Great to hear that you’re having a go at the Manx and that you are enjoying it. There are some big differences between Manx and English although they might not always be obvious at first. Differences such as starting with a verb: Ta Bob goll - Bob is going; mutations etc etc. Some structures can be more Gaelic or more English in their structure: I can play tennis could be: Foddym cloie tennis or the more Gaelic Foddym tennis y chloie.
Don’t worry about that though, just enjoy saying ta mee geearree loayrt Gaelg rhyt!
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One more new Manx thing - a new iOS app! I’m looking for a few beta testers, so if you are interested, drop me a PM (or just say so here!).
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Just sayin’
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Hey there Manxies - three new challenges were just published 
Enjoy!
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Yes, Mike, there are adult learners there now, and a Manx-immersion primary school. Small numbers, but grounds for optimism. Some of it has Tynwald funding.
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Hi, Just having a rather half-hearted go at the Manx, and feel that I probably should report back for anyone who might be listening. I hope not to be too boring. I’ve staggered through the first 6 challenges in a couple of evenings, trying not to pause the tape, (done it twice, and found it hard to restart it, so got instant punishment!) and refusing to go back over anything, with the result that quite a lot of the stuff remains gobbledygook to me. I’m finding it very hard to retain some stuff, and to hear other stuff clearly. I’ve had a sneaky but very brief look at the transcripts but they didn’t look as though they’d help much - I’m assuming the written forms don’t correspond too closely to the spoken sound, though they look a little less intimidating than the Scots Gallic place-names. Is there a consistent, established orthography in Manx?
I guess I’ll eventually go back and look in detail at the transcripts, but for the moment I do want to test the system to see if it works as prescribed. Past training and experience says look at the phonetics and grammar of the language, too, don’t waste time knitting fog, but for the moment I’m willing to suspend disbelief. And it’s certainly the case that some of the sounds which remained inchoate initially have gradually coalesced into something which may or may not correspond to accepted Manx language. But my memory is pictorial rather than aural, and I think my memorisation process is probably very slow, except where I can see a resemblance to something familiar which makes sense, or I just like the sound. Consequently, I find the lack of a decent pause after each phrase an impediment to memorisation. One of the pauses was to try and capture ‘surprised’ or ‘surprising’ but I’d have needed a lot more repetition to get closer than where I am now, with something like ‘tayirigissen’ (Please don’t tell me, by the way, if you’re reading this and feel sorry for me! Let’s see if it just sticks in the end). I suppose the fact that you always have the English cue is at least a stress-reliever - I know I imposed a lot of unintelligible Spanish phrases on unsuspecting victims in my language classes in the past, and I’m sure it choked a lot of them off, and I regret it, though I did it innocently.
Where mnemonics suggest themselves as a help to recovering the sound of a word or phrase, they don’t necessarily help to recover the sense. So ‘some licorice’ (or ‘samshigirish’?) may mean ‘thank you very much’ or it may mean ‘goodbye for now’ - I know it’s some kind of ‘fixed phrase’, not as it happens ‘thank you very much’, which I think is’ garam (as in garam masala) my mored’ (as in the name Mared). But that, too, may be mistaken…
I had a brief go at Dutch a few years ago (Apologies to Lewie for giving up so early) and I don’t think I would ever have worked out the meaning of some of the phrases without having them spelt out to me (Was there one about a slice of bacon or something?), and I fear that Manx will be even more difficult, being linguistically more remote from anything I know. But this is an experiment, so I’d better desist from the grammar books for now.
I can see some resemblances to Welsh, e.g. in sentence structure (verb first), lexically ( ‘tigl’ meaning ‘deall’/‘dallt’ ) and a possible m/v oscillation due to mutation, but there isn’t a lot of help there. Or from English, though I hear the word ‘just’ at one point. But yes, thank god, this is not ‘immersion’. We have the key to meaning.
When you don’t pause, do you make some kind of sound in the gap almost all the time? Watch out for absolute blanks - too many of them (which is what happens when people who don’t adapt to ‘no pause’ keep on regardless) is clearly an impediment.
Otherwise, looking forward to trying to remember some Manx with you, and discussing this visual/audio memory thing… 
Am answering almost all the time, but frequently only catch up when the answer is being given - sometimes with the help of the answer itself, but often I just need more time to dredge up the answer, so I’m ambushed by the answer before I can get my caca together.
Would be useful to try and speak a little, though available topics are strictly limited so far, of course. I keep looking at the signs to Heysham, where the boats for I o M leave from - only 4 or 5 miles from here - but not really practical to go over there. Anyway, home this week.
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Damia - I’m on an intensive this week… But should be here pretty consistently from then on for a good while…
Sounds promising with the speed of speech - I’ll call round some time for a listen to double-check, if you’d like…
Mwynha’r cwrs dwys, a chroeso mawr iti alw draw, san shigirish.
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i SHOULD HAVE SAID EARLIER, Adrian’s voice is really soothing and natural. We know it’s pure professional flattery, but it still has a very positive effect. Thanks, Adrian!
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Welllllllll… most of the scripted prompts are based on what we can deduce from the work that people have done… so if someone skipped straight to, say, Lesson 12, then those comments would be deeply untrue - but anyone who’s done the hard slog has got real stuff going on, and we can be really very sure about that…