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Hey, Ur Bio Says Feel Free To Ask Me Questions Abt Irish So Sorry If Someones Already Asked This. But

hey, ur bio says feel free to ask me questions abt irish so sorry if someones already asked this. but when do you know when to use 'má' and 'dá'?

(like for 'if' kind of sentences, sorry if this doesnt make sense)

Yeah good question, basically dá is used for hypotheticals, stuff which you don't think is gonna be true, and má is used for conditions which could be true. One of the reasons this is confusing in English is that a lot of the type we use what looks like the past tense when doing hypotheticals, we say things like "If I was in France, I would eat a lot". But it's important to notice there that we're not actually talking about the past tense, we're talking about some imaginary world, and you can confirm this to yourself by looking at the second part of the sentence: "would" is conditional. So in Irish we use the conditional for both and dá:

Dá mbeinn sa Fhrainc, d'íosfainn an-chuid

A non hypothetical then would look like this, they're usually talking about the present or the future: "If he speaks, I'll hit him" "If he's telling a lie, I'll kill him These get má and the same tenses as we use in English*

Má labhraíonn sé, buailfidh mé é Má tá sé ag insint bréige, maróidh mé é

Something which can be a bit more confusing is when we have one of these which is actually talking about the past tense. This is pretty rare but sometimes we do say stuff like "If he was there, I didn't see him", where we're actually talking about the past and it's not a hypothetical. Remember that you can tell this from the english since the second part isn't conditional - no "would"

In these cases you just use má and the past tense

Má bhí sé ann, ní fhaca mé é.

I don't want to overload you with stuff, but something else to look out for is that if you're ever looking to say "if" in the middle of a sentence, in a way that you could also say "whether", you should use the question form in Irish, not má or dá. E.g. "I don't know if he's here" = "I don't know whether he's here" = "Níl a fhios agam an bhfuil sé anseo"

*footnote: something to note here is that when you're using the verb bí in a future sense with "má", like "If he is there, I'll say hi to him" (It doesn't matter if he's there right now, you're saying if he will be there, when you're there) you use bíonn So má bhíonn sé ann = if he's there (future) má tá sé ann = if he's there (right now)