the Irish patois. Then we're going to give you some cultural references to study and some drills to practice. Soften your vowels When the Irish make fun of yanks, it's generally by elongating their phonemes and turning their vowels into long sounds, kind of like the way most Americans make fun of Texans. In fact, if you want to imagine how you sound to a European ear, just think of your stereotypical 1800s southerner. That's you. Eww, right, time for a change. Perhaps the best example of how vowels in the Irish argot are softer is contained in the schoolhouse recitation of the alphabet. American kids begin it "ay, bee, see . . ."; Irish kids begin it "ah, bee, see . . . ." Let's begin with perhaps the first phrase you'll utter in your Irish disguise: "How are you?" That's should come out: "Ha-ware-ya?" Oh, and just as a general note applicable to all our phonetic guides, don't separate the syllables into separate beats - slur it all together like natives: "Hawareya?" So from an Irish mouth, you'll hear far less differentiation between the very distinct "o" sounds of "how" and "you." The both sound more like "ah" than they would from an American larynx. Also note that in this particular example, the "a" in "hawareya" is actually long, like the "a" in "bake." That's because the pronunciation of the "a" is generally the reverse of the U.S. accent. For another example, the word "****" in Irish (meaning