A chairde, you all know that I'm constantly saying that learners of Irish (or almost any other language) should learn IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet. The reason is, of course, that English is particularly ill-suited for giving even approximate pronunciations for foreign words (please don't do it, it gets wrong every time...) while it's extremely easy with the IPA. The problem has been that for by just looking at charts of the IPA, how is one to know how the sounds are pronounced.

Finally I've found a site with recording of the whole IPA. You just click on a symbol to hear it pronounced twice, very slowly.

http://www.paulmeier.com/ipa/charts.html

This one's nice too:

http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/about.html#

I hope Ailbhe Ní Chasaide or somebody is working on something just like it for Irish.

You're right: Irish consisting of English sounds is not Irish. There is nothing "difficult" about any of the sounds of Irish; they're just different from those of English, and the differences are important. Any little baby anywhere in the world can easily utter velar and palatal fricatives, for example. Adults can too.

After learning the IPA, students of Irish should not only use it to read phonetic transcriptions of isolated words and occasional short phrases, but read the dialect studies, which include whole dialectal texts (stories, poems, reminiscences) in IPA transcription, showing what happens to words in connected speech. That's important too. Language is all details, kind of like playing the fiddle. If you learn it right and practice it right, in time it all falls together. It's never perfect, but you can get good and keep getting better.

I've noticed that, within the site give by Jonas, the sounds given for aspirated are totally different from those described by Ó Siadhail. However the 'veral d' uses the same symbol and has the same sound as is given for "broad dh" by Ó Siadhail.
Why the discrepency? Is there one?
-Maidhc.

Lenited Irish consonants have been inaccurately called "aspirated consonants" in the past. The correct word is "lenited," which means softened or weakened.

When today's linguists speak of aspirated consonants, they are referring to stops/occlusives/plosives that are uttered with a strong expulsion of breath. In this sense, the c in "caitheamh" is aspirated or, more precisely, "strongly aspirated," and the c in "scathamh" is not. The same is true of the c sounds in the English "car" and "scar."

The c in "caitheamh" is a (strongly aspirated) voiceless velar stop (or occlusive, or plosive).

The ch in "a chaitheamh" is a voiceless velar fricative. Lenition is the substitution of a fricative for a stop, or a glottal fricative for a sibilant, or a lax sonorant for a tense one, or elision of a fricative.

The soft palate is the posterior part of the roof of the mouth, where there is no bone directly above the flesh. It's also called the velum, which is Latin for "veil." Those consonants that are articulated by raising the back part of the tongue so that it touches the velum and momentarily stops the outward flow of air, or comes close enough to the velum so that the air passing between them produces audible friction, are known as velar consonants.

Consonants during whose articulation the vocal folds (or "cords") are silent, are called voiceless consonants. Those that are articulated with the vocal folds vibrating and resonating are called voiced consonants.

The voiced counterparts of "broad" c and ch are:
g as in "gaoth": a voiced velar stop;
gh as in "an ghaoth": a voiced velar fricative.

ng as in "i nGaeilge" is a velar nasal.

"Slender" c, ch, g, gh and ng are not velar, but palatal, articulated by raising the forward part of the tongue towards the hard palate (the anterior part of the roof of the mouth).

"Broad" consonants other than the velars are called "velarized" consonants because during their articulation the back of the tongue is raised somewhat towards the velum, affecting their resonance and that of the transition from the preceding sound or to the following one.

"Slender" consonants other than the palatals are called "palatalized" consonants because during their articulation the front part of the tongue is raised somewhat towards the hard palate, affecting their resonance and that of the transition from the preceding sound or to the following one.

There are several ways of showing palatalization and velarization in phonetic transcriptions, such as using superscript j for palatalization and superscript lower-case gamma for velarization. For Irish, since this contrast is a basic feature of the sound system, the convention used is a less cumbersome one: b, k, d etc. for the velar and velarized consonants and b´, k´, d´ etc. for the palatal and palatalized ones.

Yikes. Sin eolas mhór é ansin. Bhí ceart agam faoin n"DH" fad agus "veral" le "aspirated" i nGaeilge ansin?

-Maidhc

Some more links:

http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/course/c hapter1/chapter1.html

http://www2.unil.ch/ling/english/phonetique/table-eng.html

http://www.celt.stir.ac.uk/staff/HIGDOX/STEPHEN/PHONO/PHONOG.HTM

http://www.utexas.edu/courses/linguistics/resources/phonetics/