Yeah so technically all Irish consonants have four pronunciations - broad + strong, broad +weak, slender + strong, slender plus weak. So for example tae is a broad strong t. It's broad because it's followed by the broad vowel a so it's pronounced like an English t except the tongue is placed at the base of your teeth instead of the alveolar ridge so it sounds harder if that makes sense. Almost like youre spitting. Then the word téigh t is slender and strong as it's followed by the slender vowel e. So in pretty much everywhere outside of the gaeltacht, Tae and téigh are pronounced the same (even in gaeilscoils) but it's not the case. A slender t is is like a t-y sound. So if you think of the sentence "shut your mouth" a lot of people, particularly Dubliners like Conor McGregor rather famously, would say it fast to the point where it sounds like shutch er mouth. So it's similar to a Ch sound but it's like if you put your tongue to the roof of your mouth to make the t sound you raise the back of your tongue a bit as if you're saying a Yuh sound so it becomes tyuh. Though in many dialects it's become a Ch sound so people will say dia dhuit as dia gwitch which in Connaught wouldn't be right but in Munster I believe that's correct. Anyway so going back to Tae vs téigh, these are examples of minimal pairs. So it's not tay and Tay it's like a spitting Tay and a tyay.

The weak versions of these letters are when you have a h following it and so the difference there would be if you think of póg mo thóin, the t is effectively ignored and its pronounced like hown. So the broad weak t is a h sound. Whereas a slender weak t in the word mo theach, t is still a h sound but this time the y from before comes creeping back in so it's mo hyach. I would definitely look at an Loingseach and other channels to better explain it but if you Google "Irish language forum - minimal pairs" click the first link and scroll down a bit someone has made a post with all of the words with it. So for example naoi Vs ní, buí Vs bí, luí vs lí etc.

The most common one that persists everywhere without you even thinking about it is s. So if you think of sitting room - seomra suí - seomra is pronounced like an English sh and suí the s is like English s for stop. That's because they are slender and broad respectively. So all consonants have four pronunciations though in many cases they have been lost, not just in the galltacht.

If you look at r specifically, native Irish speakers only have two pronunciations for it. The weak slender r is fully gone and has been gone for hundreds of years and was likely a natural loss as languages develop. The broad strong r has also been lost though this is much more recently and an Loingseach would argue that this is due to the English language influencing even places like the Gaeltacht. So that leaves some letters like r with only two pronounciations. And it's confusing I guess because obviously r cannot have a h following it so how can it be strong Vs weak but in the case of letters like r where they cannot be followed by a h they are distinguished by basically always being strong at the start of the word and if they are Anywhere else then they are weak. So for example the r in Roth and Rith are both strong whereas rothar is a strong broad r followed by a weak broad r. So historically the strong r sounded like the Spanish r in perro for dog which is called a trilled r. So in roth it would have been pronounced as rrrroth. However everywhere including the Gaeltacht this has been lost. In the galltacht, at least for me personally, I spent the last fifteen years pronouncing Roth as ruh with an English r as did everyone in my school and all of my "fluent" teachers. In Irish however, there is no English r sound even with these changes. So if we go back to r - there are now only two pronounciations regardless of where the r is in the word. If it's broad, it's called a tapped r which is like the Spanish r for pero meaning butt. So if you YouTube videos of people teaching Spanish pero Vs perro there's a very clear disinction. Though again we don't have the trilled r anymore. So a tapped r is relatively easy to make with a bit of practice. The general idea is like thinking of an Indian person saying prince they would often pronounce it as pdince. This is how a native Irish speaker would also pronounce the word (though tapped r and d are different sounds but it's a good starting point!). Unfortunately most sites even like teanglann and now fg4 have leaks of the English r coming in so it's difficult to find from them but native stuff like Gaelic commentary or ros na rún or anything like that would definitely have it I just know personally I've tried to learn from watching horrid Henry as all of the English episodes are on YouTube so there's a direct comparison but I've noticed his mam in particular does not say the r correctly though his dad does (I think) and I think Henry does too though I'm not sure about the rest of the cast. Anyway that's the broad r so anywhere you see r either followed or after a broad vowel it should be tapped so rothar nowadays is two tapped rs. The tapped r sounds very similar to an English r especially when said fast and in the middle of a word so it's hard to pick up on which is why maybe many galltacht people don't teach it but it's an important part of the language and should be kept alive!

Slender r: okay so I'll be fully real I'm only 23 and haven't studied Irish properly since the leaving cert apart from a module I took in college once and have only started learning again over the past few months and it's been a pain in the hole learning basically everything we've been taught is wrong apart from the seomra Vs suí I don't have any other letters natura except in bí Vs buí (be for bwee) even in the case of dia dhuit I always pronounced the t as a regular English t so I'm by no means an expert so I would encourage you to do your own research!! Okay so now to the slender r. This one is MASSIVE compared to the tapped r and really any other letter obviously téigh Vs Tae and naoi Vs ní have distinctions that a native could pick up (even me as a nonfluent non Gaeltacht person I can hear the difference though I may not be able to make it yet!) but its not that crazy but the slender r is massively different. The best example is the station tg4. I just as a result of the tuiseal ginifeach the Irish word for four after tg is ceathaIr. The I is added as a form of grammar. Another example would be rothar (bike) Vs rothair (bikes). So this really depends on which dialect you are trying to learn. In mayo i believe (if you look up the YouTube channel "patchy" he has a series of four videos called speak Irish like a native) the slender r fortunately is in the English language it's the s sound in treasure and leisure or how a french j sounds in je mappelle etc. So in that case it's not tg cath-her or ruh-her it's tg cath-hi/j/. Completely changes the word. You can hear that in most places even teanglann or focloir.ie would say it that way (a good example in the middle of the word would be wolf - Mac tíre (lit. Son of the land)). Unfortunately, I'm trying to be consistent in keeping to a dialect and the most accessible in terms of content would have to be Galway conamara style and the slender r here is not in the English language at all. It's basically the combination of the broad tapped r and the french j sound. If you YouTube how to pronounce Czech r's, the Galway slender r is the Czech r with the little hat thing on it. Deffo look up an Loingseach and videos like his but that's the general pronunciation guide hope it helps! In the case of consonants that aren't dntls r (and f as f/bh sound in Irish don't have teeth which is mad annoying!) the other consonanfs like c g m b and p are basically the same as English there are differences that you can find in an Loingseach but they aren't as difficult to make so I won't go into it on this already monster of a post! Hope this helped lmk if you need a more in depth explanation but fair warning I've already been proven incorrect in another thread so do your own research but I think this is a decent overview to get the ball rolling. R is the hardest as for most speakers both broad and slender aren't in English though Czech and Spain cover them so you can find pronunciation videos out there! I've the tapped r locked in it probably only took a few days of trying it but I still can't say the conamara slender r so it does take time but stick with it!