The Leaving Cert and Junior Cert Irish oral exams are just around the corner, and you
are probably watching this video right now because you’re an exam student who is currently
binging Leaving Cert videos in a state of panic, and you are procrastinating from real
study by watching educational videos so you feel like you’re studying, when, in reality,
you are getting f-cking nowhere. But do not worry, because if you’re trying to learn
some valuable study tips that your teacher won’t tell you, then you have come to the right video.
Firstly, before I jump into the content of the oral exam, let’s start off by discussing
how you should present yourself when you're conversing with the examiner. The best advice
I can give you is to just be yourself. The examiner will lose interest in you if they
notice you’re pretending to be someone you’re not, so you should retain your own personality
and the exam will go great. Of course, you have to be polite when you’re talking to
this examiner for the first time, so I would advise you to pull out their chair before
they sit down, and offer to take off their jacket for them. And I’m sure you’ve been
told by your teacher not to bring your phone into the exam, and I fully agree with that.
Remember that you’re having a conversation with the examiner, and if you’re looking
at your phone during the exam instead of focusing on them, they are going to find it rude and
disrespectful. As is the case with everything else in life, first impressions are important,
so you should be confident and friendly when you walk into the exam room, and you should
greet the examiner with a smile.
Now let’s familiarise ourselves with the structure of the exam. The oral examination
is divided into four sections - the fáiltiú, the dán, the sraith pictiúr, and the comhrá.
The fáiltiú is worth five marks and it is the easiest section by far - basically, if
you don’t know how to answer these questions, then you may as well say “Slán go fóill”
to the examiner and walk right out the door. The examiner will ask you for a few basic
details about yourself, such as your name, your address, the twelve digits on your credit
card, the three digits on the back, the expiration date, and your exam number. If you want to
practice for this section, you can leave your answers to the fáiltiú questions in the
comment section below. It’s a very simple start to the exam which should help you to
ease your nerves, before you move onto the poem. Alright, so there are five poems on
the course, one of which the examiner will ask you to recite out loud - just to recap,
there’s the poem about a sad animal in a zoo, there’s one about the married couple
getting a divorce for no f-cking reason, one of them is basically a diss track against
the poet’s husband, and there’s the other two that everybody wants to avoid.
I fully understand the thought process of a sixth-year student because I did the Leaving
Cert myself last year, and I know that you want Géibheann. Colscaradh and Mo Ghra-sa
are alright at best, and the other two are the social outcasts of the poetry line-up
that nobody likes, but there are several reasons why you do not need to pray for Géibheann
to come up. First of all, that is blasphemy, and secondly, if you do not get Géibheann,
just slide a fiver to the examiner and ask for Géibheann. This may sound like a risky
move which could potentially jeopardize your entire Leaving Cert, but don’t worry - I
used this method myself last year when I was presented with Spailpín Fánach and I got
on fine in my Leaving Cert - I’m a film student now and I’m also a YouTuber and….
Actually, no, don’t do that.
So we’ll just forget about the bribery and let’s
just say you’re backed into a corner in the exam and you’re presented with one of
the more difficult poems on the course that you did not want. You really have no choice
but to play the hand you’re dealt and to make the most out of it, but you can easily
secure top marks with one little trick. Of course, your pronunciation and your fluency
are both very important, but what separates a 30-mark student from a 35-mark student is the emotion.
It’s not enough to simply read the poem with perfect pronunciation. You’re not relaying
the story of the sad animal in the zoo - you have to BE the sad animal in the zoo.
You're not aiming to impress the examiner:
You have to SEDUCE the examiner.
If you read the poem in a monotonous tone with no emotion whatsoever, then you are just yeeting 35 marks
into the bosca bruscair.
Remember that you must read the title and the poet’s name before you
recite the poem itself, and then you will leave a little pause. During these few seconds,
you are going to make direct eye contact with the examiner - this will waste some time so
you won’t spend as long in the comhrá section - and it will show the examiner that you feel
the poem. Read it slowly, read it softly, and make sure to keep full eye contact with
the examiner while you’re reading the poem, and you will have 35 marks in the bag.
Arguably the most intimidating part of the Irish oral exam is the Sraith Pictiúr. I
completely understand how frustrating they are - the Irish government desperately wants
the Irish language to be more prominent, so in order to teach Gaeilge to young people,
they consciously decided that forcing you to learn not one, not two, not ten, but TWENTY
black-and-white Irish comic books was the way to go. It is a ridiculous concept, and
I would advise you not to waste your time learning how to describe all twenty word-for-word.
Sraith Pictiúrs are a f-cking joke, and your study time is much better spent revising anything
else. For example, if you only learn nineteen Sraith Pictiúrs, then you are subjecting yourself
to the curse of picking up the one Sraith that you did not learn, which renders your
hours of study completely useless.
To avoid falling into this trap, you should really just learn one or two Sraith Pictiúrs
and hope for the best. If you get one of them, then well done, you beat the system, but if
you pick up any of the other eighteen or nineteen Sraiths, sh-t happens. But what if I told
you that there is a simple solution if you do not get the Sraith Pictiúr that you wanted?
If you go to a decent school like I did, then you should have a dedicated Sraith Pictiúr
folder which contains all your pictures and the corresponding notes. This may sound like
a longshot, but you should place this folder in the nearest bathroom before you queue up
outside the exam room. If you pick up a Sraith Pictiúr that you don't know very well, you
can use the allocated thirty seconds of thinking time to your advantage. What you're going
to do is ask the examiner if you can run out to the toilet really quickly as Gaeilge
before you begin, you’re going to open up your folder in the bathroom, you’ll look
through your notes for your selected Sraith Pictiúr, and you’re going to head back
to the exam room as soon as possible.
This plan is mostly foolproof, but I had one little slip-up when I tried it last year which
I hope you will learn from. Our exam room was in the same corridor as the principal's
office and the reception desk, so I was unaware that I had placed my Sraith Pictiúr folder
in a staff bathroom. So, because of an awkward encounter with my school principal, I wasn't
able to enter the cubicle where I had hidden my folder, so I apologised for walking in
on her and I went straight back to the exam room. However, if you simply use the classic
phrase “An bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithreas”, you should have no trouble
exiting the exam room, and of course, just make sure you choose your bathroom wisely,
so you can avoid making the same mistake that I made.
For the Sraith Pictiúr, you should be able to improvise when you’re describing each
picture. You have been learning the language for thirteen years after all, so you should
have a cornucopia of standard phrases learned off and ready to go, such as:
Bhí an grian ag scoilteadh na gcloch.
Bhí me ag siúl leis an bóthair.
Go tobann, tháinig carr.
Léigh anois go cúramach ar do scrúidpháipéar.
Cén fáth go bhfuil mo seanathair i mo leaba?
Don't forget that you need to be prepared to ask and answer three questions about your
selected Sraith when you're finished. You should be able to fly through this part if
you have a few universal questions learned off and if you ask three completely different questions.
If you rely on the same question for each picture, it's going to be pretty embarrassing.
We all know that the general conversation is the main meat of the oral exam, and it
may be scary to think about, but if you take my advice and waste as much time as possible
in the first three sections, then you should be able to cut down on the time spent in the
comhrá by about two or three minutes. If I can just break character for a minute and
give you some genuine advice, I would advise you to never bring up anything that you're
not ready to talk about in the exam. I learned this lesson the hard way in my mock Irish
oral last year when I said that I love reading, despite the fact that I hadn’t read a book
since primary school. It wasn't a good look when the examiner asked me what kind of books
I like, to which I responded with twenty seconds of silence and…
“Hunger Games”.
I think I've covered everything you need to know when you're doing the exam, but it's
important that I give you some creative study advice too. Instead of reading a book for
hours, you should record yourself on your phone speaking Irish, and listen back to that
whenever you get the chance. I think I’ve still got some of my recordings from last
year actually…
“Oh, Brian! Dia dhuit, a Brian! Tá mé i mo chónaí i Qua-”
You get the idea. To finish off this advice video, I would urge you not to stress out
over the oral exam. Just keep a cool head when you're speaking, stay confident, and
don’t rely on the same words and phrases for each question.
Thank you very much for watching this video, and if you’re a Leaving Cert student who
is looking for actual Irish oral advice, then I apologise for wasting your time. Also, just
a quick disclaimer in case my friends at the SEC are watching this video - this was complete
satire. I didn’t actually try to bribe my examiner in my Irish oral last year, and I
also did not walk in on my principal in the toilet.
It was the vice principal.
The guy who played the examiner in this video
actually has a YouTube channel too. It’s not very good, but it’s better than Old
Child Support and he helped me to write some of the jokes in this video, so go check him
out. You should also check out his Twitter account, where he posts quality tweets, such as...
So yeah, if you like bad content, you can check him out. And, speaking of which, I should
probably check out my girlfriend who I keep in here now. I actually upgraded her room
because of good behaviour, so I think I might give her this bottle of uisce which should
last about two or three weeks or so. I’d also like to say a special thanks to Cormac,
also known as ‘Corion’ on YouTube. Cormac was our ‘camera operator’ for all those
little cutaway gags you saw in this video, and I would tell you to subscribe to his channel
as well, but he watches anime, so….
Alright, this video should be ten minutes long now, so I'll see you in the next one.
Best of luck in your Irish oral, and slán go fóill.