I'm going to review a program I discussed a
while ago and then completely forgot about:
Blas. As I mentioned in the original post, the website and program seems to be solely in Irish (the website does have an English option, but the blas page doesn't exist). The program is designed for teachers teaching students at the "second level", which is roughly equivalent of American High School.
It starts out with the introduction (a lesson 10 recording comes first, for some odd reason, though). This is mostly for the benefit of the teacher, looking over it, and it asks the students to pick out words they hear in a recording, and includes a short questionnaire about how well they can differentiate and make the sounds, as well as some attitudes towards the sounds they have. This would be great to have with a highly fluent teacher, though I do admit to worrying about how it would go over with learners who don't think there's any difference between English sounds and Irish ones (I know people who claim they need to speak Irish exactly like they speak English because 'my accent comes from Irish'), or with teachers who don't understand themselves. But, if you get honest students, it could be a really good starting point to see where they are.
Then you reach the lessons themselves, which are very useful. It has a conversation between two or three people, generally covering the dialects. All three are used, with one person speaking each one. It then brings a 'sound in focus', and explains about it, especially sounds that are different than English. This is mainly a palatalized sound, or a sound that doesn't exist in English (for example /x/). There are several practices with this, and it asks you to distinguish minimal pairs, matching them with the correct sound, or, in lesson 2, saying if the word is the same or different. It also often includes diagrams of where to place the tongue and such, something else that is very useful. I personally find this a great way for practicing picking up these sounds, and it's similar to Gabriel Wyner's system, if I remember his correctly.
On top of the student's book, there's also a teacher's manual and notes for the teacher. These both contain answers and some more information about the sounds. This makes it useful to students who are studying alone, as they can use the teachers manual without needing a teacher. Granted, a knowledge of Irish is needed as everything is in Irish, but this is still useful. I would recommend this to anyone who is teaching a class in Irish, as it can be a great way to really get the sounds of Irish imparted to learners, and it's also a great way for learners who have trouble distinguishing the sounds. I'm definitely going to be including this in the future, if I teach Irish or work with learners, and I might incorporate it into my own study of Irish, since I'm currently working on getting my pronunciation down pat.
I'm also going to include how I would use the book.
First, I would listen to the conversation, without looking at the transcript. I would also try to transcribe it out on my own, which shouldn't take too many repetitions as they're fairly short (at least early on). Then I would compare my transcription to the official one, and listen again while reading it. Then I would listen once more without reading. This is the same method I recommend using on
Vifax, which uses clips from NuachtTG4 (which often includes interviews with non-natives, so Blas might be better).
Then I would read the discussion in the student's book to learn more about what they want to draw your attention to. I would tentatively look into the teacher's manual and the teacher's notes over that section to see if there is any additional information about it, though I would be hesitant because I don't want to ruin the answers to the questions.
I would then do the first practice, repeating it as many times as needed until I felt comfortable and confident with my answers. I would then check my answers, and, if any were wrong, I would listen until I could pick them out and get them right. Make sure everything is pretty much understood before moving on. Then read the information between exercises, and repeat. I would probably do a lesson a week, unless I had more time, and go over them at least twice to stay in practice.
This needs to be done in conjunction with watching TG4 and/or listening to Raidio na Gaeltachta. I hesitate to recommend TG4 even, as there's a few presenters on the show who don't have a good command of Irish sounds. I would recommend avoiding the other radio stations while doing this, as they often don't use native speakers (or "natives" who were raised by learners with no interaction to natives in the Gaeltacht) and they often make the kinds of mistakes the book is trying to correct.
Along with this it's made me want to create a website of minimal pairs, as well as testing a user on each of them, for the dialects. The design of the website won't be too hard, but I'll need to get recordings. I've found a good list of minimal pairs (for consonants) in three main subdialects - Carraroe, Gweedore, and Corca Dhuibhe - so I now need to find native speakers to record them for me and get the website up and running. This could easily be on the same page as another website I did I was suggested a "slot machine" of Irish, where it gives you a verb and two nouns, leaving the user to create a sentence out of them (to be used in conjunction with a teacher). I might get on those as it wouldn't take but a little Javascript to get them both done, though part of me wants to overkill it and use Python instead.
