Do you know if duolingo teaches a specific dialect? they seem to have speakers who pronounce some things fairly drastically differently, for example agus pronounced by some close to an english y sound for the g and some with a very hard g sound, but i don't know enough about dialects to sort of choose one to focus on. i feel like i'll come out sounding quite odd.
To my knowledge, Duolingo doesn't teach a specific dialect, which means that in terms of the words it favours it will be "Mid-Minch" (what we call the generic/homogenised "dialect"). In terms of speaker pronunciations, I can think of at least three different dialects just from the people that I know for sure contributed audio recordings. The Gaelic Duo team is pretty keen to make sure learners are exposed to multiple dialect accents. As for how you'll come out sounding, I wouldn't worry at all! Most learners (and even a lot of native speakers, thanks to having teachers from other islands) have a somewhat mixed accent. If you live in an area with Gaelic-speakers you'll end up picking up the same accent as them eventually anyway, but if not, you won't be the only person speaking a generic "Mid-Minch" dialect.
Thanks for the tip on Blas na Gàdhlig. Great book.
Do you know if duolingo teaches a specific dialect? they seem to have speakers who pronounce some things fairly drastically differently, for example agus pronounced by some close to an english y sound for the g and some with a very hard g sound, but i don't know enough about dialects to sort of choose one to focus on. i feel like i'll come out sounding quite odd.
To my knowledge, Duolingo doesn't teach a specific dialect, which means that in terms of the words it favours it will be "Mid-Minch" (what we call the generic/homogenised "dialect"). In terms of speaker pronunciations, I can think of at least three different dialects just from the people that I know for sure contributed audio recordings. The Gaelic Duo team is pretty keen to make sure learners are exposed to multiple dialect accents.
As for how you'll come out sounding, I wouldn't worry at all! Most learners (and even a lot of native speakers, thanks to having teachers from other islands) have a somewhat mixed accent. If you live in an area with Gaelic-speakers you'll end up picking up the same accent as them eventually anyway, but if not, you won't be the only person speaking a generic "Mid-Minch" dialect.
Thank you! Very informative.
What happened to c in the list of letters?