I can readily imagine the difficulty of Irish dialects. Smaller languages are more inclined towards having difficult dialects, I suppose, as there are fewer influences pushing standardization and fewer foreign speakers for whose benefit one should try to speak something intelligible. It's certainly the case with Flemish.

Thirteen years with so little to show for it? I'll be the first to admit that some students here emerge from secondary school after eight years of French with a rather poor command of the language, and no doubt Irish is harder than French. But if it's as general a failure as you say, that's pretty bad.

Hold on, just thought of something - are you saying they have Irish classes from the very first year of primary school? As in, they learn to read in English and Irish simultaneously? Now that's ambitious...

Yeah, though the really sponge-like age in terms of language absorbtion is still younger than that... but in primary schools it's also important to get the fundaments of native language and mathematics right, so that in secondary school students can take all kinds of additional subjects, including more languages. That's how it is here, anyway.

Well, maybe if it was less strong, you'd have been forced to do more with your French and would speak it more fluently now?