Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Irish Complete Course, CD package

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I used this system as my second attempt to teach myself Irish, but like the previous course I followed, this one failed me. There are lots of exercises and cute culture notes in each chapter, and the vocabularies are decent. However, this book lacks thorough grammar explanations. Once I got into the 6th lesson, I was having questions about different usages that the book simply didn't answer. It tended to brush over most grammar points to teach you the absolute basics.

This book is good for a tourist who wants to spend a few days in an Irish speaking area, but is terrible for the serious student.

If I was planning a short vacation in the Gaeltacht and made a decision to use Irish as much as possible, this text may have sufficed. Peculiarly, in some ways it seems to treat Irish as one might treat Chinese, Russian or Italian. One has to have a very specific interest in Gaeilge in order to want to use it in Ireland, as there are effectively no monoglots, and this book does not lay out how its students ought to utilize the text in order to embrace the Irish language in the unusual state it is in.

One of the things I cannot get past is the pronunciation guide. Unthorough and confusing, I found myself continually frustrated at not knowing how to pronounce the words as I continued with the lessons, even though I went through the pronunciation guide (with the CDs!) three or four times.

Next, how does one treat the chapters? Memorize each dialogue? And there is integrated grammar, but it is presented then forgotten in the exercises. Simple grammar features had me baffled, which I felt should have been explained. I am not a linguist, but I certainly understand language structure and terminology, so why do I still find Irish as illusive and vexing as ever?

I give it two stars because it could be useful if you are visiting a Gaeltacht and want to have a stock of memorized phrases at your disposal. Or maybe it is just not suited toward how I learn a language. I have tried to milk everything I could out of it, and I even bought "Teach Yourself Irish Grammar" as a supplement. Hopefully I will have more luck with "Learning Irish." I am not giving up though. The Irish language is truly worth all the headaches it gives. Rath Dé oraibh.

Perhaps I just learn differently, but for me, this set does not work. For one thing, the c.d. has people shouting off Irish words in such quick succession that there is no time to repeat what they are saying. I suppose this cd could be useful if a person played it while they slept, but it is not a good program for those who learn languages by repetition.

This book is lacking in numerous ways, but its major problem is how it gives vocabulary notes. Instead of trying to explain the grammar and listing each word separately, it gives entire phrases (sometimes even sentences) as individual vocabulary items. How are you then supposed to use individual words? I guess if you're aim is to learn "useful phrases" for the purposes of travel, this book would work for you, but for an active understanding of how to speak productively, you're going to have to look elsewhere.

I have learnt more than a dozen languages by myself, including Hebrew and Norwegian, and I can assure you that this is the worst self-learning book I've ever come across. Although Gaelic is very difficult to pronounce and written in a way that makes French spelling look easy, you wouldn't believe how complicated the first dialogues are and how quickly the people on the recording read the words and sentences right from the start.

I was completely discouraged and since the overall presentation is awful and ugly I threw the book in the dustbin in no time. Learning a language in the 21st century should not be a torture, methinks.

Don't waste your money on this manual.

This is definitely not a book/cd for the first timer. I was hoping for a few "good morning", "how are you", etc to help me become familiar with the language. Unfortunately, the CD goes almost straight to short conversations. I did read the reviews before placing my order and decided to take a chance. Wrong decision.

Even if I had some experience with Irish, the CD is useless without the book and will do me no good listening to it while sitting in traffic. I'll have to find another CD to get started with and save this CD for later.

As for the book, it has a wonderful pronunciation guide - but does me no good since I need to hear the words, not just read them.

I bought this only a few days ago, and already I understand a great deal about Irish grammar! This product doesn't only show you how to speak it, but write it as well. If you don't really read the book, and just try to wing it with the audio, it can be confusing. So, read the chapters and listen to the audio. You'll get it in no time!
I've tried other products to learn Irish, and this is the best.

I purchased the book/cd package. While the dialogs inside the book are decent, the audio CD was a total disappointment. I would have been better off listening to Irish on the radio because the beginners' CD doesn't bother to break down the language; it starts at about sixty miles per hour and doesn't get any better. I accomplished more with a Hippocrene phrase book that didn't have a CD. I've learned three foreign languages and for each of them, the student is taken through steps; we learn the pronunciation of the vowels, consonants, and blends, which the Hippocrene book did. Then the student is given simple phrases (eg "What time is it?") at a slow or moderate pace, and we continue to build on the given theme. This "Teach Yourself Irish" is definitely the worst language course that I've encountered because it does nothing right.

This is quite possibly the worst language system I've ever encountered. The very structure is awful. The CD is a single repeat (meaning you are constantly replaying it to hear the words again) and doesn't cover all the exercises, but skips over whole sections. The pronunciation guide is both long and nearly incomprehensible (and, once again, the CD runs through the words way too fast, not giving you time to repeat them and still follow along in the text). The grammar is cursory and there are errors in the answer-key, still, you might be able to pick out a few rote phrases if you are determined.

I highly recommend both Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone. Also, if you are interested in Ulster dialect (there are three major dialects of Irish), the BBC offers a FREE language course which will teach you basic phrases right on their website.

I would be highly impressed by anyone able to actually 'teach themselves' using just this series of language books.

Irish is by no means an easy language to learn and I struggle with it. I couldn't do it at all without the audio portion of the course. I did not give 5 stars because I have nothing to compare it to.