https://www.duolingo.com/course/ga/en/L ... ish-Online

I'm very interested to see what any native speakers would have to say about it. In contrast to all other Duolingo courses so far, they've hired a native to pronounce many (but not all) of their sentences, due to lacking a text-to-speech engine which could successfully work with Duolingo's setup.

Apparently, the main issue to anticipate at the moment, on the technical front, is in some occasions a line of audio playing with the wrong accompanying sentence. I've not experienced it so far, but we'll see.

Hopefully Duolingo will do very well and bring Irish to an even wider audience. What higher purpose is there in life?

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She is not a native.

Hmm, interesting. I don't know if I am misremembering whether they said they had a native speaker or not (I very well could be, but it seems a natural presumption). But if they did say so, she may have misrepresented herself. In any case, I think it's less than ideal to have a non-native speaker when there are natives out there who could do the work and assure you are getting a genuine pronunciation. Clearly, new learners are scarcely going to know the difference, and it only seems logical that someone demonstrating the language's pronunciation should be a native, so it seems to be a bit misleading to me.

It's a given in my mind that the phonology of Irish will be ignored in any course. It's a) alien to people and b) not understood and c) difficult

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__̴ı̴̴̡̡̡ ̡͌l̡̡̡ ̡͌l̡*̡̡ ̴̡ı̴̴̡ ̡̡͡|̲̲̲͡͡͡ ̲▫̲͡ ̲̲̲͡͡π̲̲͡͡ ̲̲͡▫̲̲͡͡ ̲|̡̡̡ ̡ ̴̡ı̴̡̡ ̡͌l̡̡̡̡.___

It's a given? It's frustrating -_- Oh well, I have a good ear, I'll just be careful not to get into any pronunciation habits and will adjust my pronunciation when I have better sources. I was excited to have access to high-quality native pronunciations of full sentences in a measured and clear manner. I might just turn off the course's audio, depending on what the particular criticism of her accent end up being. If she's pretty accurate minus a couple of identifiable give-aways, I don't mind too much. I've been learning the basics of Gaelic prior to this course being launched, and predictably it was harder still to find good audio material for that. But there is some, and when good material accompanies a decent course, it's very valuable indeed.

Ach well, onwards to victory!

I just started using this course. I've been waiting for it for awhile. I finished the Spanish course and thought it really helped a lot with my understanding of the language (especially with reading/writing). Irish is still in beta and is buggy. There is a lot of audio that doesn't match the text but it's a beta so I'm sure that will work itself out eventually.

I'd be interested in hearing what a native speaker or someone with a lot of experience with the language thinks about the course. My personal thoughts are anything that keeps me interested and exposed to the language is a good thing. I have tried audio courses like Pimsleur and a multitude of books but when I'm starting to get distracted from them I think since Duolingo is so interactive it's a good way to prevent drifting away.

Apparently they paid her. As they couldn't get the ABAIR synthesizer to work with their site-which would've been perfect. Like Jay-Bee said it's disappointing but not unexpected. Anyhow it is still a good course. You will learn the rules of grammar and spelling. The voice is clear unlike some of the TTSs they have with other courses.

Like previously said it is in Beta so there are a lot of technical mistakes at the moment (like wrong audio with text) but that will be corrected over the coming weeks. When you come across a mistake report it. At the moment only the Caighdeánach is accepted but Alex said that in time all the dialectical spellings will be accepted.

So I recommend it.

I've often found myself feeling frustrated by the number of "fragments" (as opposed to complete sentences) used in DuoLingo in other languages.

Eg bean agus fear; uisce, le do thoil.

But in Irish this has led to various things I'd personally flag up as at best misleading, at worst outright wrong.

I'm thinking in particular about the emphatic pronouns and short answers. I'm sure there are circumstances where "Tá sé." would be a valid answer, but am I not right in thinking that the sentence "He is" would most normally translate to either just "Tá." or as "Tá seisean."?

There's a sentence in there that's worse: "Tá sé agus tá sí." While I know next to know Irish, I understand the emphatic pronouns are used pretty much identically to those in ScG, and I can't picture any context in which I could use this in Scottish Gaelic without the emphatic particles.

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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.

For anyone who is interested, here are some criticisms of the audio for Irish from other Duolingo users:

https://www.duolingo.com/comment/4305589
http://www.reddit.com/r/duolingo/commen ... unciation/

The main criticism seems to focus on the broad/slender distinction. It sounds like quite a fundamental element for it to be glossed over. The mods don't seem very willing to acknowledge the criticisms. Given that the language is in beta, I do hope people who know what they're talking about make an audible uproar over it so that it might be improved. It's already at 11k+ learners; seems unfair that such a popular resource should have potentially misleading audio. Does their criticism seem fair to you good folks here?

On that note, I'm off hunting for articles and half-decent audio samples describing broad/slender distinctions. If anyone knows of some good places to point me, feel free to share