Irish Gaelic from Rosetta Stone
Mar. 30th, 2008 10:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tmcgRosetta Stone has finally added Irish Gaelic as one of the languages it offers instruction in, and at all three levels, which is great. I did Italian Levels 1 and 2 online and Japanese Level 1 with the old-version CD-ROM, and it's a terrific and effective way to learn a new language.
I haven't tried the new version--I'll post an update once I have--but the old version was fantastic and I trust that the new one improves on it, so I highly recommend Rosetta Stone to anyone who's been wanting to learn some Irish but has no access to local instruction and has been frustrated trying to work with teach-yourself books and tapes. You used to have to download software to try the method out, but that's no longer the case, and the demo is here. The lessons are pretty addictive, and as fun and absorbing (to me, anyway) as FreeCell or any online Flash game.
It's not cheap, but it's reasonably priced and competitive with other language-learning tools and classes, and the cost should be deductible as an educational and/or software expense for writers and editors. If you're self-motivated and a fairly fast learner with a broadband Internet connection, an online subscription is the way to go; you'll probably zoom through Level 1, and Level 2 has the material you'll need to start usefully communicating. I'd just started Level 2 Italian when I flew off to Italy, and I did pretty well with my month's intensive study, but when I got back and finished Level 2 I found myself learning everything I sorely lacked when I was there (how to ask for and understand street directions, for example). "Oh, man, if only I'd gotten this far," I said partway into every Level 2 lesson. You don't need to own Level 1 on disk unless you'll be working through it very slowly, you'll want to have it available for years for starting-overs and brushing-ups, and/or you be working primarily offline. For me, all three are true of my Level 1 Japanese (especially the working-through-it-very-slowly part), so I'm glad I bought that on disk, and I'll be buying all three levels of Irish Gaelic (least expensive place I've seen it so far is Amazon), but the online subscription suited my needs perfectly for Italian, and I'll be using it to dabble in other languages and refresh my fading Spanish and Latin in the future.
I recommend getting a good basic grammar book to go along with any Rosetta Stone course. It helped me with both Italian and Japanese, at any rate, because I can soak up a great deal intuitively, but there are times when I like to have the rules laid out for me (and I needed a lot of ancillary materials to help me with the reading aspects of Japanese). Máiréad Ní Ghráda's Progress in Irish is a wonderful book we used in class at the Irish Arts Center, and since it's good to have a dictionary, too, I suggest Foclóir Póca.
I haven't tried the new version--I'll post an update once I have--but the old version was fantastic and I trust that the new one improves on it, so I highly recommend Rosetta Stone to anyone who's been wanting to learn some Irish but has no access to local instruction and has been frustrated trying to work with teach-yourself books and tapes. You used to have to download software to try the method out, but that's no longer the case, and the demo is here. The lessons are pretty addictive, and as fun and absorbing (to me, anyway) as FreeCell or any online Flash game.
It's not cheap, but it's reasonably priced and competitive with other language-learning tools and classes, and the cost should be deductible as an educational and/or software expense for writers and editors. If you're self-motivated and a fairly fast learner with a broadband Internet connection, an online subscription is the way to go; you'll probably zoom through Level 1, and Level 2 has the material you'll need to start usefully communicating. I'd just started Level 2 Italian when I flew off to Italy, and I did pretty well with my month's intensive study, but when I got back and finished Level 2 I found myself learning everything I sorely lacked when I was there (how to ask for and understand street directions, for example). "Oh, man, if only I'd gotten this far," I said partway into every Level 2 lesson. You don't need to own Level 1 on disk unless you'll be working through it very slowly, you'll want to have it available for years for starting-overs and brushing-ups, and/or you be working primarily offline. For me, all three are true of my Level 1 Japanese (especially the working-through-it-very-slowly part), so I'm glad I bought that on disk, and I'll be buying all three levels of Irish Gaelic (least expensive place I've seen it so far is Amazon), but the online subscription suited my needs perfectly for Italian, and I'll be using it to dabble in other languages and refresh my fading Spanish and Latin in the future.
I recommend getting a good basic grammar book to go along with any Rosetta Stone course. It helped me with both Italian and Japanese, at any rate, because I can soak up a great deal intuitively, but there are times when I like to have the rules laid out for me (and I needed a lot of ancillary materials to help me with the reading aspects of Japanese). Máiréad Ní Ghráda's Progress in Irish is a wonderful book we used in class at the Irish Arts Center, and since it's good to have a dictionary, too, I suggest Foclóir Póca.
