- 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.
When in doubt, turn every consonant to "H".
this was really interesting!