Hello, I am learning more about Irish. I understand pronunciations vary across dialects. Would it be accurate to say an Ulster dialect might sound more like "Shunna" (pardon my phonetic ignorance) and a Connact dialect might sound more like "Shunnuv" like how Siobhan is frequently pronounced "Shivan?" Thank you for your wonderful work!
Does anybody have a clue on how to pronounce the slender R sound? I can perfectly pronounce the broad R, but after several months, I've failed with the slender R. It's so damn hard, and I can never find a good description on how to pronounce it. I'm tired of adding a "ž" sound after a broad R when pronouncing words like "fir" and "óir" when it sounds nothing like the real deal.... 🥲🙏
Thank you SO much for acknowledging Aon Troim. It gets so tiring having to defend our Irish ethnicity. Go raibh maith míle agat! Also, you should know that those of us in the North with any interest in Gaelic don't participate in "the 12th". Please be more careful.
Wonderfully done!!! you’ve made this video so engaging and fun, I had quite the laugh while watching. I usually hate watching long videos about phonetics (despite loving the subject), as the videos are very often dry and boring, but this was great! very informative and entertaining!!
I love your work! Can I ask a question please. In Australia, historically Irish was called Gaelic or "the Gaelic" by speakers here. Now obviously the official way to refer to it in Ireland is "Irish", but many heritage learners in Australia don't see the official standard as being the language which our ancestors spoke and so are more interested in learning dialects (with correct pronunciation). I was wondering, do native/dialect speakers in Ireland ever call the language "Gaelic" in English, or has it fallen out of use entirely in favour of "Irish"? As someone who was taught that older family members had spoken "Gaelic" and knowing that some convict ancestors were listed as (and sometimes punished for) speaking "only Gaelic", many of us here have an emotional connection to the name. We are constantly told off for using the wrong name online by Irish speakers though, and I was wondering your thoughts on this. GRMMA
Trying to learn Irish on Duolingo, is very frustrating because there are many pronunciations of the same words...... after listening to you I'm going to need antidepressants.......😣 I have a great fear that I can read it, but will understand NOTHING if I go to Connemara.... I hear YOU sigh....imagine how we all feel now. Perhaps conversations with subtitles....speaking slowly would be a great benfit.
I am a Canadian who is using Mícheál Ó Siadhail’s “Learning Irish” book and recordings supplemented by some lessons Máirtín Ó Cadhain made with recordings and some other native Cois Fharraige stuff on TG4. It’s very hard to get good source material. I tried a couple of courses online from Ireland and the most daunting thing was always asking which dialect I was going to get (U/C/M). They could never give me an answer. There seems to be a tendency to try to erase dialects entirely from lessons out of Dublin (was able to get an answer from Galway online lessons). But it should be the FIRST THING said - “In this class we will be learning a real (or approximation) of Connacht dialect…) “
Learners should know what they are getting into. If they want to learn, or have been learning one dialect correctly even, and they get a new instructor teaching the class another dialect it will be discouraging and confusing for the student… as experienced by myself.
This is a useful video. I never learned Irish in school, so I'm thankful for the accessibility of Duolingo, especially given that it's free. I've also used other resources like 'Now You're Talking' (available on RU-vid and worth watching purely for the retro cardigans and hairdos) which definitely seems like it gives more genuine (Ulster) pronunciations. Using these things, my comprehension has improved exponentially, but I'm aware that in order to get good at speaking, I'll certainly need to find time to attend classes and groups. There are plenty in my locality, just never seems like there are enough hours in the day.
Don't listen to the complaining and criticism of other commenters, I really enjoyed hearing this discussion and your thoughts about life and hope to see more episodes of this in the future.
thank you for doing this! i especially loved you showing the munster way to pronounce siúicre and le do thoil as that’s the dialect i want to learn :D i realize more and more how similar sounding irish and my native norwegian can be at times, especially since i speak a dialect where palatalization is one of its core distinctions! i hope you, painful as it may be, choose to do this again sometime so we can get a further look at the various ways to correctly pronounce words i nGaeilinn ;) grma!
Are you specifically learning east Munster Irish by any chance? You used the form “Gaeilinn” which afaik is only used in east Munster (Waterford, south Tipperary and east Cork).
I have been searching the internet for the best place to learn authentic Scottish Gaelic. Because its a small unrepresented language im paranoid about learning it the wrong way. If you or anyone can tell me id appreciate it
I’m learning Irish on Duolingo, but I think I have quite a feeling for languages, I can hear if it is „real“ Irish or if it has that „english touch“. Even the English on Duolingo is just American English, I would not call it „English“, because then it would be BE and not AE. I just use it to learn words and a hint of grammar, because you can not really find good material online. That works pretty fine, I fresh up my Italian(second mother tongue) with German(first), Swedish, English and a little bit of French so I get all kind of pronounciations. I like to have it all in one app. When I add all dialects I speak/understand, I can just get a feeling for what is „contaminated“ and what sounds real. You should never learn a language only from one app/book/course but get as many material you can. So thank you so much for this vid that helps me learning better Irish, the next wunderful language on my list 😊
A Loingseach, might I suggest you open lines for viewer donations, as some of us would like to help buy you a better microphone -- all the better to hear you with.
5:23-5:30 This is EXACTLY like how non-greeks or westerners using Erasmian pronunciation treat the dipthong ει when learning Ancient Greek, pronouncing it not like a monophthong /eː/ or /iː/ but as /ey/ which is completely wrong and artificial.
That happens with pretty much every language with phonemic vowel length when Anglophones learn them - since English lacks pure long vowels, they get substituted. The thing with Irish (and I guess Ancient Greek to, for the most part, sadly) is that they don’t get corrected, so they’re not even aware they’re doing something incorrectly. At least with bigger modern languages, the teachers will generally correct them and thus at least make them aware of what they should strive to achieve - and even if not the teachers, then native speakers will tell them at some point. With minority and ancient languages that’s more likely not gonna happen.
duolingo changed the speaker for the course a few months back. the old speaker was all 'acub' and 'innuv' and her war of saying 'dheathair' contained lots of new sounds for me. the new speakers sound much more english to my ears. also the new speakers often pronounce the 'f' in future forms.
Yes, they changed from a native speaker of Conamara Irish (one who, coincidentally, has won the highest sean-nós competition award in the country) to a TTS trained on learners.
Too much emphasis on forcing students to speak from day one instead of getting the sound of the language fully ingrained in their head before they start talking. But that isn’t as easy to measure and test, so who cares! Totally wrongheaded approach to teaching language
Without taking issue with your comment, I do feel like one misses out on the glorious features that the language offers you for making long fluid statements without choking or fumbling your sounds (likely due to having been taught a much klunkier pronunciation.... Which must then be unlearned). 🤷♂️ The second blow to dedicated learners after "why am I choking out these phrases" might as well be, "I studied for a very long time and could not for the life of me communicate with my cousin in Conamara. I'll never understand this language. 💔" Again, I don't entirely disagree with varied approaches here, but I would argue that a student that learns the sounds and pronunciation first will enjoy alot less stress and frustration moving forward. 🤷♂️
I actually find that alot of folks really enjoy learning to write in Cló Gaelach from the very start. It is a beautiful script with a rich history that still sees use today! Coupling that effort with pronunciation seems to reeeeally help some folks. ❤
I think one of the BIG problems that learners have right now, is an pandemic of "I can read and write very very well, but I can literally never simply listen and understand or be understood the first time." I think that people learning their phonetics very late in the game face a specific hell that pronunciation savy folks simply won't. Why setup for that struggle? 🤷♂️
@@MadSc13ntist I agree with a lot of what you're saying to be honest. I think there's a benefit to learning the basics of the phonetics of a language early on, in Irish specifically for instance like broad d makes this sound, slender d makes this sound, etc. Not with a focus on being able to reproduce the sounds per se, but to be able to hear them and recognize them in context, especially when combined with reading along with a transcript of what you're listening to. My personal approach I'd recommend to someone is something like learn the basic spelling rules, get to grips with the basics of phonetics and phonology, but don't worry about reproducing the sounds yourself early on. Focus on building vocabulary by reading a lot, and on building your ability to understand by listening a lot (starting with reading along with a transcript but eventually dropping the transcript and only using it to double check when you're not sure you've heard something correctly). then once a high level of comprehension is achieved by the above methods, begin outputting by writing and having a native check your work for naturalness/grammaticality. Writing first because it removes the extra barrier of pronunciation. Once writing skill is achieved to a sufficient level, the student can begin the process of learning to speak by first imitating audio recordings of native speech, then by recording oneself reading aloud from a script focusing on pronunciation, and finally by doing structured output with a teacher. All the while doing a dive into the specifics of grammar and pronunciation. I think the best thing a student can do to improve their pronunciation is have a robust internal model of the sounds of a language, so when they say something incorrectly, they can HEAR the mistake instead of having to be told they're saying soemthing incorrectly.
Haven't used Duolingo in a number of years, but I couldve sworn they used to have pre-recordings from a Connaught-sounding woman. It was pretty decent, don't know why they got rid of her :(
Really wish a comprehensible input channel made by native Irish speakers existed. There should be some kind of government scheme or incentive to create a resource à la Dreaming Spanish so learners can listen to graded and varied content from total beginner to advanced, allowing learners to then make the jump to native materials. I basically went from terrible school-level Spanish to being able to converse with my girlfriend in a bit over year with no pronunciation issues. I owe all of it to videos, podcasts, and books targeted at specific levels.
The problem is, most people who'd be interested in making such a thing sound closer to Duolingo than to native Irish speakers. There's, sadly, very few learners with good pronunciation of Irish.
@@davissandefur5980ah I should have said 'native speakers' instead of 'Gaeilgeoirí' (I will edit my original comment to change that). You are correct - such a resource would require native speakers, which is what I was trying to get at originally. Funding such a project would be fantastic. A few hundred hours of graded audio/video material would go a long way in making native content accessible for learners.
I think the fundamental problem is that there's a reluctance in modern Ireland to declare that there are native Irish speakers and there are native English speakers. Some in the latter would see such a description (ie reality) as an attack on their Irishness, respond that its "a language for all", "the first language of the constitution" and they're not incorrect on the latter two points. However, it is living in a state of delusion, and not owing up the brutal truth that it's not the first language of 99% of the population, just like French and Welsh aren't. There is instead this bizarre insistence on a (weak) passive bilingualism, where we'll speak English in at work, in the home, when socialising in public, hear it in all our media consumption and yet we'll somehow retain Irish from when we learned it as an L2 language at an English-speaking school in our youth. It's a laughable strategy which will never revive a language, let alone bring it back to how it naturally sounds. The saying "tír gan tenaga, tír gan anam" has never been drilled in adequately. Like an alcoholic, if we cannot admit to the denial we're in, then there will be no way out of the rut. People need to be told (as An Loingseach does here to his very limited audience) that you're not a native speaker, your pronunciation is heavily anglicised and you will need to look upon Irish as if it were German, with all its own unique phonology, just as you already accept for its orthography (spelling). If you can work on trying to sound like someone in a Gaeltacht does, then you won't automatically become a native Irish speaker, but you will be setting up the country for a resurgence and linguistic shift towards such. If we do get to a broad acceptance of the reality then you can be sure that such an insulting, deceiving load of codswallop will never be gracing Duolingo again. And foreign learners will no longer find themselves walking through a maze of confusion, as will their thought "why does this sound like English?" disappear.
Tangential question: How is the Irish pronunciation on Rosetta Stone (the app)? To my untrained ears it doesn't sound exceedingly English, but is it good Irish?
Yeah I believe it is. The course is very short and only covers very basic things like greetings, but the audio is by native speakers of Munster Irish, if it's the course I'm thinking of.
thank you for this video. As someone who tried to learn irish a while back with duolingo and rosetta stone, the moment when i realized that the pronounciation was completely wrong was like a revelation to me: so there IS a difference between rothar and rothair!
I have finally, at 34 years of age, learned *why* I pronounce mór like i do. (Raised and taught in South Tipp by local teachers.) For a while there i was starting to become self-conscious that it was a bad habit or pronunciation I'd picked up as a child and I'd been saying it wrong my entire life.
They’re too busy updating the Klingon course to be bothered with Irish phonology. there’s only a million people learning these mispronunciations, right?
Thank you very much for clarifying this! I considered using Duo Lingo but I now understand that I shouldn’t do that. I think that maybe a non-native speaker doesn’t need to get completely accent free (but they should make an effort to get as close as possible) but at least the learning resources should not contain the anglicized version of the language. I’m not a native English speaker myself (I’m German) so apologies if I make some mistakes. But I’m always willing to improve.
Learning a language, not everyone will have the same goals, skills or growth curves and that is okay. If instead of the duolingo app, it was learners of the language approaching me with these pronunciations, I would be delighted with their using the language and praise their success at communicating, because I can mostly understand what these words are supposed to be, even without the spelling shown. But that does not mean they are correctly pronounced. This is absolutely unacceptable as teaching material or even practising material, as far as sounds go. Especially material for a worldwide audience. P.S. Your English seems very good to me.
@@gwenbutler9687 Thank you very much! 😊 And yes, I totally agree with you about the different goals and the teaching materials. I actually hope that the man in this RU-vid video makes his own app for learning Irish which would be absolutely amazing… 🤓
As a native German speaker, you'll be off to a head start on the pronunciation of Irish gutturals which are non-existent among English speakers (including in Ireland). Think of macht, Bach, which is the same /x/ of the Irish broad /ch/. You'll also have a better ear for what is overly-anglicised, knowing which sounds are associated with each language and which aren't ie compartmentalising your languages.
@@pio4362 Is fíor sin, ach an bhfuil an 'ch' sa nGearmáinis díreach mar an gcéanna lenár 'ch' leathan féin? Níl mórán taithí agamsa leis an nGearmáinis, mar sin, b'fhéidir nach bhfuil an ceart agam anseo, ach bíonn na 'gutturals' níos láidre sa nGearmáinis, agus níos cosúla leis an mBreatnais ná leis an nGaeilge, i mo thuairim féin.
Thanks for this. Your consonant and vowel pronounciation videos were a massive turningpoint and help to my learning. I still use Duo-in a kind of conditional, extended way with notes, grammar research, and checking in with the teanglann audio. My fear using it now is how much of the grammar it teaches isn't correct.
Go raibh míle maith agat! Been using Duo for a daily quick vocab booster and general motivation to practice, and I've been deliberately ignoring the pronunciations and focusing on what I've picked up from your videos and a couple others like Patchy on RU-vid. It helps to hear that my pronunciation is a lot closer to yours than the Duo recordings, but it also shows me a lot of areas where I need to improve.
I’ve been using Irish books with English parallel translation. I’ve found it more interesting and rewarding to get the vocabulary along with a story. And often the words stick because there is some story behind them. If you’re ignoring the pronunciation anyway, perhaps consider that approach too.
This is such an interesting approach to learning the language! Don't think I've heard a teacher use linguistics and vowel placement to describe how to pronounce rudaí as Gaeilge before, it's so cool! First time seeing this channel, learned Irish in school from a mixture of Leinster and Munster teachers - (though the school was in Connacht), so we had an...interesting... mix of pronunciations by the time we got past Leaving Cert. Would love to see more of this on RU-vid, it's both educational and entertaining. Maith thú dude.
Breathníonn an fhuaimniú ar an gcanúint, go háirithe le 'taispeáin' (nó i gConamara 'speáin) agus 'bord'. Tá na fuameanna de na cinn seo uilig ar teanglann.ie Éist leo ansin.
A large part of the reason for this, lets be frank, is because authentic pronunciation is *stigmatised* in modern Ireland. The Americanised stuck-up D4 types mentioned in the video mock the rural accents (ie those with Gaelic influence) in English, and have no notion of sounding anything like them in Irish either. Unless this fear of sounding like a "bogger" is overcome, we will continue to find a abundance of overly-anglicised speakers.
Go raibh maith agat AnLoingseach. Your videos have been very beneficial. I think many of us gravitate towards Duolingo because it's one of the simplest, easiest, and least expensive learning platforms out there. It's clearly quite counterproductive in terms of actual content. This might be a horrid idea, but perhaps it would be helpful if the folks watching this video drop the resources they use below this comment. I am hoping to compile them all into a Google Document, because from what I can tell, there seems to be no centralised source that points to quality resources for learning Irish. Your You Tube channel has been a huge help!
Was using Irish Duolingo a few years ago to familiarise myself with Irish for the sake of Gael solidarity. Had visions of making it easier to converse with the Donegal ground workers I encounter on building sites in West of Scotland
