- Hey everyone, Benny Lewis from Fluent in Three Months
here, and as you may know, I'm an Irishman.
So that means that I would love to
encourage you today to learn the Irish language.
And whenever I talk about this with people,
they always think it must be hard,
because of when you see Irish words, they look so weird and
they're pronounced very differently to how you'd expect.
So, today I want to make it a little bit
easier for you, and I'm gonna go through
the rules of how to pronounce Irish words.
Okay, so the first thing to keep in mind
is that the Irish language is phonetic.
And that means once you learn the rules
of how each letter or letter combination is pronounced,
you can literally see any new word in the language and
know how to say it, even if you've never seen it before.
So let me walk you through these main rules
to help you get used to that, okay?
So the first one is the vowels.
You have the same vowels A, E, I, O, U, and these are
pronounced kind of like they are in English.
But as well as those, you also have long vowels, which we
use the term fada after them, so, like, A fada, U fada.
And these are just elongated, for instance, you might see
the name Tomas, and that has the ahh sound after it.
In general though, single vowels are pretty straightforward.
So next, you have the consonants.
So all of these consonants are essentially
the same as they are in English.
So let's look at the ones that are different.
Now you know the way in English when you have
the letter C, sometimes it's pronounced
like an S if it's before an I or an E?
Same rule applies to French and Spanish
and other languages, and sometimes it's a hard K.
In Irish, it's always gonna be a hard K.
And that gives you words like the name Cian.
But in Irish, we do actually have that thing where
some consonants change before an E and an I,
the most famous one being the letter S.
So, before E and I, it has the shh sound
like in Sean, Seamus, or Sinead.
And then otherwise, it's exactly
like in English, just an S sound.
So, back to vowels, and this time
when you have two of them together.
So AE is pronounced like "ay", like in Maeve.
IA, we saw "ia" like in Cian, and those aren't too bad.
But the trickiest one to remember is AO
because that's pronounced like "ee".
It's the oddest one of the bunch, I know.
But once you know the rule, you're good to go.
That gives you words like Aoife.
Otherwise, in many cases when you see two vowels together,
it's often because of this way of transitioning between
two ways of saying consonants.
Now you don't need to worry too much about that,
except for the fact that this rule means that
one of those letters is not going to be pronounced.
So in these words here, the letters in red
are not going to be pronounced.
And that gives you Ciara, Padrig and Oisin.
Now, the last thing that might throw some people off
is a feature of Irish called lenition.
And it's actually a really nice part of the language,
it helps the sounds of words flow together nicer.
But, the thing is, it creates letter
combinations that might throw you off.
The good news, though, is they all have
one thing in common, the letter H.
So just keep a couple of more pronunciations rules in mind,
when you see these letters with the letter H after them.
It's not as bad as it looks, so for instance,
SH and TH both have the same huh sound,
like in English, the H, so that
gives you words like Cathal or Blaithin.
PH is the F sound, like in English or French,
and FH is silent, but looking at the tricky ones,
CH is the guttural sound, that you might know
from the word loch, and DH and GH could be
a similar but kind of different sound,
which you would know from the Irish way of saying hello,
dia dhuit, so don't worry too much about that, though,
because in names, they tend to have
the much easier Y sound, like in Tadhg.
And finally, depending on the dialect,
you might have W used in some cases,
but for names especially, B and M,
you'll hear them with the V sound,
so that gives you Niamh and Siobhan.
And that's pretty much it, it takes some getting used to,
but you can see how these rules would apply
for when you see something new,
like, for instance, the leader of the Irish government
is the Taoiseach, which you would know
from the rules I just went through.
Now, I know it's not easy, but it's
way more consistent than English is.
I actually made another video of me showing
how ridiculous English phonetic
and pronunciation rules can be.
So I hope that by showing you a small number of things
to keep in mind, you might find that Irish words
are that little bit easier to pronounce.
There's a little bit more to it than what I gave
in this short video, so make sure to click here
for more info on learning Irish if you really
want to get into it, and otherwise, check out
this playlist of videos that I've made in Irish.
And if I've missed anything, be sure to leave a comment.
Thanks for watching, Slan agus go raibh mile maith agaibh.