I'm a recently qualified primary teacher and my time in the Gaeltacht made it clear to me I have no idea how the language should be pronounced. As a language enthusiast, I know how critical pronunciation is. All of this diluted Irish is largely because native speakers are marginalised in discussions around the nature of the language, cf. an caighdeán. How can the next generation of primary school teachers start to fix this shambles?
the first step is saying it out loud and challenging clowns who parrot that this crap is just a new dialect or the next evolution of a language that is clearly dying rapidly
They’re too busy updating the Klingon course to be bothered with Irish phonology. there’s only a million people learning these mispronunciations, right?
they’re not actually updating the Klingon course; as someone who’s wasted 2000 hours on Duolingo before I finally quit it for good and started actually learning languages: • gimmick courses get left in the dust. • it’s about quantity of languages, because that’s what drives people to start using the app. The app already has a predatory market dominance even though it is woefully inefficient • Duolingo has absolutely no obligation to make courses cover more content than they already do. It just needs to waste as much time as it can without demoralising the user enough that they cancel their subscription. • hence you used to get for example Finnish, in a pathetic state, where you know nothing by the end of the course, and Navajo, and High Valaryian, and Navajo. • there was a time when languages used to be developed by volunteers on Duolingo. Duolingo shut this down around the time it really started ramping up predatory monetisation because people bored locked inside their homes in 2020 could have coins abused out of them like a Mario question mark block. • so Duolingo SEPERATED itself from the people who would develop more niche languages for it, STOLE the work from the community, MONETISED it to hell, and laid off workers at the same time • it had to lay off workers at its own company. • nowadays they are a cabal of a few dozen extremely neurotic post-grads who don’t care or know how to teach languages except selection bias to dupe the Duo goyim • courses “refresh” and “get updated with new content” conveniently sending you back many “units” (in the ugly candy crush abomination they made of the skill tree) wasting hours more of your time just in the hopes it gets another monthly subscription turnout before you throw its trash app in the trash. • the remaining, stagnating venture capital is invested in vapid, stupid brand image campaigns and developing their heckin “characters” with forced, unappealing “personalities” • all because Duolingo, the “learning app” went PUBLIC, yes PUBLIC (as a stock), so they need to attract venture capital, profiting off the desaturated brand image left over from when they used to actually teach a few things. Delete Duolingo.
0:33 I can’t get enough of this stuff, oul professor Loingseach dropping knowledge as usual and can’t help himself seething at the Duolingo robot lady. Fantastic 😂
Thank you for this! I have tried many times to raise this with their customer services and they ignore me every time. They used to have a native Connemara Irish speaker but they removed her a couple of years ago for no apparent reason. I would be overjoyed if they completely shut down this course because they are contributing to the death of the language. Please, everyone spam their customer services and social media teams to get them to understand!
I agree that they should just shut down the Irish course altogether until they fix the pronunciation issue as is definitely damages the language. Using bad pronunciation to this level would not be even remotely acceptable with other languages, imagine the equivalent but with French or German, there’d be uproar (and rightfully so)
learnt in school and my pronunciation is fairly shite, wish i could learn properly >_> your videos are informative though, irish sounds so much nicer when it isn't anglicised
A very informative and valuable critique of the kinds of mispronunciations that are going on in Duolingo Irish at the moment. They used to have recordings from speakers which were generally better than these. These very clearly are AI generated, but a common misconception I hear from people is that the poor pronunciation results from training on non-native or L2 speakers of Irish, whose own pronunciation is incorrect. That's just not how the state-of-the-art in AI language models works, at least, in the case of under-resourced languages like Irish. Even if it were, you wouldn't expect mispronunciations that are quite this blatant to result from training AI models on the speech of L2 speakers who are any way competent in the language, so there's clearly something else going on in the case of Duolingo's Irish speech synthesis. We've known for a long time that to produce an AI model which can generate speech from text requires a considerable quantity of data. Some of the earliest AI models to successfully produce speech may have been trained on speech data for a single language, but only for widely used languages for which huge amounts of training data was already available, or could easily be created. The type of data required for a task like text-to-speech would be large amounts of audio data of speakers matched with transcriptions of what they're saying. Not only that, but if the data is copyright protected, like you'd expect of subtitled TG4 shows for example, researchers are unlikely to incorporate it into language models for fear of legal ramifications or complications, and a company like Duolingo may not want to pay for the rights to use that quantity of data for training their models. Early AI models like these might be expected to mispronounce things if a considerable portion of their training data was mispronounced, but a sufficient quantity of freely available, open source data of this type just doesn't exist for Irish. What I suspect is going on here is that Duolingo has resorted to using an LLM (large language model). These are more up-to-date AI models which are typically trained first to perform a task like text-to-speech using data from one or more very well resourced languages like English, before then being shown a smaller amount of data from a lesser-resourced language like Irish. They can generally learn the basics concepts of the task from working with the better resourced language, i.e. that certain letters or letter combinations equate to particular sounds. In theory this means that they can focus on just learning the specifics, what sounds equate to what letters or letter combinations, when applied to the lesser resourced language. In practice many things can go wrong with this approach, and it requires careful tweaking and tuning to achieve the best results. For example, if I'm correct in thinking Duolingo is using an LLM here, what may have gone wrong is that they trained on too much English data during the initial phase of training (specifically American English based on what I'm hearing). If so, this could likely be fixed by retraining the model using roughly equal amounts of data from several different languages in the initial training phase, then working with fluent Irish speakers to tweak the model until the final result sounds correct to them. Sorry for the long-winded response, but I think it's important to clarify what is most likely going on in cases like this. TL;DR - This poor AI pronunciation in Duolingo probably has more to do with the way the model was built and trained than on the quality of the Irish language data it was trained on. The problem might be solved by just retraining and tweaking the AI model a bit.
I think you are misanalysing it. Duo's Irish speech synthesis sounds like a traditional speech synthesis engine. Nothing "AI" and definitely not an LLM involved. If it were a modern AI technique, it would sound a lot better than it does!
@@nickmoore5105 I suppose it's possible that they've recently started using a text-to-speech (TTS) model, though it doesn't seem like the most likely scenario to me, and I certainly don't see any reason to think they're after taking to training older/traditional speech synthesis engines themselves. It's fairly well documented that they have used stock TTS voices in the past where these were already available, but they started transitioning to creating their own machine learning (ML) models for speech synthesis some time ago (see this video from Duocon three years ago: ua-cam.com/video/oEiKfH9WCGo/v-deo.htmlsi=mlv48VmiUSg9_YXJ ). As for LLMs specifically, they have even more recently discussed how these are now being used to synthesise characters' voices, "Every prompt gives the LLM information to make it sound like the Duolingo character you're talking to" ( blog.duolingo.com/chatbot-language-practice/#:~:text=Every%20prompt%20gives%20the%20LLM,chipper%20or%20Eddy%20sounding%20discouraged. ), though this might be restricted to their recent Roleplay feature which isn't available for Irish yet, I think. I can't find anything to suggest that they ever created their own TTS models using older speech synthesis techniques, though, and while that certainly doesn't rule out the possibility, I just don't see why they would decide to start now. Older techniques typically require more effort and tweaking on the programming side, and hence would likely be more expensive for Duolingo than just hiring voice actors to generate a sufficient amount of data with which to train a basic AI model. This is exactly what they claim to be doing in the Duocon video I linked above, getting voice actors to produce 6,000 sentences and using these to train ML models. I don't see much reason to think the recent change in the app for Irish wasn't the result of them switching from using an older TTS model to using one of these newer ML models. This is clearly the roadmap they've set out for themselves three years ago, and it seems extremely unlikely that since that time they would have invested in and rolled out a less sophisticated speech synthesis model just for Irish. It's not impossible that the change could instead have resulted from them switching from using simple speech recordings to using an Irish TTS model for the first time, I suppose, but that would contradict the statement made in the Duocon video, "Duolingo also uses TTS. We don't record every single line that we have in the app." This would suggest to me that they must have always been using some form of TTS for Irish, and the recent change must have been a move to some other type of model - likely the ML model they discuss in the video, because it makes no sense to switch from one TTS model to another inferior TTS model when you're clearly transitioning to ML for other languages. I don't see any reason to think that an AI or LLM should be expected to sound better than these clips just because more modern techniques are being used. Especially not if a model is being trained on very limited data. Modern AI techniques also require a lot of testing and tweaking during training to get them to sound right. Again, in the Duocon video, Dr. Kevin Lenzo discuss these challenges and how they are trying to deal with them, "To get all of the context that we'd need, we'd need about a hundred times the amount of data that we collect for this 6,000 sentences... Every one of these examples is corrected by a linguist so when we see something or hear something that's wrong in the course content, we can fix it". I don't see why Duolingo wouldn't be able to get voice actors who were at least as proficient as the original Irish voices on the app to generate these 6,000 sentences for them, so my inclination is still to assume that there is some bottleneck to improving the models, either because they don't yet have a sufficient quantity of training data, or because there simply aren't enough qualified linguists who are available to work with Duolingo on their Irish course.
Duolingo is so depressing because even I can hear how Anglicised/Americanised some of the speakers are and it destroys my confidence in the whole programme. I'd love any decent resources people could share for Gaeilge Uladh, the only contemporary one I can think of offhand is Speaking Irish.
Now You're Talking is the key thing, but I think most of Art Hughes's courses are fairly decent for learning Donegal Irish ( the only extant Ulster dialect)
@@davissandefur5980 I found the format of Now You're Talking a little frustrating but it never gave me that eerie 'something's wrong with the pronunciation' vibe, I'll return to it. Art Hughes is a great recommendation! Sounds a lot closer to the family I grew up with, who had mid-Ulster accents mostly.
@@C-on That is not a magic solution. Most people who go to a Gaeltacht do not pick up the sounds of the language. They must be pointed out and taught or all people will hear and pick up are approximations. Also the Gaeltachts are not the Irish speaking strongholds they were in the sixties. You will not learn by immersion by going to a Gaeltacht, unless you are signing up for courses which explicitly aim to create an immersion environment for you.
This is such an interesting approach to learning the language! Don't think I've heard a teacher use linguistics and vowel placement to describe how to pronounce rudaí as Gaeilge before, it's so cool! First time seeing this channel, learned Irish in school from a mixture of Leinster and Munster teachers - (though the school was in Connacht), so we had an...interesting... mix of pronunciations by the time we got past Leaving Cert. Would love to see more of this on UA-cam, it's both educational and entertaining. Maith thú dude.
The Duolingo Irish course is indeed excruciating, I couldn’t agree more. I’d actually enjoy more videos like that comparing Duolingo (or other recordings) with actual proper Irish. I’d also love to see a video on Déise Irish and comparing it with other dialects. By the way as a side note, in the Déise, broad L can be very deep, so much so that in some speakers it very closely resembles a broad gh, so lá can sound similar to dhá. Also, in Déise Irish again, in the book called The Phonology of Desi Irish, toil is transcribed phonetically as tol’ or tel’ (as expected), however the author notes that in the expression má’s é do thoil é, toil can have a broad l and the author himself refers to it as the old nominative.
Really wish a comprehensible input channel made by native Irish speakers existed. There should be some kind of government scheme or incentive to create a resource à la Dreaming Spanish so learners can listen to graded and varied content from total beginner to advanced, allowing learners to then make the jump to native materials. I basically went from terrible school-level Spanish to being able to converse with my girlfriend in a bit over year with no pronunciation issues. I owe all of it to videos, podcasts, and books targeted at specific levels.
The problem is, most people who'd be interested in making such a thing sound closer to Duolingo than to native Irish speakers. There's, sadly, very few learners with good pronunciation of Irish.
@@davissandefur5980ah I should have said 'native speakers' instead of 'Gaeilgeoirí' (I will edit my original comment to change that). You are correct - such a resource would require native speakers, which is what I was trying to get at originally. Funding such a project would be fantastic. A few hundred hours of graded audio/video material would go a long way in making native content accessible for learners.
I think the fundamental problem is that there's a reluctance in modern Ireland to declare that there are native Irish speakers and there are native English speakers. Some in the latter would see such a description (ie reality) as an attack on their Irishness, respond that its "a language for all", "the first language of the constitution" and they're not incorrect on the latter two points. However, it is living in a state of delusion, and not owing up the brutal truth that it's not the first language of 99% of the population, just like French and Welsh aren't. There is instead this bizarre insistence on a (weak) passive bilingualism, where we'll speak English in at work, in the home, when socialising in public, hear it in all our media consumption and yet we'll somehow retain Irish from when we learned it as an L2 language at an English-speaking school in our youth. It's a laughable strategy which will never revive a language, let alone bring it back to how it naturally sounds. The saying "tír gan tenaga, tír gan anam" has never been drilled in adequately. Like an alcoholic, if we cannot admit to the denial we're in, then there will be no way out of the rut. People need to be told (as An Loingseach does here to his very limited audience) that you're not a native speaker, your pronunciation is heavily anglicised and you will need to look upon Irish as if it were German, with all its own unique phonology, just as you already accept for its orthography (spelling). If you can work on trying to sound like someone in a Gaeltacht does, then you won't automatically become a native Irish speaker, but you will be setting up the country for a resurgence and linguistic shift towards such. If we do get to a broad acceptance of the reality then you can be sure that such an insulting, deceiving load of codswallop will never be gracing Duolingo again. And foreign learners will no longer find themselves walking through a maze of confusion, as will their thought "why does this sound like English?" disappear.
@@conanglas3358 RNAG is great but it's not comprehensible input for learners. Look up the concept of Comprehensible Input if you don't know what it is. Seriously, there is almost no CI Gaeilge content. The closest is a few videos of people reading out children's books. It's as if the concept of CI doesn't exist in irish language education. Meanwhile I can find hours and hours of CI for other languages. People are making good UA-cam money doing it!
Haven't used Duolingo in a number of years, but I couldve sworn they used to have pre-recordings from a Connaught-sounding woman. It was pretty decent, don't know why they got rid of her :(
Go raibh míle maith agat! Been using Duo for a daily quick vocab booster and general motivation to practice, and I've been deliberately ignoring the pronunciations and focusing on what I've picked up from your videos and a couple others like Patchy on UA-cam. It helps to hear that my pronunciation is a lot closer to yours than the Duo recordings, but it also shows me a lot of areas where I need to improve.
I’ve been using Irish books with English parallel translation. I’ve found it more interesting and rewarding to get the vocabulary along with a story. And often the words stick because there is some story behind them. If you’re ignoring the pronunciation anyway, perhaps consider that approach too.
thank you for this video. As someone who tried to learn irish a while back with duolingo and rosetta stone, the moment when i realized that the pronounciation was completely wrong was like a revelation to me: so there IS a difference between rothar and rothair!
I am literally learning Irish on Duolingo , because it's the only apps on Irish I could find that matches my learning style😭 And it doesn't pronounce anything like what I learned about Irish phonology or from the videos you did on the topic. Could you do a concise video on Irish phonology and orthography? I watched your previous videos but they were a bit ✨ chaotic ✨ 😅 so it was kind hard to follow 😅
These docs have detailed timestamps for AnLoingseach's pronounciation videos. Hope they help. drive.google.com/drive/folders/1NL7WYy958DTMMRqDGT92WfGUyDuA29Wz?usp=sharing
Was using Irish Duolingo a few years ago to familiarise myself with Irish for the sake of Gael solidarity. Had visions of making it easier to converse with the Donegal ground workers I encounter on building sites in West of Scotland
This is a useful video. I never learned Irish in school, so I'm thankful for the accessibility of Duolingo, especially given that it's free. I've also used other resources like 'Now You're Talking' (available on UA-cam and worth watching purely for the retro cardigans and hairdos) which definitely seems like it gives more genuine (Ulster) pronunciations. Using these things, my comprehension has improved exponentially, but I'm aware that in order to get good at speaking, I'll certainly need to find time to attend classes and groups. There are plenty in my locality, just never seems like there are enough hours in the day.
@@minhuang8848 ah to clarify, by "un-learning" I don't mean i've forgotten because i haven't practiced. I mean i have since learned things that directly contradict things on duolingo, mostly pronunciation and phrasing.
I’ve been working on improving my pronunciation (and aural ability because for me they’re linked). It’s not difficult to produce the proper sounds - your videos have helped. Problem for me is I can’t reject the incorrect pronunciations, so I’d treat them as being valid. It’s good to have critical videos like these.
thank you for doing this! i especially loved you showing the munster way to pronounce siúicre and le do thoil as that’s the dialect i want to learn :D i realize more and more how similar sounding irish and my native norwegian can be at times, especially since i speak a dialect where palatalization is one of its core distinctions! i hope you, painful as it may be, choose to do this again sometime so we can get a further look at the various ways to correctly pronounce words i nGaeilinn ;) grma!
Are you specifically learning east Munster Irish by any chance? You used the form “Gaeilinn” which afaik is only used in east Munster (Waterford, south Tipperary and east Cork).
Breathníonn an fhuaimniú ar an gcanúint, go háirithe le 'taispeáin' (nó i gConamara 'speáin) agus 'bord'. Tá na fuameanna de na cinn seo uilig ar teanglann.ie Éist leo ansin.
I am a Canadian who is using Mícheál Ó Siadhail’s “Learning Irish” book and recordings supplemented by some lessons Máirtín Ó Cadhain made with recordings and some other native Cois Fharraige stuff on TG4. It’s very hard to get good source material. I tried a couple of courses online from Ireland and the most daunting thing was always asking which dialect I was going to get (U/C/M). They could never give me an answer. There seems to be a tendency to try to erase dialects entirely from lessons out of Dublin (was able to get an answer from Galway online lessons). But it should be the FIRST THING said - “In this class we will be learning a real (or approximation) of Connacht dialect…) “
Learners should know what they are getting into. If they want to learn, or have been learning one dialect correctly even, and they get a new instructor teaching the class another dialect it will be discouraging and confusing for the student… as experienced by myself.
I’m learning Irish on Duolingo, but I think I have quite a feeling for languages, I can hear if it is „real“ Irish or if it has that „english touch“. Even the English on Duolingo is just American English, I would not call it „English“, because then it would be BE and not AE. I just use it to learn words and a hint of grammar, because you can not really find good material online. That works pretty fine, I fresh up my Italian(second mother tongue) with German(first), Swedish, English and a little bit of French so I get all kind of pronounciations. I like to have it all in one app. When I add all dialects I speak/understand, I can just get a feeling for what is „contaminated“ and what sounds real. You should never learn a language only from one app/book/course but get as many material you can. So thank you so much for this vid that helps me learning better Irish, the next wunderful language on my list 😊
Dia duit, go raibh míle maith agat as an bhfíseán seo. Cabhróidh sé le foghlaimeoirí idirmheánacha cosúil liom féin botúin éasca fuaimnithe a sheachaint. An féidir leat físeáin cosúil leis seo a dhéanamh do gach ceacht? 😅 Leis an tsúil atá agat don mhionsonra, níor cheart go dtógfadh sé ach cúpla uair an chloig de do chuid ama... 🤣🤣🤣 Le gach dea-ghuí ón Astráil!
Thank you very much for clarifying this! I considered using Duo Lingo but I now understand that I shouldn’t do that. I think that maybe a non-native speaker doesn’t need to get completely accent free (but they should make an effort to get as close as possible) but at least the learning resources should not contain the anglicized version of the language. I’m not a native English speaker myself (I’m German) so apologies if I make some mistakes. But I’m always willing to improve.
Learning a language, not everyone will have the same goals, skills or growth curves and that is okay. If instead of the duolingo app, it was learners of the language approaching me with these pronunciations, I would be delighted with their using the language and praise their success at communicating, because I can mostly understand what these words are supposed to be, even without the spelling shown. But that does not mean they are correctly pronounced. This is absolutely unacceptable as teaching material or even practising material, as far as sounds go. Especially material for a worldwide audience. P.S. Your English seems very good to me.
@@gwenbutler9687 Thank you very much! 😊 And yes, I totally agree with you about the different goals and the teaching materials. I actually hope that the man in this UA-cam video makes his own app for learning Irish which would be absolutely amazing… 🤓
As a native German speaker, you'll be off to a head start on the pronunciation of Irish gutturals which are non-existent among English speakers (including in Ireland). Think of macht, Bach, which is the same /x/ of the Irish broad /ch/. You'll also have a better ear for what is overly-anglicised, knowing which sounds are associated with each language and which aren't ie compartmentalising your languages.
@@pio4362 Is fíor sin, ach an bhfuil an 'ch' sa nGearmáinis díreach mar an gcéanna lenár 'ch' leathan féin? Níl mórán taithí agamsa leis an nGearmáinis, mar sin, b'fhéidir nach bhfuil an ceart agam anseo, ach bíonn na 'gutturals' níos láidre sa nGearmáinis, agus níos cosúla leis an mBreatnais ná leis an nGaeilge, i mo thuairim féin.
duolingo changed the speaker for the course a few months back. the old speaker was all 'acub' and 'innuv' and her war of saying 'dheathair' contained lots of new sounds for me. the new speakers sound much more english to my ears. also the new speakers often pronounce the 'f' in future forms.
Yes, they changed from a native speaker of Conamara Irish (one who, coincidentally, has won the highest sean-nós competition award in the country) to a TTS trained on learners.
So far, Duolingo has left the Scottish Gaelic voices alone. It was reported a while back that Sabhail Mor Ostaig had a partnership with Duolingo - maybe that's the difference.
I love your work! Can I ask a question please. In Australia, historically Irish was called Gaelic or "the Gaelic" by speakers here. Now obviously the official way to refer to it in Ireland is "Irish", but many heritage learners in Australia don't see the official standard as being the language which our ancestors spoke and so are more interested in learning dialects (with correct pronunciation). I was wondering, do native/dialect speakers in Ireland ever call the language "Gaelic" in English, or has it fallen out of use entirely in favour of "Irish"? As someone who was taught that older family members had spoken "Gaelic" and knowing that some convict ancestors were listed as (and sometimes punished for) speaking "only Gaelic", many of us here have an emotional connection to the name. We are constantly told off for using the wrong name online by Irish speakers though, and I was wondering your thoughts on this. GRMMA
The language was traditionally called Gaelic in English, but starting with the formation of the Irish Free State there was a push to call it Irish, as a way of claiming it as part of the Irish identity and heritage. That's why some older speakers and disapora speakers would still call it Gaelic. Insisting on calling it Irish is more of a political thing. It's not factually wrong to call the language you ancestors spoke Gaelic, it's just politically incorrect to call it that now. Whilst it's understandable you have a connection to the term Gaelic due to family traditions, referring to it as Irish reflects the modern, post-colonial emphasis on reclaiming heritage.
@nickmoore5105 Thanks for the detailed answer. I suppose for some of us outside of Ireland who have never visited, the culture and language that was fought for in our countries was heavily connected to the word "Gaelic". We still have Gaelic clubs and classes and university courses, and access to old newspapers and sermons and such which were written when the language (referred to as Gaelic) was still being seriously suppressed in Ireland. It's a tough one because there is obviously a desire to support decolonisation and cultural identity in Ireland itself, but we don't want to erase the history of speakers of the language outside either. Both histories and lineages are valid and with almost no connection to the modern Republic of Ireland, it can be a challenge for us to conform to relatively new terminology being used there. It's still interesting to think about and I'm sure in a generation or two, the name Irish will be used by people all over the world as the only name. I just wish (perhaps selfishly) that Irish speakers from Ireland could see self identifying Gaelic speakers and learners from other countries as having a valid claim to the name, perhaps as a separate lineage which still fought hard for the continuation of the language and culture, even so far from its homeland. I guess the way I see it is that if a third of the speakers of the Netherlands left their country and in 200 years they changed the name of their language in Europe to Netherlandish, I think it would be hard for the decendants of those who left to stop using the word Dutch
@@sbubwoofer I guess I was interested as to why the name had changed from Gaelic to Irish. And the reasons were political. So his answer was exactly what I was asking for. Speaking a minority language that isn't needed for daily use in a place IS political, like it or not.
Can you do a video on your own accent when speaking English? I know it's not your usual content but I'd be curious to see what you think stands out to other people, or what stands out as wrong to you when foreigners try to imitate it.
Tangential question: How is the Irish pronunciation on Rosetta Stone (the app)? To my untrained ears it doesn't sound exceedingly English, but is it good Irish?
Yeah I believe it is. The course is very short and only covers very basic things like greetings, but the audio is by native speakers of Munster Irish, if it's the course I'm thinking of.
5:23-5:30 This is EXACTLY like how non-greeks or westerners using Erasmian pronunciation treat the dipthong ει when learning Ancient Greek, pronouncing it not like a monophthong /eː/ or /iː/ but as /ey/ which is completely wrong and artificial.
That happens with pretty much every language with phonemic vowel length when Anglophones learn them - since English lacks pure long vowels, they get substituted. The thing with Irish (and I guess Ancient Greek to, for the most part, sadly) is that they don’t get corrected, so they’re not even aware they’re doing something incorrectly. At least with bigger modern languages, the teachers will generally correct them and thus at least make them aware of what they should strive to achieve - and even if not the teachers, then native speakers will tell them at some point. With minority and ancient languages that’s more likely not gonna happen.
Thanks for this. Your consonant and vowel pronounciation videos were a massive turningpoint and help to my learning. I still use Duo-in a kind of conditional, extended way with notes, grammar research, and checking in with the teanglann audio. My fear using it now is how much of the grammar it teaches isn't correct.
Trying to learn Irish on Duolingo, is very frustrating because there are many pronunciations of the same words...... after listening to you I'm going to need antidepressants.......😣 I have a great fear that I can read it, but will understand NOTHING if I go to Connemara.... I hear YOU sigh....imagine how we all feel now. Perhaps conversations with subtitles....speaking slowly would be a great benfit.
A Loingseach, might I suggest you open lines for viewer donations, as some of us would like to help buy you a better microphone -- all the better to hear you with.
Too much emphasis on forcing students to speak from day one instead of getting the sound of the language fully ingrained in their head before they start talking. But that isn’t as easy to measure and test, so who cares! Totally wrongheaded approach to teaching language
Without taking issue with your comment, I do feel like one misses out on the glorious features that the language offers you for making long fluid statements without choking or fumbling your sounds (likely due to having been taught a much klunkier pronunciation.... Which must then be unlearned). 🤷♂️ The second blow to dedicated learners after "why am I choking out these phrases" might as well be, "I studied for a very long time and could not for the life of me communicate with my cousin in Conamara. I'll never understand this language. 💔" Again, I don't entirely disagree with varied approaches here, but I would argue that a student that learns the sounds and pronunciation first will enjoy alot less stress and frustration moving forward. 🤷♂️
I actually find that alot of folks really enjoy learning to write in Cló Gaelach from the very start. It is a beautiful script with a rich history that still sees use today! Coupling that effort with pronunciation seems to reeeeally help some folks. ❤
I think one of the BIG problems that learners have right now, is an pandemic of "I can read and write very very well, but I can literally never simply listen and understand or be understood the first time." I think that people learning their phonetics very late in the game face a specific hell that pronunciation savy folks simply won't. Why setup for that struggle? 🤷♂️
@@MadSc13ntist I agree with a lot of what you're saying to be honest. I think there's a benefit to learning the basics of the phonetics of a language early on, in Irish specifically for instance like broad d makes this sound, slender d makes this sound, etc. Not with a focus on being able to reproduce the sounds per se, but to be able to hear them and recognize them in context, especially when combined with reading along with a transcript of what you're listening to. My personal approach I'd recommend to someone is something like learn the basic spelling rules, get to grips with the basics of phonetics and phonology, but don't worry about reproducing the sounds yourself early on. Focus on building vocabulary by reading a lot, and on building your ability to understand by listening a lot (starting with reading along with a transcript but eventually dropping the transcript and only using it to double check when you're not sure you've heard something correctly). then once a high level of comprehension is achieved by the above methods, begin outputting by writing and having a native check your work for naturalness/grammaticality. Writing first because it removes the extra barrier of pronunciation. Once writing skill is achieved to a sufficient level, the student can begin the process of learning to speak by first imitating audio recordings of native speech, then by recording oneself reading aloud from a script focusing on pronunciation, and finally by doing structured output with a teacher. All the while doing a dive into the specifics of grammar and pronunciation. I think the best thing a student can do to improve their pronunciation is have a robust internal model of the sounds of a language, so when they say something incorrectly, they can HEAR the mistake instead of having to be told they're saying soemthing incorrectly.
How would you change the Irish education system to support fledging Irish learners, Irish being a difficult language to learn (obviously learn in this case referring to the language not being spoken to a fluent level in everyday life but learned in addition to their dominant language). Is there something of a tendency for Gaeilgeoirí to be over-critical to learners for not pronouncing things pitch-perfectly, driving learners away from the language entirely?
There's nothing wrong with native speakers insisting on correct pronunciation, whatever the language may be. When you're learning to drive, and the instructor pinpoints all your errors (as they always do), they are doing so so that you can be aware of what you're doing wrong and what can you do to fix them. It can be strict, yes, it can take practise for the right way to come naturally, yes, but that's the only way you're going to become proficient. Nobody made any promises that these things will come automatically. You're "pitch perfect" is nothing but a cop-out for laziness. Just because sounding proficient will take time, does not mean the correct pronunciation shouldn't be put in front of you and insisted on form the beginning.
@@pio4362 I'm not sure that I agree with you that there's nothing wrong with native speakers of a language insisting on non-native speakers pronouncing everything perfectly, it's not a realistic ask. I also don't agree with the driving instructor comparison, as one is learning how one should and shouldn't operate machinery that can potentially (and very often does) result in grave harm/death to yourself and others when rules aren't followed, and the other is communication between two individuals... not nearly the same stakes. Yes, the "proper" pronunciation should be presented from the outset and adhered to to the best of the learner's ability, that should be obvious. But should the end goal of learning a language to be to adhere to a certain standard of pronunciation, and if this standard isn't followed to then be considered "wrong"? I don't think so. Imo, languages are only vessels of communication, and new methods of communication are added to languages all the time (like slang and other colloquialisms that creep into languages, often borrowed from other communities or languages). Go to any other country in the world and try your best to speak the language of the people there amd I'm sure they will help you with pronunciation and even grammar whenever mistakes are made (except maybe France lol) but any Irish speakers I've met often come off as having a superiority complex or something, like if you're not worth their time if you weren't born speaking Irish and instead fought your way through the years of standard education, changing teachers every year who A. Aren't necessarily native speakers themselves and B. If they are, your teacher could be native speaker of Ulster, Connaucht, or Munster Irish, which is never really explained in the formal system to learners... which brings me back to the main part of my original comment: how can we make learning Irish better for people in the Irish education system? I would love thoughts and suggestions on that particularly
@@slifer0081 Yeah Japanese. Studied in classroom setting with native speaker since 2013, lived there, married a Japanese person, been speaking/reading/writing/listening to it daily since 2017. I'm not new to language learning Why?
@@DanTrundle What is so terrifying about being instructed the correct pronunciation?! Are you trying to troll me? The analogy makes sense and that's why it has the upvotes. Why can't you understand it too? This is what happens with every language and Irish should be no different. You are making up prejudiced nonsense about native Irish speakers, without a shred of evidence, to serve as your own excuses for not learning the language or for the laughable anglicised crap An Loingseach has just debunked.
Is léir nach raibh tú i nGealtacht Thír Chonaill ariamh. Sa chéad sámpla, tá tuaimniú an chainteora go huile 's go hiomlán ceart. "Caife" = "caff-eh". Baineann an tuaim leis an chanúint. Níl Gaedhilg na Mumhan ag achan duine créid nó ná chréid!
Ceist a ritheann liom chuile uair a thosaíonn an comhrá seo faoi fhuaimniú na Gaeilge ná; céard is fuaimniú ‘ceart’ ann i ndáiríre? Agus cén uair ba cheart dúinn canúint nó creole a thabhairt ar stíl labhartha áirithe? Tuigim go bhfuil droch-fhuaimniú i gceist nuair a chloisim ‘k’ seachas ‘ch’, easpa idirdhealú idir consain chaola agus leathana, ⁊rl., mar bhíonn rudaí mar seo ina driseacha cosáin roimh chumarsáid éifeachtach. Ach dá mbeadh pobal ann agus tuigeann siad a chéile, nach bhfuil sé sin maith go leor? Mar shampla má tá ‘Gaeilge na scoile ó dhúchas’ ag slua mór Gaeil amach anseo, nach canúint nua (nó Creole fiú) ar an bhfód é seo?
@@johnmackenreillytag Seans go mbeidh creole ann. Ní chuirfeadh sé iontas ormsa. Ach ní hionann an Ghaeilge agus aon chreole Gaeilge/Béarla. Tá súil agam go dtuigfidh daoine é sin. Bheadh sé spéisiúil, teanga nua a fheiceáil ag teacht ar an bhfód!
B'fhéidir nach raibh sé go huile 's go hiomlán ceart, cé nach raibh an leagan Muimhneach aigesean mar an gcéanna leis na canúintí eile... Ach deirfinnse 'caifí', agus níl an-taithí agamsa le Gaeilge Thír Chonaill, mar sin, b'fhéidir nach dtuigim. Ach d'fhoghlaim mé go leor ag éisteacht le cainteoirí Uladh ó 'Céim Ar Aghaidh'. B'fhéidir go dtaithníodh na físeáin sin leat níos mó? Seo péire a thaitin go mór liom, ar aon chaoi: ua-cam.com/video/JTC1JdMNQm8/v-deo.htmlfeature=shared agus ua-cam.com/video/fc6zhuMwg_4/v-deo.htmlfeature=shared
I'm a recently qualified primary teacher and my time in the Gaeltacht made it clear to me I have no idea how the language should be pronounced. As a language enthusiast, I know how critical pronunciation is. All of this diluted Irish is largely because native speakers are marginalised in discussions around the nature of the language, cf. an caighdeán.
How can the next generation of primary school teachers start to fix this shambles?
the first step is saying it out loud and challenging clowns who parrot that this crap is just a new dialect or the next evolution of a language that is clearly dying rapidly
Well. As you said, live in the Gaeltacht, or have people from the Gaeltacht teach the Gaelic.
They’re too busy updating the Klingon course to be bothered with Irish phonology. there’s only a million people learning these mispronunciations, right?
they’re not actually updating the Klingon course; as someone who’s wasted 2000 hours on Duolingo before I finally quit it for good and started actually learning languages:
• gimmick courses get left in the dust.
• it’s about quantity of languages, because that’s what drives people to start using the app. The app already has a predatory market dominance even though it is woefully inefficient
• Duolingo has absolutely no obligation to make courses cover more content than they already do. It just needs to waste as much time as it can without demoralising the user enough that they cancel their subscription.
• hence you used to get for example Finnish, in a pathetic state, where you know nothing by the end of the course, and Navajo, and High Valaryian, and Navajo.
• there was a time when languages used to be developed by volunteers on Duolingo. Duolingo shut this down around the time it really started ramping up predatory monetisation because people bored locked inside their homes in 2020 could have coins abused out of them like a Mario question mark block.
• so Duolingo SEPERATED itself from the people who would develop more niche languages for it, STOLE the work from the community, MONETISED it to hell, and laid off workers at the same time
• it had to lay off workers at its own company.
• nowadays they are a cabal of a few dozen extremely neurotic post-grads who don’t care or know how to teach languages except selection bias to dupe the Duo goyim
• courses “refresh” and “get updated with new content” conveniently sending you back many “units” (in the ugly candy crush abomination they made of the skill tree) wasting hours more of your time just in the hopes it gets another monthly subscription turnout before you throw its trash app in the trash.
• the remaining, stagnating venture capital is invested in vapid, stupid brand image campaigns and developing their heckin “characters” with forced, unappealing “personalities”
• all because Duolingo, the “learning app” went PUBLIC, yes PUBLIC (as a stock), so they need to attract venture capital, profiting off the desaturated brand image left over from when they used to actually teach a few things.
Delete Duolingo.
0:33 I can’t get enough of this stuff, oul professor Loingseach dropping knowledge as usual and can’t help himself seething at the Duolingo robot lady. Fantastic 😂
I love how you know exactly how they'll mispronounce it.
Thank you for this! I have tried many times to raise this with their customer services and they ignore me every time. They used to have a native Connemara Irish speaker but they removed her a couple of years ago for no apparent reason.
I would be overjoyed if they completely shut down this course because they are contributing to the death of the language.
Please, everyone spam their customer services and social media teams to get them to understand!
I agree that they should just shut down the Irish course altogether until they fix the pronunciation issue as is definitely damages the language. Using bad pronunciation to this level would not be even remotely acceptable with other languages, imagine the equivalent but with French or German, there’d be uproar (and rightfully so)
Yes, it is a pity that they got rid of the native audio. Last time I checked there were even grammatical errors.
I can’t recall how often I’ve been reporting wrong audio ever since they swapped out the native speaker … I’ll keep on doing it
learnt in school and my pronunciation is fairly shite, wish i could learn properly >_> your videos are informative though, irish sounds so much nicer when it isn't anglicised
Listen to Raidió na Gaeltachta and to native speakers to improve your pronunciation :)
A very informative and valuable critique of the kinds of mispronunciations that are going on in Duolingo Irish at the moment. They used to have recordings from speakers which were generally better than these. These very clearly are AI generated, but a common misconception I hear from people is that the poor pronunciation results from training on non-native or L2 speakers of Irish, whose own pronunciation is incorrect. That's just not how the state-of-the-art in AI language models works, at least, in the case of under-resourced languages like Irish. Even if it were, you wouldn't expect mispronunciations that are quite this blatant to result from training AI models on the speech of L2 speakers who are any way competent in the language, so there's clearly something else going on in the case of Duolingo's Irish speech synthesis.
We've known for a long time that to produce an AI model which can generate speech from text requires a considerable quantity of data. Some of the earliest AI models to successfully produce speech may have been trained on speech data for a single language, but only for widely used languages for which huge amounts of training data was already available, or could easily be created. The type of data required for a task like text-to-speech would be large amounts of audio data of speakers matched with transcriptions of what they're saying. Not only that, but if the data is copyright protected, like you'd expect of subtitled TG4 shows for example, researchers are unlikely to incorporate it into language models for fear of legal ramifications or complications, and a company like Duolingo may not want to pay for the rights to use that quantity of data for training their models. Early AI models like these might be expected to mispronounce things if a considerable portion of their training data was mispronounced, but a sufficient quantity of freely available, open source data of this type just doesn't exist for Irish.
What I suspect is going on here is that Duolingo has resorted to using an LLM (large language model). These are more up-to-date AI models which are typically trained first to perform a task like text-to-speech using data from one or more very well resourced languages like English, before then being shown a smaller amount of data from a lesser-resourced language like Irish. They can generally learn the basics concepts of the task from working with the better resourced language, i.e. that certain letters or letter combinations equate to particular sounds. In theory this means that they can focus on just learning the specifics, what sounds equate to what letters or letter combinations, when applied to the lesser resourced language. In practice many things can go wrong with this approach, and it requires careful tweaking and tuning to achieve the best results. For example, if I'm correct in thinking Duolingo is using an LLM here, what may have gone wrong is that they trained on too much English data during the initial phase of training (specifically American English based on what I'm hearing). If so, this could likely be fixed by retraining the model using roughly equal amounts of data from several different languages in the initial training phase, then working with fluent Irish speakers to tweak the model until the final result sounds correct to them.
Sorry for the long-winded response, but I think it's important to clarify what is most likely going on in cases like this.
TL;DR - This poor AI pronunciation in Duolingo probably has more to do with the way the model was built and trained than on the quality of the Irish language data it was trained on. The problem might be solved by just retraining and tweaking the AI model a bit.
I think you are misanalysing it. Duo's Irish speech synthesis sounds like a traditional speech synthesis engine. Nothing "AI" and definitely not an LLM involved. If it were a modern AI technique, it would sound a lot better than it does!
@@nickmoore5105 I suppose it's possible that they've recently started using a text-to-speech (TTS) model, though it doesn't seem like the most likely scenario to me, and I certainly don't see any reason to think they're after taking to training older/traditional speech synthesis engines themselves. It's fairly well documented that they have used stock TTS voices in the past where these were already available, but they started transitioning to creating their own machine learning (ML) models for speech synthesis some time ago (see this video from Duocon three years ago: ua-cam.com/video/oEiKfH9WCGo/v-deo.htmlsi=mlv48VmiUSg9_YXJ ). As for LLMs specifically, they have even more recently discussed how these are now being used to synthesise characters' voices, "Every prompt gives the LLM information to make it sound like the Duolingo character you're talking to" ( blog.duolingo.com/chatbot-language-practice/#:~:text=Every%20prompt%20gives%20the%20LLM,chipper%20or%20Eddy%20sounding%20discouraged. ), though this might be restricted to their recent Roleplay feature which isn't available for Irish yet, I think. I can't find anything to suggest that they ever created their own TTS models using older speech synthesis techniques, though, and while that certainly doesn't rule out the possibility, I just don't see why they would decide to start now. Older techniques typically require more effort and tweaking on the programming side, and hence would likely be more expensive for Duolingo than just hiring voice actors to generate a sufficient amount of data with which to train a basic AI model. This is exactly what they claim to be doing in the Duocon video I linked above, getting voice actors to produce 6,000 sentences and using these to train ML models.
I don't see much reason to think the recent change in the app for Irish wasn't the result of them switching from using an older TTS model to using one of these newer ML models. This is clearly the roadmap they've set out for themselves three years ago, and it seems extremely unlikely that since that time they would have invested in and rolled out a less sophisticated speech synthesis model just for Irish. It's not impossible that the change could instead have resulted from them switching from using simple speech recordings to using an Irish TTS model for the first time, I suppose, but that would contradict the statement made in the Duocon video, "Duolingo also uses TTS. We don't record every single line that we have in the app." This would suggest to me that they must have always been using some form of TTS for Irish, and the recent change must have been a move to some other type of model - likely the ML model they discuss in the video, because it makes no sense to switch from one TTS model to another inferior TTS model when you're clearly transitioning to ML for other languages.
I don't see any reason to think that an AI or LLM should be expected to sound better than these clips just because more modern techniques are being used. Especially not if a model is being trained on very limited data. Modern AI techniques also require a lot of testing and tweaking during training to get them to sound right. Again, in the Duocon video, Dr. Kevin Lenzo discuss these challenges and how they are trying to deal with them, "To get all of the context that we'd need, we'd need about a hundred times the amount of data that we collect for this 6,000 sentences... Every one of these examples is corrected by a linguist so when we see something or hear something that's wrong in the course content, we can fix it". I don't see why Duolingo wouldn't be able to get voice actors who were at least as proficient as the original Irish voices on the app to generate these 6,000 sentences for them, so my inclination is still to assume that there is some bottleneck to improving the models, either because they don't yet have a sufficient quantity of training data, or because there simply aren't enough qualified linguists who are available to work with Duolingo on their Irish course.
Duolingo is so depressing because even I can hear how Anglicised/Americanised some of the speakers are and it destroys my confidence in the whole programme. I'd love any decent resources people could share for Gaeilge Uladh, the only contemporary one I can think of offhand is Speaking Irish.
Now You're Talking is the key thing, but I think most of Art Hughes's courses are fairly decent for learning Donegal Irish ( the only extant Ulster dialect)
@@davissandefur5980 I found the format of Now You're Talking a little frustrating but it never gave me that eerie 'something's wrong with the pronunciation' vibe, I'll return to it. Art Hughes is a great recommendation! Sounds a lot closer to the family I grew up with, who had mid-Ulster accents mostly.
Go to the Gaeltacht
@@C-on That is not a magic solution. Most people who go to a Gaeltacht do not pick up the sounds of the language. They must be pointed out and taught or all people will hear and pick up are approximations.
Also the Gaeltachts are not the Irish speaking strongholds they were in the sixties. You will not learn by immersion by going to a Gaeltacht, unless you are signing up for courses which explicitly aim to create an immersion environment for you.
Great Ulster Irish free resources at Céim Ar Aghaidh!
This is such an interesting approach to learning the language! Don't think I've heard a teacher use linguistics and vowel placement to describe how to pronounce rudaí as Gaeilge before, it's so cool!
First time seeing this channel, learned Irish in school from a mixture of Leinster and Munster teachers - (though the school was in Connacht), so we had an...interesting... mix of pronunciations by the time we got past Leaving Cert.
Would love to see more of this on UA-cam, it's both educational and entertaining. Maith thú dude.
The Duolingo Irish course is indeed excruciating, I couldn’t agree more.
I’d actually enjoy more videos like that comparing Duolingo (or other recordings) with actual proper Irish. I’d also love to see a video on Déise Irish and comparing it with other dialects.
By the way as a side note, in the Déise, broad L can be very deep, so much so that in some speakers it very closely resembles a broad gh, so lá can sound similar to dhá. Also, in Déise Irish again, in the book called The Phonology of Desi Irish, toil is transcribed phonetically as tol’ or tel’ (as expected), however the author notes that in the expression má’s é do thoil é, toil can have a broad l and the author himself refers to it as the old nominative.
Really wish a comprehensible input channel made by native Irish speakers existed. There should be some kind of government scheme or incentive to create a resource à la Dreaming Spanish so learners can listen to graded and varied content from total beginner to advanced, allowing learners to then make the jump to native materials.
I basically went from terrible school-level Spanish to being able to converse with my girlfriend in a bit over year with no pronunciation issues. I owe all of it to videos, podcasts, and books targeted at specific levels.
The problem is, most people who'd be interested in making such a thing sound closer to Duolingo than to native Irish speakers. There's, sadly, very few learners with good pronunciation of Irish.
@@davissandefur5980ah I should have said 'native speakers' instead of 'Gaeilgeoirí' (I will edit my original comment to change that). You are correct - such a resource would require native speakers, which is what I was trying to get at originally. Funding such a project would be fantastic. A few hundred hours of graded audio/video material would go a long way in making native content accessible for learners.
I think the fundamental problem is that there's a reluctance in modern Ireland to declare that there are native Irish speakers and there are native English speakers. Some in the latter would see such a description (ie reality) as an attack on their Irishness, respond that its "a language for all", "the first language of the constitution" and they're not incorrect on the latter two points. However, it is living in a state of delusion, and not owing up the brutal truth that it's not the first language of 99% of the population, just like French and Welsh aren't. There is instead this bizarre insistence on a (weak) passive bilingualism, where we'll speak English in at work, in the home, when socialising in public, hear it in all our media consumption and yet we'll somehow retain Irish from when we learned it as an L2 language at an English-speaking school in our youth. It's a laughable strategy which will never revive a language, let alone bring it back to how it naturally sounds. The saying "tír gan tenaga, tír gan anam" has never been drilled in adequately.
Like an alcoholic, if we cannot admit to the denial we're in, then there will be no way out of the rut. People need to be told (as An Loingseach does here to his very limited audience) that you're not a native speaker, your pronunciation is heavily anglicised and you will need to look upon Irish as if it were German, with all its own unique phonology, just as you already accept for its orthography (spelling). If you can work on trying to sound like someone in a Gaeltacht does, then you won't automatically become a native Irish speaker, but you will be setting up the country for a resurgence and linguistic shift towards such.
If we do get to a broad acceptance of the reality then you can be sure that such an insulting, deceiving load of codswallop will never be gracing Duolingo again. And foreign learners will no longer find themselves walking through a maze of confusion, as will their thought "why does this sound like English?" disappear.
Radio na Gaeltachta is your answer a chara, an hour long programme everyday in each of the 3 main dialects
@@conanglas3358 RNAG is great but it's not comprehensible input for learners. Look up the concept of Comprehensible Input if you don't know what it is. Seriously, there is almost no CI Gaeilge content. The closest is a few videos of people reading out children's books. It's as if the concept of CI doesn't exist in irish language education. Meanwhile I can find hours and hours of CI for other languages. People are making good UA-cam money doing it!
Haven't used Duolingo in a number of years, but I couldve sworn they used to have pre-recordings from a Connaught-sounding woman. It was pretty decent, don't know why they got rid of her :(
They did. It was a Connemara speaker and it was much better
AI fever
I've heard that dipthongisation is how native-English speakers get clocked with a lot of foreign languages. V common mistake
correct
Go raibh míle maith agat! Been using Duo for a daily quick vocab booster and general motivation to practice, and I've been deliberately ignoring the pronunciations and focusing on what I've picked up from your videos and a couple others like Patchy on UA-cam. It helps to hear that my pronunciation is a lot closer to yours than the Duo recordings, but it also shows me a lot of areas where I need to improve.
I’ve been using Irish books with English parallel translation. I’ve found it more interesting and rewarding to get the vocabulary along with a story. And often the words stick because there is some story behind them. If you’re ignoring the pronunciation anyway, perhaps consider that approach too.
Would love to hear an analysis of the accent of the members of Kneecap in Belfast
Right! would be well interesting.
Tá Gaedhilg ar a dtoil acu, gan céist ar bith.
the short answer is it's not traditional and highly anglicised
thank you for this video. As someone who tried to learn irish a while back with duolingo and rosetta stone, the moment when i realized that the pronounciation was completely wrong was like a revelation to me: so there IS a difference between rothar and rothair!
I am literally learning Irish on Duolingo , because it's the only apps on Irish I could find that matches my learning style😭 And it doesn't pronounce anything like what I learned about Irish phonology or from the videos you did on the topic. Could you do a concise video on Irish phonology and orthography? I watched your previous videos but they were a bit ✨ chaotic ✨ 😅 so it was kind hard to follow 😅
These docs have detailed timestamps for AnLoingseach's pronounciation videos. Hope they help.
drive.google.com/drive/folders/1NL7WYy958DTMMRqDGT92WfGUyDuA29Wz?usp=sharing
@@FeralWorker I just saw your comment, and WOW, this is incredible! Thank you so much! This is going to be very helpful for my study. 😄
I wish I was taught half of this in school! Go raibh míle maith agat from a Dubliner
Was using Irish Duolingo a few years ago to familiarise myself with Irish for the sake of Gael solidarity. Had visions of making it easier to converse with the Donegal ground workers I encounter on building sites in West of Scotland
Would you ever do one-on-one coaching for the sounds? It's hard to get them right!
tae is recorded with a broad t [tE:] by Hamilton in the Irish of Tory Island
This is a useful video. I never learned Irish in school, so I'm thankful for the accessibility of Duolingo, especially given that it's free. I've also used other resources like 'Now You're Talking' (available on UA-cam and worth watching purely for the retro cardigans and hairdos) which definitely seems like it gives more genuine (Ulster) pronunciations. Using these things, my comprehension has improved exponentially, but I'm aware that in order to get good at speaking, I'll certainly need to find time to attend classes and groups. There are plenty in my locality, just never seems like there are enough hours in the day.
I did this course top to bottom a few years back and while it's far from useless, i did find myself un-learning a lot of it
@@minhuang8848 ah to clarify, by "un-learning" I don't mean i've forgotten because i haven't practiced. I mean i have since learned things that directly contradict things on duolingo, mostly pronunciation and phrasing.
I’ve been working on improving my pronunciation (and aural ability because for me they’re linked). It’s not difficult to produce the proper sounds - your videos have helped. Problem for me is I can’t reject the incorrect pronunciations, so I’d treat them as being valid. It’s good to have critical videos like these.
thank you for doing this! i especially loved you showing the munster way to pronounce siúicre and le do thoil as that’s the dialect i want to learn :D
i realize more and more how similar sounding irish and my native norwegian can be at times, especially since i speak a dialect where palatalization is one of its core distinctions!
i hope you, painful as it may be, choose to do this again sometime so we can get a further look at the various ways to correctly pronounce words i nGaeilinn ;) grma!
Are you specifically learning east Munster Irish by any chance? You used the form “Gaeilinn” which afaik is only used in east Munster (Waterford, south Tipperary and east Cork).
Úsáidim duolingo gan fuaimeanna. Ní chleachtaim ach foclóir a léamh leis.
I don't even speak Irish but one of the voices sounds like an American (a non-native speaker)
there are plenty of non-native irish speakers in ireland too who make similar (or the same) mistakes
Ana-mhaith
we need more pronunciation videos: I’m still confused with words like beag, taispeáin and bord. Radically different pronunciation in different sources
Focloir has the pronunciation in different dialects; forvo can also be quite good!
Breathníonn an fhuaimniú ar an gcanúint, go háirithe le 'taispeáin' (nó i gConamara 'speáin) agus 'bord'. Tá na fuameanna de na cinn seo uilig ar teanglann.ie Éist leo ansin.
I am a Canadian who is using Mícheál Ó Siadhail’s “Learning Irish” book and recordings supplemented by some lessons Máirtín Ó Cadhain made with recordings and some other native Cois Fharraige stuff on TG4. It’s very hard to get good source material.
I tried a couple of courses online from Ireland and the most daunting thing was always asking which dialect I was going to get (U/C/M). They could never give me an answer.
There seems to be a tendency to try to erase dialects entirely from lessons out of Dublin (was able to get an answer from Galway online lessons). But it should be the FIRST THING said - “In this class we will be learning a real (or approximation) of Connacht dialect…) “
Learners should know what they are getting into.
If they want to learn, or have been learning one dialect correctly even, and they get a new instructor teaching the class another dialect it will be discouraging and confusing for the student… as experienced by myself.
I’m learning Irish on Duolingo, but I think I have quite a feeling for languages, I can hear if it is „real“ Irish or if it has that „english touch“. Even the English on Duolingo is just American English, I would not call it „English“, because then it would be BE and not AE.
I just use it to learn words and a hint of grammar, because you can not really find good material online. That works pretty fine, I fresh up my Italian(second mother tongue) with German(first), Swedish, English and a little bit of French so I get all kind of pronounciations. I like to have it all in one app. When I add all dialects I speak/understand, I can just get a feeling for what is „contaminated“ and what sounds real. You should never learn a language only from one app/book/course but get as many material you can.
So thank you so much for this vid that helps me learning better Irish, the next wunderful language on my list 😊
Dia duit, go raibh míle maith agat as an bhfíseán seo. Cabhróidh sé le foghlaimeoirí idirmheánacha cosúil liom féin botúin éasca fuaimnithe a sheachaint. An féidir leat físeáin cosúil leis seo a dhéanamh do gach ceacht? 😅 Leis an tsúil atá agat don mhionsonra, níor cheart go dtógfadh sé ach cúpla uair an chloig de do chuid ama... 🤣🤣🤣 Le gach dea-ghuí ón Astráil!
Thank you very much for clarifying this! I considered using Duo Lingo but I now understand that I shouldn’t do that. I think that maybe a non-native speaker doesn’t need to get completely accent free (but they should make an effort to get as close as possible) but at least the learning resources should not contain the anglicized version of the language. I’m not a native English speaker myself (I’m German) so apologies if I make some mistakes. But I’m always willing to improve.
Learning a language, not everyone will have the same goals, skills or growth curves and that is okay. If instead of the duolingo app, it was learners of the language approaching me with these pronunciations, I would be delighted with their using the language and praise their success at communicating, because I can mostly understand what these words are supposed to be, even without the spelling shown. But that does not mean they are correctly pronounced. This is absolutely unacceptable as teaching material or even practising material, as far as sounds go. Especially material for a worldwide audience.
P.S. Your English seems very good to me.
@@gwenbutler9687 Thank you very much! 😊 And yes, I totally agree with you about the different goals and the teaching materials. I actually hope that the man in this UA-cam video makes his own app for learning Irish which would be absolutely amazing… 🤓
As a native German speaker, you'll be off to a head start on the pronunciation of Irish gutturals which are non-existent among English speakers (including in Ireland). Think of macht, Bach, which is the same /x/ of the Irish broad /ch/. You'll also have a better ear for what is overly-anglicised, knowing which sounds are associated with each language and which aren't ie compartmentalising your languages.
@@pio4362 Is fíor sin, ach an bhfuil an 'ch' sa nGearmáinis díreach mar an gcéanna lenár 'ch' leathan féin? Níl mórán taithí agamsa leis an nGearmáinis, mar sin, b'fhéidir nach bhfuil an ceart agam anseo, ach bíonn na 'gutturals' níos láidre sa nGearmáinis, agus níos cosúla leis an mBreatnais ná leis an nGaeilge, i mo thuairim féin.
Tá an diabhail upspeak sin as Meiriceá le cloisteáil anseo freisin, mó dochar ná maitheasa atá duo lingo déanamh
Go raibh míle maith agat, a chara.
It’d be great to see more videos like this focused on correct Irish pronunciation.
Tell us more about the lenition dot and the unentomological h please
duolingo changed the speaker for the course a few months back. the old speaker was all 'acub' and 'innuv' and her war of saying 'dheathair' contained lots of new sounds for me. the new speakers sound much more english to my ears. also the new speakers often pronounce the 'f' in future forms.
Yes, they changed from a native speaker of Conamara Irish (one who, coincidentally, has won the highest sean-nós competition award in the country) to a TTS trained on learners.
Would love to see you sample Scottish Gaelic Duolingo and hear your thoughts
So far, Duolingo has left the Scottish Gaelic voices alone. It was reported a while back that Sabhail Mor Ostaig had a partnership with Duolingo - maybe that's the difference.
My favorite word in the Irish DuoLingo course is iógart...because the voice sounds like they're having painful constipation.
I love your work! Can I ask a question please. In Australia, historically Irish was called Gaelic or "the Gaelic" by speakers here. Now obviously the official way to refer to it in Ireland is "Irish", but many heritage learners in Australia don't see the official standard as being the language which our ancestors spoke and so are more interested in learning dialects (with correct pronunciation).
I was wondering, do native/dialect speakers in Ireland ever call the language "Gaelic" in English, or has it fallen out of use entirely in favour of "Irish"? As someone who was taught that older family members had spoken "Gaelic" and knowing that some convict ancestors were listed as (and sometimes punished for) speaking "only Gaelic", many of us here have an emotional connection to the name. We are constantly told off for using the wrong name online by Irish speakers though, and I was wondering your thoughts on this.
GRMMA
The language was traditionally called Gaelic in English, but starting with the formation of the Irish Free State there was a push to call it Irish, as a way of claiming it as part of the Irish identity and heritage. That's why some older speakers and disapora speakers would still call it Gaelic. Insisting on calling it Irish is more of a political thing. It's not factually wrong to call the language you ancestors spoke Gaelic, it's just politically incorrect to call it that now. Whilst it's understandable you have a connection to the term Gaelic due to family traditions, referring to it as Irish reflects the modern, post-colonial emphasis on reclaiming heritage.
@nickmoore5105 Thanks for the detailed answer. I suppose for some of us outside of Ireland who have never visited, the culture and language that was fought for in our countries was heavily connected to the word "Gaelic". We still have Gaelic clubs and classes and university courses, and access to old newspapers and sermons and such which were written when the language (referred to as Gaelic) was still being seriously suppressed in Ireland. It's a tough one because there is obviously a desire to support decolonisation and cultural identity in Ireland itself, but we don't want to erase the history of speakers of the language outside either. Both histories and lineages are valid and with almost no connection to the modern Republic of Ireland, it can be a challenge for us to conform to relatively new terminology being used there.
It's still interesting to think about and I'm sure in a generation or two, the name Irish will be used by people all over the world as the only name. I just wish (perhaps selfishly) that Irish speakers from Ireland could see self identifying Gaelic speakers and learners from other countries as having a valid claim to the name, perhaps as a separate lineage which still fought hard for the continuation of the language and culture, even so far from its homeland.
I guess the way I see it is that if a third of the speakers of the Netherlands left their country and in 200 years they changed the name of their language in Europe to Netherlandish, I think it would be hard for the decendants of those who left to stop using the word Dutch
@nickmoore5105
so cringy. Why do you have to shove your politics into everything?
It’s literally called Irish because it’s from Ireland.
@@sbubwoofer I guess I was interested as to why the name had changed from Gaelic to Irish. And the reasons were political. So his answer was exactly what I was asking for. Speaking a minority language that isn't needed for daily use in a place IS political, like it or not.
Can you do a review of Microsoft edges Irish text to speech?
Can you do a video on your own accent when speaking English? I know it's not your usual content but I'd be curious to see what you think stands out to other people, or what stands out as wrong to you when foreigners try to imitate it.
Tangential question: How is the Irish pronunciation on Rosetta Stone (the app)? To my untrained ears it doesn't sound exceedingly English, but is it good Irish?
Yeah I believe it is. The course is very short and only covers very basic things like greetings, but the audio is by native speakers of Munster Irish, if it's the course I'm thinking of.
5:23-5:30 This is EXACTLY like how non-greeks or westerners using Erasmian pronunciation treat the dipthong ει when learning Ancient Greek, pronouncing it not like a monophthong /eː/ or /iː/ but as /ey/ which is completely wrong and artificial.
That happens with pretty much every language with phonemic vowel length when Anglophones learn them - since English lacks pure long vowels, they get substituted. The thing with Irish (and I guess Ancient Greek to, for the most part, sadly) is that they don’t get corrected, so they’re not even aware they’re doing something incorrectly.
At least with bigger modern languages, the teachers will generally correct them and thus at least make them aware of what they should strive to achieve - and even if not the teachers, then native speakers will tell them at some point. With minority and ancient languages that’s more likely not gonna happen.
Thanks for this. Your consonant and vowel pronounciation videos were a massive turningpoint and help to my learning. I still use Duo-in a kind of conditional, extended way with notes, grammar research, and checking in with the teanglann audio. My fear using it now is how much of the grammar it teaches isn't correct.
Ní bheinn in ann dó seo, theilgfinn an guthán ar an mballa 😂
Ar fheabhas.. grmma
I think it is indeed AI... "sé" is pronounced as "say". Pretty sure it's "shay" in all dialects.
an í gaeilge do theanga dhúcais?
Sílim gur guth AI é.
Go diail, tánn tú ana-greannmhar agus dheinis an beart glan chun taircaisne a thabhairt d’einne agus duine eile nach iad😄
Trying to learn Irish on Duolingo, is very frustrating because there are many pronunciations of the same words...... after listening to you I'm going to need antidepressants.......😣 I have a great fear that I can read it, but will understand NOTHING if I go to Connemara.... I hear YOU sigh....imagine how we all feel now. Perhaps conversations with subtitles....speaking slowly would be a great benfit.
A Loingseach, might I suggest you open lines for viewer donations, as some of us would like to help buy you a better microphone -- all the better to hear you with.
i think a lot are ai voices
Má chuireann sé seo goimh ort fan go gcluinfidh tú cé chomh lofa is atá MS Word..
seriously duolingo is so bad
Thar bárr air fad. Tadhg
Too much emphasis on forcing students to speak from day one instead of getting the sound of the language fully ingrained in their head before they start talking. But that isn’t as easy to measure and test, so who cares! Totally wrongheaded approach to teaching language
Without taking issue with your comment, I do feel like one misses out on the glorious features that the language offers you for making long fluid statements without choking or fumbling your sounds (likely due to having been taught a much klunkier pronunciation.... Which must then be unlearned). 🤷♂️
The second blow to dedicated learners after "why am I choking out these phrases" might as well be, "I studied for a very long time and could not for the life of me communicate with my cousin in Conamara. I'll never understand this language. 💔"
Again, I don't entirely disagree with varied approaches here, but I would argue that a student that learns the sounds and pronunciation first will enjoy alot less stress and frustration moving forward. 🤷♂️
I actually find that alot of folks really enjoy learning to write in Cló Gaelach from the very start. It is a beautiful script with a rich history that still sees use today! Coupling that effort with pronunciation seems to reeeeally help some folks. ❤
I think one of the BIG problems that learners have right now, is an pandemic of "I can read and write very very well, but I can literally never simply listen and understand or be understood the first time."
I think that people learning their phonetics very late in the game face a specific hell that pronunciation savy folks simply won't. Why setup for that struggle? 🤷♂️
@@MadSc13ntist I agree with a lot of what you're saying to be honest. I think there's a benefit to learning the basics of the phonetics of a language early on, in Irish specifically for instance like broad d makes this sound, slender d makes this sound, etc. Not with a focus on being able to reproduce the sounds per se, but to be able to hear them and recognize them in context, especially when combined with reading along with a transcript of what you're listening to.
My personal approach I'd recommend to someone is something like learn the basic spelling rules, get to grips with the basics of phonetics and phonology, but don't worry about reproducing the sounds yourself early on. Focus on building vocabulary by reading a lot, and on building your ability to understand by listening a lot (starting with reading along with a transcript but eventually dropping the transcript and only using it to double check when you're not sure you've heard something correctly).
then once a high level of comprehension is achieved by the above methods, begin outputting by writing and having a native check your work for naturalness/grammaticality. Writing first because it removes the extra barrier of pronunciation. Once writing skill is achieved to a sufficient level, the student can begin the process of learning to speak by first imitating audio recordings of native speech, then by recording oneself reading aloud from a script focusing on pronunciation, and finally by doing structured output with a teacher. All the while doing a dive into the specifics of grammar and pronunciation.
I think the best thing a student can do to improve their pronunciation is have a robust internal model of the sounds of a language, so when they say something incorrectly, they can HEAR the mistake instead of having to be told they're saying soemthing incorrectly.
How would you change the Irish education system to support fledging Irish learners, Irish being a difficult language to learn (obviously learn in this case referring to the language not being spoken to a fluent level in everyday life but learned in addition to their dominant language).
Is there something of a tendency for Gaeilgeoirí to be over-critical to learners for not pronouncing things pitch-perfectly, driving learners away from the language entirely?
There's nothing wrong with native speakers insisting on correct pronunciation, whatever the language may be. When you're learning to drive, and the instructor pinpoints all your errors (as they always do), they are doing so so that you can be aware of what you're doing wrong and what can you do to fix them. It can be strict, yes, it can take practise for the right way to come naturally, yes, but that's the only way you're going to become proficient. Nobody made any promises that these things will come automatically. You're "pitch perfect" is nothing but a cop-out for laziness. Just because sounding proficient will take time, does not mean the correct pronunciation shouldn't be put in front of you and insisted on form the beginning.
@@pio4362 I'm not sure that I agree with you that there's nothing wrong with native speakers of a language insisting on non-native speakers pronouncing everything perfectly, it's not a realistic ask. I also don't agree with the driving instructor comparison, as one is learning how one should and shouldn't operate machinery that can potentially (and very often does) result in grave harm/death to yourself and others when rules aren't followed, and the other is communication between two individuals... not nearly the same stakes. Yes, the "proper" pronunciation should be presented from the outset and adhered to to the best of the learner's ability, that should be obvious. But should the end goal of learning a language to be to adhere to a certain standard of pronunciation, and if this standard isn't followed to then be considered "wrong"? I don't think so. Imo, languages are only vessels of communication, and new methods of communication are added to languages all the time (like slang and other colloquialisms that creep into languages, often borrowed from other communities or languages). Go to any other country in the world and try your best to speak the language of the people there amd I'm sure they will help you with pronunciation and even grammar whenever mistakes are made (except maybe France lol) but any Irish speakers I've met often come off as having a superiority complex or something, like if you're not worth their time if you weren't born speaking Irish and instead fought your way through the years of standard education, changing teachers every year who A. Aren't necessarily native speakers themselves and B. If they are, your teacher could be native speaker of Ulster, Connaucht, or Munster Irish, which is never really explained in the formal system to learners... which brings me back to the main part of my original comment: how can we make learning Irish better for people in the Irish education system? I would love thoughts and suggestions on that particularly
@@DanTrundle What, lol?? Do you even speak another language? Are you hearing yourself?
@@slifer0081 Yeah Japanese. Studied in classroom setting with native speaker since 2013, lived there, married a Japanese person, been speaking/reading/writing/listening to it daily since 2017. I'm not new to language learning
Why?
@@DanTrundle What is so terrifying about being instructed the correct pronunciation?! Are you trying to troll me? The analogy makes sense and that's why it has the upvotes. Why can't you understand it too? This is what happens with every language and Irish should be no different. You are making up prejudiced nonsense about native Irish speakers, without a shred of evidence, to serve as your own excuses for not learning the language or for the laughable anglicised crap An Loingseach has just debunked.
Is léir nach raibh tú i nGealtacht Thír Chonaill ariamh. Sa chéad sámpla, tá tuaimniú an chainteora go huile 's go hiomlán ceart. "Caife" = "caff-eh". Baineann an tuaim leis an chanúint. Níl Gaedhilg na Mumhan ag achan duine créid nó ná chréid!
Ceist a ritheann liom chuile uair a thosaíonn an comhrá seo faoi fhuaimniú na Gaeilge ná; céard is fuaimniú ‘ceart’ ann i ndáiríre? Agus cén uair ba cheart dúinn canúint nó creole a thabhairt ar stíl labhartha áirithe?
Tuigim go bhfuil droch-fhuaimniú i gceist nuair a chloisim ‘k’ seachas ‘ch’, easpa idirdhealú idir consain chaola agus leathana, ⁊rl., mar bhíonn rudaí mar seo ina driseacha cosáin roimh chumarsáid éifeachtach.
Ach dá mbeadh pobal ann agus tuigeann siad a chéile, nach bhfuil sé sin maith go leor? Mar shampla má tá ‘Gaeilge na scoile ó dhúchas’ ag slua mór Gaeil amach anseo, nach canúint nua (nó Creole fiú) ar an bhfód é seo?
@@johnmackenreillytag Seans go mbeidh creole ann. Ní chuirfeadh sé iontas ormsa. Ach ní hionann an Ghaeilge agus aon chreole Gaeilge/Béarla. Tá súil agam go dtuigfidh daoine é sin. Bheadh sé spéisiúil, teanga nua a fheiceáil ag teacht ar an bhfód!
B'fhéidir nach raibh sé go huile 's go hiomlán ceart, cé nach raibh an leagan Muimhneach aigesean mar an gcéanna leis na canúintí eile... Ach deirfinnse 'caifí', agus níl an-taithí agamsa le Gaeilge Thír Chonaill, mar sin, b'fhéidir nach dtuigim. Ach d'fhoghlaim mé go leor ag éisteacht le cainteoirí Uladh ó 'Céim Ar Aghaidh'. B'fhéidir go dtaithníodh na físeáin sin leat níos mó? Seo péire a thaitin go mór liom, ar aon chaoi: ua-cam.com/video/JTC1JdMNQm8/v-deo.htmlfeature=shared agus ua-cam.com/video/fc6zhuMwg_4/v-deo.htmlfeature=shared
I don’t care and you can’t make me
ipad child
Is abair.ie any good for pronunciations?