I just thought I'd say hello to everyone here as I'm just starting out in Irish and will no doubt have many questions to ask you all in the not too distant future.

Because of family connections, Ulster Irish will always be foremost in my mind but all Irish is good as far as this beginner is concerned.

For the time being I am trying to train my ear to Irish sounds so I'm watching Ros na Rún and the news on TG4 quite a bit. I understand nothing but it gets the ear cells working a bit !

Soon I shall be asking questions on pronunciation (Ulster in particular). As a beginner I find it hard to learn vocabulary without having a reasonably good idea on how to pronounce a word so my early questions will be on pronunciation.

Anyway bye for now folks!

Welcome to Daltaí Baodaiwei.

I suggest you check out Forvo too -http://www.forvo.com/languages/ga/
Very few Ulster pronunciations though, and nobody doing them at the moment.

Bríd,
Thank you - I have already heard your sexy voice on that site :) quite a few times actually !

If you haven't already try the http://www.bbc.co.uk/irish/ site, it also has a course called Gíota Beag which I first used when I started and it's very good and will help you get the blas your after.

I wouldn't focus in the pronunciation of everything to the nth degree though, pronunciation is something that will come naturally as you go along, the most important thing is constructive learning in my opinion and using what you have and not being scared of mispronouncing or mistakes, fluency comes from that.

And it's true, Bríd's voice is great

(Message edited by macfear on April 03, 2011)

ahh thank you Baodaiwei :)

You're welcome Bríd.

macFear,
I'm using Giota Beag. It might seem that I might be overdoing the pronunciation but from my own perspective the pronunciation of Irish seems to be the hardest aspect of the language.

I do appreciate that I have to be realistic in what I can learn though - thanks.

... you'll find it hard to beat the voice of Bríd.... listen to her pronunciations and you'll be grand....