I’m sitting here listening to Raidio na Gaeltachta live on-line. Great music (there’s a nice little waltz playing right now, and the whistling’s grand!), and a good chance to hear Irish spoken fluently too! This link’s probably been posted here before, but what the heck:
You’ll need “RealPlayer” to listen in (free…there’s a clickable at the site), but it’s worth it. They also have back “issues” of programs that are worth a listen.
Agh! Don’t anyone download RealPlayer, it’s brutal! Go get JetAudio’s free download instead. It plays real player files without all the ads and junk that comes with RP.
Amen to the brutal Real Player. I had a brand new system, no bugs, and mistakenly put the latest version on. Crash, crash crash. Even when Real wasn’t being used. What a mess. The older version, eight I think, is ok. But the latest one is one of the biggest messes I’ve seen put out. I thought the AOL software was bad…
Plenty of virii that do less damage than Real.
Well, use whatever works. The trad music is generally pretty good. Some of the other programs can be fun too…I just finished listening to a children’s program that had little interviews with the kids interspersed with them performing (a couple of them on the whistle…and man, did they ever tongue every note! What are they teaching them in those Gaeltacht schools these days? ) It was fun to listen to because the repetative nature of the questions made the Irish a little easier to follow (but only a little!), and because it was such a kick to hear the odd English word break in amongst all the Irish (one kid’s favorite TV show was The Simpsons: “Homer agus Marge agus Lisa agus Bart agus Maggie!”)
If you get SCOLA, catch the Philippine program. The Tagalog is generally pretty staccato, but they use a suprising number of English words, and they generally come through with excellent American accents, which really makes them stand out. This is very different from English words used in Japanese, which are often unrecognizable to the inexperienced listener. My son and I like to just sit and listen for the English. The words that occur in English are often pretty surprising, too.
) It was fun to listen to because the repetative nature of the questions made the Irish a little easier to follow (but only a little!), and because it was such a kick to hear the odd English word break in amongst all the Irish (one kid’s favorite TV show was The Simpsons: “Homer agus Marge agus Lisa agus Bart agus Maggie!”)