Hey all!

I'm in the process of shifting my Irish blog from Tumblr to WordPress, and I think it looks a lot nicer! I'll be gradually moving the rest of the posts over from Tumblr over the next week or so.

https://thegeekygaeilgeoir.wordpress.com/

Redwolf

I like the page about what learning materials you recommend ("Beyond Duolingo").

I like what you say about language learning and how the rules change when learning a language with few speakers, but I have my doubts about recommending materials that contain multiple dialects for beginners.

My thinking is: if a vowel is pronounced two different ways by a good speaker, there's usually a grammatical reason. If the learner is listening to 3 dialects, they'll hear that vowel pronounced 6 ways. When person A says "I have to go to booop" and person B replies "Lucky you, baaap is great", the beginner can't know if the change in pronunciation has a grammatical significance or it's just a dialectical feature.

At best this makes learning harder, and at worst the learner will form the bad habit of ignoring certain types of differences and searching elsewhere for the gist of the sentence. This probably wouldn't affect their progress at beginners' level, but anyone in this habit would struggle to make progress at intermediate level.

So my conclusion is that beginners should focus on a single dialect. The narrower the better. And when they're confident in their knowledge of how Irish pronunciation relates to Irish grammar, then they can start learning about other dialects. So, start as specialised as possible, and broaden later.

So one choice would be Connemara dialect, and the materials I'd recommend would then be:

Buntús Cainte

Colloquial Irish

Learning Irish (and Stenson's workbook)

Caint Ros Muc

To be used in that order.

I haven't found single-dialect materials of this quality and completeness for any other dialect, so Connemara dialect is what I'd recommend to a learner. With more choice, my personal preference would have been for Donegal Irish.

Of course, any serious learner will be listening to RnaG or TG4 and will have some level of exposure to other dialects anyway. A small amount isn't the end of the world.

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Pages I made:
(These are unfortunately offline for the near future, but they'll be back!)

• Teaching Young Kids Irish (It's just my notes, a work in progress.)
• CD transcript and translations for the book Learning Irish

I disagree. In my experience, I've found that exposure to all the dialects from the beginning to be extremely helpful.

In any case, the idea in the post was that someone would choose one of the learning programs and work his or her way through it.

Most of the people reading the "Beyond Duolingo" post aren't yet at the point where you'd call them "serious learners." Some are, but most are just kind of dipping their toe in the water...whether they stick with it remains to be seen. I wrote the post in response to someone who said "well, can you recommend anything better?" (meaning, of course, anything free, as people are remarkably unwilling to part with cash when it comes to language learning), when I voiced my concerns about Duolingo on the Facebook group "Irish for Beginners."

Redwolf

Out of curiosity, do you have any recommendations for someone willing to pay but not to move to Ireland?
And what would you say is the best value for money?

Apologies if this is already on your site :P

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ЯГОН ТОҶИК НЕСТ ИНҶО???

I would say that the Ranganna classes through Gaelchultúr are among the best on-line courses for beginner through intermediate.

If you can afford to visit Ireland, any of the immersion courses are worth doing.

Redwolf