It's unfortunately that so many books front-load rules like this and throw them into an introductory chapter, rather than introducing them as and when they come up. It's a weakness of the TY series as a whole that they throw a lot of unrelated stuff into each chapter, and nothing's really systematised....

My view is that you should always start with some conscious thought about the sound system, because your ear will never give you complete information.

Consider this: if someone said one single sentence to you in English, would you be able to repeat it back in their accent? It's highly unlikely. Not just because your mouth isn't physically accustomed to speaking that way, but also because while every sound hits your ear, your brain filters most of it out.

The brain processes different accents in English by mapping the received sound to your nearest equivalent to give the perceived sound. You know it's different, and if it's someone you know, you recognise the voice, but you cannot quantify how or why it's different, as your brain has processed it in the wrong way for that (unless you have been trained in phonetics, and even then, you have to be actively analysing).

And consider this:
Maybe you've had this happen to you in school language classes. Or maybe you did it to a foreign person at work or in a bar. There's a word that the learner can't pronounce correctly, and the teacher or native speaker repeats it... and the learner said "that's what I said". A typical Spanish person cannot hear the difference between "bin" and "been", and won't recognise which one you said. A French person cannot hear the difference between "dare" and "there".

If you want your brain to notice the different sounds, you must first demonstrate to your brain that they are different sounds, and the only way I know to do that is in careful pronunciation. If I pronounce a difference between bog and beag, I am showing my brain that there is a difference.

Am I saying you need perfect pronunciation from the start? No, far from it. You can get the pronunciation pretty wrong, but as long as you make a clear distinction between the two sounds, your brain can fix it later. The important thing is that you put the b' words in one box and the b words in a different box, because the boxes can be moved later. If you put them both into the same box, you'll have to learn all those words again further down the road.

I hope that's clear...ish.

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A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.

A point to consider if anyone else is making recordings:

A lot of people are scared to put their recording volume up, and the on-screen representation of their recording rarely gets above half-way. It looks neat, so it looks right. What happens next is that you discover it's too quiet, so you boost it in software... but a quiet signal isn't just quiet -- it's missing a lot of data. Turning up the volume means taking a small amount of data and trying to make a large amount of data out of it. If the data isn't there, the computer basically has to make a "guess" at what the signal should be, and it starts to sound like you're listening to a tin-can-and-string telephone.

It also gets worse when you convert it to MP3, particularly if you try to make it into a very small file. (It's at this point that it picks up a sound that I describe as "bubbles in a metal radiator".)

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A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.

I agree. This is what I was saying the other day on the thread about broad and slender sounds and how some are subtler than others. A lot of English speakers (myself included, when I first started learning Irish) really CAN'T hear the difference between, say, broad and slender "L" in normal speech, let alone repeat it. But starting off knowing that there IS a difference, and trying as much as possible to replicate it (even if it means you speak in an over-exaggerated manner) makes it easier for your brain to eventually make sense of it.

Redwolf

I think the main reason that people can't pronounce right is that how one speaks is connected to self identity and one's sense of aesthethics, so there is a sort of emotional mental block that prevents both a higher intellectual understanding and the actual physical act of production from happening.

it is believed that the irish accent comes from gaelic and rural accents are nearest to irish thus to articulate properly might even be construed as speaking like a bogger (in Ireland), while for foreigners, it would not wanting to sound like a leprechaun.

After all, the sounds are very easy to tell apart, but it is obvious that for a lot, they even refuse to accept the possibility of the broad/slender difference even existing, which then blocks hearing which blocks the sort of internal sensitivity needed to monitor oneself and tune up to the sounds.

Personally, i think it is a sort of racism reflex -there is no problem pronouncing french even tho the accent would be weird to an unwashed english speaker, because french culture has a certain cache that ireland does not

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