In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, Rosetta Stone language software is offering a free week-long trial of their Rosetta Stone Irish language tutorials. All you have to do is register online, and you will be able to access the tutorials for free through March 19th. I was interested to give this a whirl, because I know people who have tried the software and liked it. The neat thing about Rosetta Stone is the approach it takes – you are shown photos featuring phrases in your chosen language, and as you walk through the program it helps you intuitively figure out the meanings, as opposed to doing traditional translation. For example, the Irish tutorial shows a photo of a little girl with the words “an cailin”, illustrating easily what the phrase means without translating it into English.
To use the free trial, you may be prompted to download a small piece of software in order to use the voice recognition feature; alternately, you can choose not to download anything and use the Irish tutorial without the speech function. If you have a microphone, I highly recommend the speech feature – the computer says a phrase in Irish, and then prompts you to repeat it. It will ask you to repeat the words until it recognizes what you are saying, and will then allow you to move on to the next phrase.
If you are interested in learning new languages and would like to see how Rosetta Stone works, this is a good opportunity to try it out free of charge. If you would like to register, you can get more information by clicking here.
