Quote Originally Posted by Slim Buddha View Post
Like everything else, learning languages is something you must do for yourself. Ireland doesn't really provide a decent education to start with and our ludicrously overblown sense of how good our education system is requires it to be compared to that of the UK which is a very low threshold to start with. It looks very threadbare when compared to the education systems in central Europe and, once again, Ireland's ugly sisters of history and geography do us an immense disservice.

When I went to Berlin first, over twenty years ago, a guy from Dublin said to me, "Look at the map of Europe and tell me what you see" I wasn't sure what I should have been looking for so he elaborated on his point. "Britain is the shield preventing any intelligence from Europe getting into Ireland." Only by combining the effects of geography, history and monolingualism did I really get his point. But now I realise it was devastatingly accurate.
The resources we have they say are limited in terms of teaching yes while the resources are strechted we could look to change the subjects. A child up until the very early teens has the ability to acquire a language at a very good level. If we cut the amount of time learning religion and other nonsense and refocus a language policy that includes Irish it could pave the way for a national of polyglots and in turn this confers a lot of positives also that it prepares the brain for future study and programmes the neurons for language learning. Learning a language and its been said before is like learning a game. There is a set of rules and a set of parameters to stay in. One possible route to follow might be to open a school which specialises in teaching such languages like the following one (http://www.lfi.ie/Mot_ProviseurE.html) which I believe is a primary school for French children ...