About 5 years ago I bough Gabriel Rosenstock's "Beginner's Irish", as I like to have a good look at any new courses that come along. My opinion at the time - maith go leor, but no audio, so it'd be nearly useless to absolute beginners outside the classroom setting. I put it away and haven't looked at it since. Sorry, Gabriel.

Today whilst book shopping I came across the same book -- rereleased with an audio CD. I've only listened to it briefly, but I'd upgrade my opinion to "interesting & promising".

It has a nicer "feel" than Ó Sé's TYI, though is not as comprehensive - but the topics flow along more smoothly than Ó Sé's hopscotch approach to Irish. There's some quirky content that I ascribe to Rosenstock, but the eccentricity is more charming than annoying. Structurally it moves ahead steadily instead of lurching from topic to topic as TYI does.

It is nowhere near as comprehensive as Learning Irish. But the approach is far simpler than LI, which is nice for those who need to take baby steps instead of full strides.

Retails in the U.S. for $19.95, so it competes with the new Language/30 CDs and the Pimsleur CDs, but is better for being an actual course (L/30 is just a phrasebook with audio and Pimsleur is just audio).

Has anyone else tried the new & improved Rosenstock course?

Le meas,
Cionaodh

Cionaodh,

Just out of curiosity, what dialect is the Irish on the CD in?

Aaron

I recently bought this because of the CD even though I also had the book without it. I will need to listen to the CD again but I think that this is the CD that has an error in the order of its arrangement. In the middle of the first part you hear one of the dialogues that you hear again later where it should be. Mo bhrón, I do not know enough yet to discern very good pronunciation from very bad, so I will have to leave that judgment up to others. I did wish, however, that the Beginner's Irish had all the Irish in the book spoken on the CD, especially Lesson 9: Telling a Story.

Scríobh Aaron:

>>Cionaodh,
>>
>>Just out of curiosity, what dialect is the
>>Irish on the CD in?

Seems to be primarily Connemara, but they may have been trying for a blend, as some of the slender consonants aren't slender-sounding (which is more common in Munster) and some of the verb endings sound like Donegal pronunciations. I'd prefer to get a second opinion about it, though. (Mícheál?)

The Irish used in the book is pretty much straight out of the Caighdeán.

Le meas,
Cionaodh

Another observation - one of the pitfalls of including contact information for shops & organizations in a textbook is their nearly instantaneous obsolescence. "Beginner's Irish" included many such entries when it was published 5 years ago . . . the text not having been edited for this new edition, I can now spot at least a dozen errors of contact info already and but a few years later. Good intentions, bad move entirely.

Le meas,
Cionaodh