I grew up in Catalonia and, until the age of 15, attended my local state school where every subject was taught in Catalan. Catalan wasn’t the topic of education; it was the medium of education. Yet with all of my friends in the playground, I spoke Spanish. I grew up steeped in debates about the language: whether it was losing ground, whether it needed protecting, and what the best ways of preserving it might be.Moving here, the debates around Irish felt broadly familiar. Here too is a language that was suppressed and nearly stamped out by an aggressive dominant power. Here too is a language that appears on signs, but which people rarely seem to use in daily interactions.The similarities are there, but they can be overstated. After all, Catalan never ceased to be a mass vernacular language. Even during the Franco dictatorship, millions continued speaking it at home. When democracy returned, the challenge was largely one of restoring Catalan to public institutions and ensuring its continued transmission. Irish faced a steeper climb. By the time independence arrived, English had already become dominant across most of the country. The task was not simply to restore a language to public life, but to reverse a language shift that had already taken place.There are other important differences. Catalunya is historically richer. Catalan developed as the language of a prosperous commercial and industrial region, whereas the decline of Irish was bound up with poverty, emigration and colonial rule. Since moving here, I’ve picked up the odd Irish phrase by osmosis, but I’d never made a serious effort to learn the language until recently.That changed when I was running late to meet a friend one evening and found her outside the pub having a cigarette and talking to a man from Kerry. We ended up having a long conversation. He grew up speaking Irish as his first language and is heavily involved in the language revival movement. Since then I’ve bumped into him regularly at my local and, every so often, over a few pints of Guinness, he’ll attempt to teach me some Irish.The nature of these lessons is perhaps best illustrated by what I actually remember afterwards.I can tell you that deoch an dorais translates literally as “the drink of the door”, the final drink before leaving, what in English we might call a nightcap. I forget more important things, such as how to reply when someone says hello. The response to Dia duit is Dia is Muire duit: “God and Mary be with you”. Unnecessarily complex, if you ask me.[ Cycling club helps Spaniard saddle up for Irish citizenship – and pick up his cúpla focalOpens in new window ]The informal lessons frequently veered into linguistic rabbit holes. At one point, my teacher mentioned an interesting pattern: in many languages, “night” sounds like “n” plus the word for “eight” in that language. The same thing happens in Spanish: noche and ocho, Catalan: nit and vuit and in Italian with notte and otto. The same thing occurs in Dutch, Norwegian, Afrikaans, Romanian, Welsh and more. It seems too neat to be a coincidence. Surely the words must be related. Except they aren’t. Linguists trace “night” and “eight” back to entirely different ancient roots. After that, the lesson never got back on track.Recently we sat down and tried to have a more focused lesson where I really tried to get to grips with the language, and not get distracted by tangents.When I learn Romance languages, my brain immediately starts building bridges. This word resembles that word because the root is the same. This structure works like French. This sound reminds me of Catalan. The brain remembers by analogy, cementing a new concept by tying it to something familiar. Learning a new language, in my experience, is usually a little like learning a new card game. Once you have understood one, the same underlying logic tends to recur. You may have to discover whether the ace is high or low, what counts as a trump card, and which rules are peculiar to this particular table, but it tends to feel like a variation on a familiar theme. Irish is different. Irish is slippery. My mind slides off it. I really struggle to retain anything at all.[ Majority of people support Irish language, all-island survey findsOpens in new window ]I like picking things up quickly. If I struggle immediately, I tend to switch off. There is a particular humiliation in becoming a beginner. This is not a flattering admission. Still, I was relieved to discover that plenty of learners online describe Irish as unusually tricky. My teacher said the bigger obstacle is embarrassment. Even Irish people feel awkward speaking the language because they think they should know it better than they do.That struck a chord. The next stage of learning Irish is probably getting comfortable with the prospect of not being any good at it for a really long time. The plan, for now, is simply to keep showing up and slowly chipping away.Sarah Moss will return on June 27th