Gaelic singer Fiona J Mackenzie joined the social network site Twitter and posted some phrases in Gaelic, little knowing how popular these short "lessons" were to become.

Within the space of six weeks, she now has some 500 "friends" from as far afield as Australia and South America who follow her daily "tweets" and weekly podcasts.

She said, "I'm absolutely astounded as to the number of people who have joined my tweets and podcasts in their bid to learn Gaelic.

"I knew that there is a huge interest in all things Celtic in the world but I didn't realise exactly how keen people are, from all over, to learn some Gaelic as well as to listen to the music."

Fiona posts several tweets every day under her Twitter name, Gaelicsinger, with short Gaelic phrases then compiles them into weekly podcasts with text, phonetics and music, on her website which people can then download to listen to at their leisure. She said, "One of the beauties of Twitter is that you are limited to 140 characters in each tweet so that makes the phrases very accessible, less scary and much easier to retain than larger chunks of normal teaching material. I have people following me from Venezuela, Argentina, Spain, Ireland, Canada, the States, New Zealand, Australia as well as from the UK.

"I've had several people e-mail me to say that they download the podcasts onto their iPods to listen to on their way to work in the morning. I've got five podcasts up so far on the site.

"They can also download the actual text and phonetics of the podcast from my website too, to refer to when they're listening."

Her podcasts have generated an added benefit by increasing CD sales of her own music. "I've added clips of some of my songs under the podcast phrases and many folk have Tweeted me after listening to say that they've gone on to purchase the CDs or downloads!"

Fiona's tweets can be found at www.twitter.com/gaelicsinger and the podcasts themselves at www.fionamackenzie.org/Gaelic_Podcasts

Printer friendly version

Email this article to a friend

Bookmark this

---