Dia Duit: All About Irish Rosetta Stone Online

Rosetta Stone online offers the exact same Irish learning experience that you’ll find with the packaged Rosetta Stone software. There are, however, a few major differences in implementation. The packaged Rosetta Stone software can only be installed on one computer at a time, but you can use the software on that one computer anywhere you like, with or without an Internet connection.

Rosetta Stone online, on the other hand, can be used from any computer--but you have to have an active Internet connection to use it. You also have to renew your subscription to Rosetta Stone online on a six-month or yearly basis, which means that subscription fees can add up quickly. A one-time subscription costs less than the packaged Rosetta Stone software, but by the time you’ve renewed it once or twice you’ll end up paying more than the one-time packaged software fee.

The rest of this article will focus on what it’s like to learn Irish online with Rosetta Stone. Click here for a more in-depth comparison of the features of Rosetta Stone online vs. installed.

Rosetta Stone online: Irish opens with a cheery greeting in Irish, dia duit. This phrase literally translates to “God save you”, but I didn’t learn that through Rosetta Stone. I had to look it up in a dictionary. Rosetta Stone teaches with the idea that associating Irish words and phrases with their appropriate concepts is more important than memorizing English-Irish translations by rote. As a result, you won’t see the Irish words you’re learning translated into English--ever. But who really needs a translation when pictures are worth a thousand words?

Rosetta Stone doesn’t think you need it, and I have to agree. When “a do” pops up on the screen with a bright letter two beneath it, I don’t need to see “two” spelled out to understand what a do means. Especially not when it’s surrounded by other Irish word-number pairings. This is contextual learning at its best. While it may be frustrating at first to learners that have come to expect old-fashioned rote memorization of vocabulary, this method allows you to connect the proper images directly to the right Irish words without having to use your English vocabulary to mediate. You begin thinking in Irish--albeit rudimentary Irish, just like a child--right away, and as the lessons progress so does your level of comprehension and the complexity of the language you’re learning.

And you can always tackle rote memorization later, if you just can’t live without it, in order to expand your vocabulary.

While the Irish version of Rosetta Stone online starts with simple, concrete words and concepts like boy, girl, drink, water, run, sit and so on, it manages to build on previous lessons and cleanly transition through more complicated concepts like here and there, near and far, time and possession. Leaping forward from one level to the next is an exercise in frustration, but if you stick with the lesson progression and don’t skip around too much, you’ll find that by the time Rosetta Stone steers you to that level you previewed, it will have provided all the building blocks necessary for you to be prepared. It’s obvious that a lot of time and thought has gone into the design of this learning progression and, even better, it works exceptionally well.