🇮🇪 The best YouTube channels for learning Irish

Ciara makes videos in Irish about Irish: grammar points, idioms, conversations with other speakers, and everyday vlogs. Because the explanations are themselves in Irish, this is where a learner crosses from studying the language to using it. Fifty thousand subscribers is remarkable for Irish and says something about the appetite.

Short lessons with audio by native speakers, pronunciation guidance and a members' community for practice. It is aimed squarely at the diaspora learner starting from nothing, and it is honest that Irish has dialects rather than pretending there is one standard spoken form. Free YouTube channel; the course itself is a subscription.

A small, well-made channel aimed at the very large group of Irish people who studied Irish for fourteen years and cannot hold a conversation. Explanations are in English, the pace is slow, and the focus is on the constructions school drilled badly. Only forty-odd videos, so it is a starting point rather than a course.

A large back catalogue of short Irish lessons covering vocabulary, verbs and phrases. It is unglamorous and there is no obvious order to work through, which makes it better as a place to look something up than as a course. Useful precisely because of its size — most gaps you hit have a video.

Material made for children in gaelscoileanna, which turns out to suit adult beginners for the same reason: everything is concrete, slowly spoken and repeated. Not aimed at you, and that is fine — treat it as free comprehensible input at a level almost nothing else in Irish provides.

Drama, documentary, sport and children's programming in Irish, most of it subtitled in English and some in Irish. The player is not geo-blocked for most of the catalogue, which makes it the main source of authentic Irish video for the diaspora. Ros na Rún, the soap, is the standard learner recommendation.

A franchise of local producers filming unscripted street interviews, each episode subtitled in the target language and English, which is the closest free thing to hearing how people genuinely speak. All YouTube episodes are free; membership adds transcripts, vocabulary lists and exercises. Real-speed unscripted speech is hard early on — start with the slower 'Super Easy' episodes if you are below B1.