Pronounciation Examples

[Micheal64]

Early days, but I’m slowly getting the hang of the complexities of Irish pronunciation, so that when I move to Cúige Mumhan I’ll be a little prepared. All my Irish friends here in Suffolk can remember almost nothing of their childhood learning back home, even though one of them won a National first prize (60 years ago!) as the best Irish linguist in Éire. I know from experience if you don’t keep using it, it fades. I’ve found one or two web sites that give a passage of written text along with the spoken version, but they’re either spoken at very high speed or in a dialect that doesn’t help very much – or brief and missing quite a lot.

There are plenty of web sites covering all the variations, so of course it’s possible to piece together pronunciations using a variety of web sources, but very slow and inefficient. The conversion from written to audio is very laborious if you just rely on forvo.com, excellent though it is. What I’d love to see and hear is a script that flows and gives a good overview of how the pieces mesh together.

The longest I’ve found so far is a match-up of the text and singing of the National Anthem. Tried YouTube too, with no success.

So I was wondering if any of the good people of the worldwide Ghaeltacht know of a site when there’s a passage which covers all/most of the phonetic permutations of consonants and vowels in Irish in a continuous passage, and a well and slowly spoken audio to go with it. I guess there could be a couple of hundred variations of sounds to cover? An English translation would be interesting, but not essential to the task of learning to accurately read out loud from Irish script. A few pages of print with a 10-minute audio should do the job, do you think?

I’m sure there would be views on whether such a web source was accurate/adequate or not (I doubt such a thing exists), but as a beginner I’d find it immensely helpful – I’m not looking for perfection yet!

Go raibh maith agaibh,
Michéal.

[Wee_Falorie_Man]

Well, if you’re looking for pronunciation examples of Munster Irish, I would start with the Cork Irish web-site. All of the audio is made by fluent native speakers.

Here’s a link to the pronunciation/intonation part of the site:

http://www.corkirish.com/wordpress/pronunciationintonation

There are also audio files for the complete conjugation of 25 different verbs, including ALL of the irregular verbs.

If you’re looking for a continuous reading, that site also has the audio for “Mo Scéal Féin” (the entire book!):

http://www.corkirish.com/wordpress/audio-files-on-this-site

That ought to start you off on the right path 🙂

[Micheal64]

Wee_Falorie_Man, Iontach! JUst what I was looking for. Go raibh míle maith agat, M64

[Harp]

Here’s a link to the pronunciation/intonation part of the site:

http://www.corkirish.com/wordpress/pronunciationintonation

There are also audio files for the complete conjugation of 25 different verbs, including ALL of the irregular verbs.

If you’re looking for a continuous reading, that site also has the audio for “Mo Scéal Féin” (the entire book!):

http://www.corkirish.com/wordpress/audio-files-on-this-site

I listen to these files and my ears tell me, “Ta/ meirg ar mo chuid Gaeilge!!”
Ni/l ann ach droch-Ghaeilge agamsa ar an am seo…because I’ve been toying with Mandarin…Simplicity confounded by Complexity as I am learning…and both languages are sending me as mo mheabhair!
Harp

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