From Teach Teanga, LLC

MISSION

Use languages, history, and culture to help us to see the Earth's peoples-- past, present, and what we will become-- as one and as part, with all life, of the amazing, amorphous community evolving from the millions of years of Creation.

What you can expect:

Using our Languages Come Alive® system, you will gain comfort, confidence, and a concrete foundation in the languages you choose to begin learning. And, as we've seen year after year, using our Languages Come Alive® system, our students take these life-changing strides whilst having a good time. They learn the joy of learning...

e believe that taking the Life-long Learning Journey is the Way to build confidence and competence in young people and, for the rest of us, the way to continue to drink from the mental and spiritual Fountain of Youth.

o build a better world, we need good tools. The tools we offer you have been forged over the forty years of the founder, Finnbarr Dunphy, as educator, author, and life-long student of words and languages. Through the use of our story-texts© by imaginative people such as yourselves, these tools are being honed in the classrooms, on front porches, and at hearth sides each day. The testimonials from parents, teachers, and administrators keep us encouraged and innovative to make Languages Come Alive® grow and get better.

ur goal is to help you, your family, our students, to continue the Journey, to help all of us develop into builders of a better world, and, through Learning, to become the truly exceptional, extraordinarily talented people we should be.

DIA DHUIT(Gee-ah gwitch) which is an Irish (sometimes called, "Gaelic") form of "Hello." CEAD MILE FAILTE (Kayad mil-ah Fawl-cha), "A Hundred Thousand Welcomes" to LANGUAGES COME ALIVE®. My name is Finnbarr Dunphy (call me, Finn) & I’m one of the founders of a small publishing company that we named, Teach Teanga (which in Irish means, “House of Languages”).

Here’s the “back story”: Although I am a native of Dublin, in Ireland, I’ve been a teacher, head of department, and headmaster in many schools across four continents. Also, I served for a time in the Diplomatic Corps. From my schooling and my travels, I’ve been able to learn to read, write, and speak five languages. About five years ago, a friend of mine was a Director on the Board of the Montessori School of Columbia, in South Carolina, where I now live. The Board wanted Latin added to the studies. My friend knew of my interest in languages, my teaching experience, and my sincere belief that learning a language can broaden a person beyond virtually any other form of education and, in the case of Latin, provide a solid foundation for so many other languages and fields of study. He asked me to take the job, and I did.

Because I couldn’t find a suitable beginners’ level English-to-Latin text, I decided to write my own. The result was our (quite popular, if I do say so),Patricius et Hilda, Alone in Rome, and thus was born the series we call, Languages Come Alive®.

Patricius et Hilda, Alone in Rome, is in its 9^th year of use in private and parochial schools across South Carolina. Our second story-text, Friends & Foes, going from English-to-Spanish, is in its 5th year. Our English-to-Irish number, Triail le Tine (Trial by Fire) debuted at the Columbia Irish Feis in the summer of 2008. The prequel for younger students to lead into Friends & Foes story-text, Carlos y Loretta, Growing Up Very fast, goes into print in the summer of 2010. Next, we plan to bring out Spanish-to-English version of these story-texts. You have a taste of three of our story-texts in our catalogue pages. Go raibh mile maith agat (A thousand thanks).