Easy way to get 15 free YouTube views, likes and subscribers
Get Free YouTube Subscribers, Views and Likes

Speak Irish Gaelic like a native (Part 2): Avoid these Youtube channels who teach the wrong sounds.

Follow
Patchy

The following channels are among the biggest of those which actively teach the wrong pronunciations:

1. Bitesize Irish.
2. Learn Irish (With Dane).
3. Gaeilge i mo chroí (Molly).

Now, to be clear, when I say they're pronouncing it WRONG, I don't mean they have a slightly odd accent or cadence (which they do), but I mean WRONG in the phonological sense of crossed minimal pairs, a bit like in English saying "light and long" when meaning "right and wrong", but with MANY other crossed phonemes together along with that.
FUNDAMENTAL sound confusion.
I mentioned "mura" instead of "Muire", a phonological minimum pair in Gaelic, or "leá"(thaw) instead of "lá"(day), and that's just two examples of so many caused by not making these integral distinctions of basic consonants. As these sounds represent the same phonemes in English, it's maybe hard for some to realise that in other languages they can be phonologically differential. But language teachers should not of course be among those some.

Am I asking too much?!

On the other hand, the following are in the TINY minority who give excellent, authentic, honest content, top of the list being the two with always fully correct pronunciation:

1. Dazpatreg.
2. An Loingseach.
3. Irish with Rosie.
4. Dave Learns Irish.

So please, don't hesitate to go listen to and learn from the content of this last group of four gifted and valuable contributers of high quality Gaelic.
Then outside of Youtube there's the excellent website Turas Siar, with its large collection of some of the best audio of Connaught Gaelic in existence, from this and the previous century, and whose curator and owner, Pap Murphy, is surely the finest, most accomplished and proficient speaker of Gaelic alive today, I kid you not! https://archivecartlann.turassiar.ie...

To fully contextualise this video you should go back and check out part one in this series which I did in January this year, also called Learn Native Irish Gaelic, and also if you'd maybe like to go hear my first conversation in Gaelic after 15 years of not speaking it, having pretty much given up on it, check out the short telephone interview I gave in 2019 on Gaeldom Radio, just when my interest in this ancestral language was reawakening, an interview spoken in my then very rusty Gaelic, titled Agallamh Ar Ardtráthnóna, put up on my Youtube here last year.

posted by alltofb0