Terminology and Grammar Tools Online

This article discusses the many tools and resources available online to help the learner on their language journey.

There are many learning materials available online to the learner. Between websites and apps, there are valuable resources to help learners not only with vocabulary and grammar, but also with samples of text and usage to help them enrich their understanding and usage of the language.

Dictionaries

A major advancement in recent years is the production of high-quality online dictionaries for the Irish-speaking community by the team at Fiontar & Scoil na Gaeilge in DCU.

These include a grammar wizard, a phonetics database, as well as foclóir.ie, the New English-Irish dictionary from Foras na Gaeilge. If you’re writing in Irish, you’ll be making good use of teanglann.ie‘s rich store of dictionaries and grammatical and pronunciation information. In téarma.ie, the National Terminology Database for Irish, you’ll find the terms you don’t find anywhere else.

  As well as the dictionaries and databases from Fiontar and Foras na Gaeilge, a useful aid worth exploring is potafocal.com – a glossary of words and expressions along with a dictionary and tools such as the spelling standardiser. If you have difficulty remembering the rules in the official standard for writing in Irish or have texts from old document that you can’t make sense of, the standardizer can help.

Cabhair scríbhneoireachta

The Corpus of Contemporary Irish on Gaois.ie is one of the most valuable Irish resources available on the internet. It is a searchable corpus or database of articles, journals and news sources comprising approximately 21.4 million words.

Phrases or clauses can be inserted and examples of them in use can be retrieved i.e. if you are in doubt about the structure of a clause, you can enter it in the search box and see if there are other examples of the use of the phrase available in the corpus.

The Aistear.ie website describes itself as a website of resources for translators, editors and anyone who writes in Irish. It is focused on promoting the accuracy of writing in Irish.

It includes some editorial lessons, also expanded in a larger book called Cruinneas that provides advice on how best to ensure concise and accurate Irish when writing, ideal for those who wish to improve their language skills.

Grammar is important when writing professionally, and An Gramadóir, located on the site Cadhan.com, is a of great help to the writer. It returns all the detected errors for a given piece of text. It is not infallible but is still a very valuable editorial tool.

You can find more information (in Irish) on the other tools on Cadhan.com in this article .

Other Apps

Irish is available on language-learning apps such as Duolingo, which are useful for those who are busy but want to practice their skills language when they can.

There are many other apps available through Irish also on Google Play and the Appstore – apps for Cúla Caint and Tuairisc.ie, and many other organisations.

Vifax (from Maynooth University) is very useful for practicing skills related to reading/listening comprehension. Irish lessons at intermediate and elementary level are made available on the site every week, based on items from Nuacht TG4.

If you have problems with the Irish verbs, help is available from Verbix.

In addition to materials related to learning the language, there are sites such as Logainm.ie, which has information about the place names of Ireland available, or Dúchas.ie, a digitization project of the Irish Folklore Collection, one of the largest folklore collections in the world.

Updated: May 2024