Lauren,
I have tried to start on my own Irish lessons and one thing has stuck in my craw that, I believe, has finally been remetdied.
Do you know that there are a few dialects in Irish? There is Connacht, Ulster, Munster and other regional ones as well. All of the learning material out there is in one of the three. So, if you want to learn, you need to decide on the dialect. I learned (after much expense) that Rosetta Stone uses the Munster accent. I want to study using the Connacht dialect. So, what's to do? Well, I bought all three books in the series Tus Maith ("A good start" in English). It is in the Ulster dialect. I like this series beccause, out of all of the ones that I have purchased (I have spent a lot of money trying to find a good set of books to guide me all the way through rather than going from one set to another with no internal consistency), it provides the best presentation of the language both linguisivcally a well as pedagogically (yes, I was a teacher of English for second-language learners). Now, as to the dialect problem, I am using a program called Easy Reader 2. This is a program that includes all of the three dialects (you can choose the one you want), i a word processor and, this is a clincher, one can also create lessons in it. I am noe in the process of writing all of Tus Maith into Easy Reader 2! This way I get the vocabulary growth as well as the help that I need with pronunciation all along that is built into Easy Reader 2.
I hope that ths helps you out and, should you be interested, please keep in touch.
Anísa