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#45961
Héilics Órbhuí
Participant

Incidentally, I recommend the site forvo.com. It has a huge database of words pronounced by people who are mostly native speakers or at least competent ones. Granted, with Irish you have to take into consideration that speakers from different regions will say words slightly differently. I just checked and all the words I mention that you didn’t get quite right are on there, so it’s definitely worth a visit there to hear them for yourself. teanglann.ie has a good “foghraíocht” section which allows you to hear words according to dialect. Another sometimes useful resource is abair.tcd.ie, which I would call a visit of last resort. It is a speech synthesizer for Irish which is built largely on actual recordings of people. So a lot of words it will get right, but sometimes it will come up against a word it doesn’t specifically have in its recorded database and an algorithm will try to fill in the gaps, which is where things can get weird. Still, if you have no clue how to say a word and can’t find a recording of it, you could do worse than seeing how it sounds there. Of course, the last and perhaps most important piece of advice is to listen to as much audio as you can of people speaking naturally. Obviously this isn’t a useful tip for finding the pronunciation of a specific word, but you’ll hear words in their natural habitat, so to speak, and eventually build up your own mental database.