Those of us learning Irish without a native Irish Speaker have this common
problem. I've been studying since 1996 and have started taking the Buntús Cainte
course to be a little more consistent with my own pronunciation. Of course, I've
also started the Progress in Irish course which is a little more advanced (but
still review for me).

Of course, when we learned to speak English, we learned one way of pronouncing
things, and that became our "standard" English. In my case, my family moved from
Ohio to Indiana, and Daddy told us, "Now I don't want you to start talking 'Lahk
them heauzhurs,' now, ok?" I was only five and not yet grounded in a "standard"
pronunciation, and I think that's why I'm such a mimic of accents. I learned it
didn't much matter how I said what, people would understand me.

I'm told the same will apply to Irish. You'll have an accent, and they'll know
your "from off," as they say in another state in which I've lived. But they
should be able to understand you. I greeted friend of mine from Dublin, "Cad é
mar atá tú?" which is common in Ulster. She understood me, but said, "You might
more correctly say, 'Conus tá tú,' and left it at that. The last time I spoke
with her, she understood my curious mix of Ulster and Connacht just fine, though
I did have to repeat myself on occasion and even reword things a little. I do
the same in English, because not everyone in the mountains of Western North
Carolina can understand my Ohio/Indiana/Virginia/South Carolina mix.

As to the transportability of lessons from Easy Reader, I don't know, never
having tried to do anything that ambitious with it, yet. I do know that it will
import an RTF file really easily, provided the formatting isn't too complex. I
haven't tried to export anything, yet. I'm fairly new to using ER.

I hope this rambling helps.

Slán agus beannacht,
Liam

--- In easyreader_users@yahoogroups.com, "CoolBaybeeBrat" <anyse1@...> wrote:
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> I am going to work independently to study Irish and I am going to take all of
my own lessons and work them into EasyReader (to be called "Irish for Life" this
spring).
>
> As of yet I do not know about the transportability of lessons written in Irish
for Life and I am hoping that, maybe, someone out there can work with me so that
I can learn how to do all of this and then to pass it on to others.
>
> P&#225;ric and I have been talking about my own frustrations with learning
Irish as it has been more than difficult to collate materials from one place to
another. The MAJOR obstacle is the dialects! One program uses Manx in their
recordings, another Connemara and another Ulster and so on. There is absolutely
NO continuity at all. Most other languages at least have what one would call a
"broadcast" standard, a sort of one size fits all in order to more efficiently
facilitate the learning of their language by other language speakers/learners.
However, this is not so for Irish at all. I have even been told that on RTE, in
the same news program, one can run into all dialects of Irish throughout the
program. How can I, in learning Irish, try to have some continuity in my own
learning as to dialects if I am learning from a broadcast different words in
different dialects. We would never allow someone to learn English with 5
different regional dialects mixed in a single sentence; however, those learning
Irish and gaining new vocabulary are doomed to this same type of dialect
"mixing." If Irish is ever going to be "saved," it also has to have internationa
appeal as well and, of course, with this lack of centralization of the Irish
language, it would seem to be a problem even for those who are natives! How do
they handle this in the schools and what happens when someone moves from Donegal
to Ulster?
>
> Just throwing this out there in the hopes that someone may know of a station
on the internet that has "standard" Irish or only one dialect upon which I may
depend.
>
> To be honest, this has set back my learning of Irish over 9 months. I need to
know sources that I can use that will be "consistent." Any ideas are welcome!
>
> Thank you all so much.
>
> Anyse
>
> Anyse Joslin
> 505 10th Street, #33
> Sacramento, CA š 95814
> anyse1@...
> 916 443.2541
>