Rosetta Stone: Welsh Explorer

Rating:
Summary: Only For Beginners
Review: I really like the set up of the Welsh Explorer. I would recommend this to anyone taking a welsh class or working out of a textbook. The drawback is that when used alone the meanings can become ambiguous and confusing. I've been using it along with the BBC Catchphrase lessons and found it very helpful.

Rating:
Summary: Very Useful and Helpful
Review: I really like the set up of the Welsh Explorer. I would recommend this to anyone taking a welsh class or working out of a textbook. The drawback is that when used alone the meanings can become ambiguous and confusing. I've been using it along with the BBC Catchphrase lessons and found it very helpful.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent, First Rate, Wonderful!
Review: I've been learning Scottish Gaelic, Irish and Welsh in the past five years and I've looked at quite a few methods and curricula. This is by far the best. Not only is my comprehension much improved, but the time needed to learn the language is reduced. It's also much more enjoyable than any other method I've tried.

Rating:
Summary: A good starter
Review: This is an excellent starter for those wishing to learn welsh. The focus is on learning one of four ways; visual, sound, written or any combination. The lessons are layed out well, a could be understood by someone from the age of 6 or 7 and up.

Rating:
Summary: Only For Beginners
Review: This software is helpful if you don't know any Welsh at all. It gives you a significant amount of vocabulary, mostly things you'd use in everyday life, like man, woman, dog, cat, numbers from one to ten, verbs like walk and run, and colours. It's also excellent for learning pronunciation, which is one of the hardest parts of learning Welsh (especially if you're American). However, it doesn't explain anything, and once you get into the grammar section things can get very confusing. I used Gareth King's grammar & workbook in conjunction with this which did help some with the grammar. It also doesn't say whether it's using North or South Welsh dialect--I think it's North, which isn't so good, because most of the places worth visiting are in South Wales so you'll have most opportunity to learn that dialect. Another problem with it is that it uses pictures for you to match with the words (you can also match written text with sound files, but that's not so useful with Welsh because it uses the English alphabet) and the pictures never change, so it might be easy to remember that bara is 'bread' while you're using the software but not so easy when you come upon a loaf in real life that doesn't look like the one in the picture.

I'm not sure why this won awards. Maybe if you're trying to do immersion, learning quickly, and doing nothing else it's easy to learn a language from this software, but it doesn't really help for someone just trying to learn the language for fun. This version only comes with the first two sections of the course, and you have to order the rest separately, so I'd say it's probably not worth your time.