I recently discovered a great channel on YouTube called Learning Native Munster Irish, which I thought deserved to be mentioned here. The channel only has 2 videos so far, in which the creator has added Irish captions over the TG4 programme caipíní. I think that one of the faults of TG4 is that they nearly always provide English subtitles for the programmes that are spoken in Irish, but they only seem to provide Irish subtitles for the more popular shows (as far as I know, only Ros na Rún), which often contain little to no native Irish at all. If any of you have found similar content to this I would be more than grateful if you were to provide it.

_________________
I'm an intermediate speaker of the Corca Dhuibhne dialect of Irish and also have knowledge on the old spelling
Soir gaċ síar, fé ḋeireaḋ thíar

I don’t know about channels that do exactly the same thing, but here are some good ones that cover some Munster Irish:

• An Loingseach - Kerry native speaker. He has 4/5 very useful videos. His style is a bit rambly, but personally I like it and he’s very knowledgeable
• Dave Learns Irish - Useful videos here too and he has a video that covers some Cork Irish
• An Spideog - His first 2/3 videos are useful. He seems to have newer videos about video games, but I haven’t checked them out
• Ciara Ní É - She’s a Dublin girl and does poetry mostly, but I thought she had two very interesting mini-series, one on Ring Irish and another on Munster Irish generally

Well, now that you've brought it up, I think that I have to ask a question about AnLoingseach. Do you know for sure if he's a native speaker, because I have brought up this creator before on a separate thread, in which I referred to him as native, and was provided with some doubtful comments on the statement. I also found a separate forum (https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... hp?t=17272), in which galaxyrocker also says that AnLoingseach is a non-native. On the other hand, I have also heard him referred to as a native speaker by many others, even people who I know to be native.

Also, I know this is a pretty big ask, but what are your best tips for comprehending quick/native speech such as this when Irish captions aren't available (besides talking to native speakers)?

_________________
I'm an intermediate speaker of the Corca Dhuibhne dialect of Irish and also have knowledge on the old spelling
Soir gaċ síar, fé ḋeireaḋ thíar

I don’t know this for sure - but if he isn’t a native speaker he has incredible control over the language and its pronounciation and can be considered a solid resource. Furthermore, I’ve heard Patchy (Mayo native speaker) call out An Loingseach’s slender r’s, saying something like “he’s the only YouTuber I’ve heard get them right”.

On that thread you linked, GalaxyRocker is correct that Daz isn’t a native speaker. But GalaxyRocker shows up here every now and again and may be able to clarify if An Loingseach is native or not.


Do you have a link for this?


The full speed Irish video that Dave learns Irish did is helpful for irish at pace.

What I found helped me most was realizing that fast Irish and slow Irish are two different languages, much in the same way that fast English and slow English are.
With Irish the goal is almost to take as little pauses between words as you let out a breath (called a breath group).
To facilitate this, sound changes happen at word boundaries, meaning that individual words can be harder to pick out for the learner who has not been exposed to real native Irish yet.
In phonetics terms these sound changes are called sandhi and the phonetics of a sentence is called connected speech.

There is one example of this in Irish that will help you the most.

Rule: When an unstressed short vowel (i.e. doesn’t have a fada nor is a diphthong) meets another vowel at a word boundary, the unstressed short vowel is typically dropped e.g. bhí duine eile ann is pronounced bhí duinelann [vi: din’el’aun].
So if you don’t recognise a word you hear at speed, try break the word apart into words you do recognise.

Outside of that it’s exposure, get listening to rnag - the shows before 5pm have the strongest speakers.

That is a great point, beepbopboop.

I think the staccato style with constant stops between vowels (actually it is an English glottal stop) is a clear marker of non-native pronunciation.

The IPA symbol for a glottal stop is /ʔ/. We don't normally notice that there is a glottal stop at the beginning of words starting with a vowel in English, but "out" is /ʔaut/, because you have to open the glottis to start with to get to a vowel.

Now, in German, all words starting with a vowel have /ʔ/ even if they not the first word in a sentence. E.g. "um elf", at 11, is /ʔʊm ʔɛlf/. A good illustration is "es ist ein Uhr" in German, which you can hear at https://forvo.com/word/es_ist_ein_uhr./#de, with glottal stops before every word.

But that is not the Irish way.

If you say ní raibh aon aidhm eile aige as /nʲi: revʲ ʔe:n ʔəimʲ ʔɛlʲə ʔɪˈgʲɛ/, then that is Irish with a heavy, arguably German-style, accent.

These words should be run together as: /nʲi: revʲ e:n əimʲ ɛlʲ ɪˈgʲɛ/.

A pronunciation style with glottal stops before each vowel is known to linguists as "hard attack". In fact, it is spreading in English - many English people say "forever and ever, Amen" with glottal stops before "ever" and "and" and "ever" and "Amen", which never used to be the way of saying it. [See the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFZZI7HCp2M] Such usage is just non-native in Irish.

_________________
I'm an intermediate speaker of the Corca Dhuibhne dialect of Irish and also have knowledge on the old spelling
Soir gaċ síar, fé ḋeireaḋ thíar