This weeks podcast on dialect was extremely helpful! Trying to read these stories for me was a pretty huge fail in all honesty, but after I listened to the two stories in this podcast it felt like Uncle Remus' dialect was finally making sense. As I followed along reading as the podcast played I came across word after word and sentence after sentence that I never would have understood without actually hearing it. Hearing this choppy incorrect words put together in a flowing, informal smootheness really helped me understand what was being said. It just shows that simply looking at certain words/sentences isn't enough. You have to go beyond just looking to fully grasp unfamiliar dialects. Pat also offered good advice in his blog, stating that "Sometimes it requires all the tricks you learned in grade school: context clues, sounding it out, etc..." Something as easy as listening to the words, sounding them out aloud, and using context clues makes a huge difference in whether you understand the context or not.
I'm glad to hear it, Stefanie. This is the first time I've tried to focus this heavily on dialect before we got to Huck Finn, and it looks like people have found it very helpful. In Huck Finn, we'll see written representations of similar stories -- we'll hear one character telling someone else a story, with the listener interrupting to ask questions. I'm glad that your reading of the Uncle Remus stories gives you a good exposure to the format.