A Review: EuroTalk Talk Now! Celtic Languages for Beginners

The Word Practice section is quite straightforward, though it varies slightly across vocabulary topics. Basically, there is a list of words in English (or the medium language you have selected) which you click on to hear. One excellent advantage of this program is that there are two native speakers voices recorded on the program, one male and one female. So when you click on it the first time, one speaker says the word, but if you click it again, the other speaker says it. You can do these one at a time, or you can listen to all of the words in succession. I found this a bit fast in many cases, but not always.

The Speaking Practice section is the most interesting. The format of it is the biggest strength of this software: you can record yourself speaking the vocabulary terms you are learning, and then listen to that recording and compare it to the original version on the CD. The program offers two options: either you can hear the word first and then repeat, or simply produce the word upon seeing it in the base language. Then, you play the recording, and the original word will be said, followed by yours. This may seem a trivial thing, but it isn't. You will be surprised by how useful this really is. Your own speech sounds quite different from inside your own head. I used to think my pronunciation of many words was terrible, but after listening to the recording, it isn't so bad after all. It's not perfect yet, but it's getting better as it is much easier to correct it when I can compare mine to the native speakers' directly.

The next two sections, Easy Game and Hard Game, are primarily for testing your knowledge, but the format definitely encourages learning from your mistakes. Again, the exact format of these both vary by vocabulary topic, but the basic idea is that they give you several of the vocabulary terms from the topic, then repeat one of them and ask you to select it. For the Easy Game, this is four items. The Hard Game generally deals with more vocabulary at once, and it does not start off with saying all of the vocabulary words. For both the easy and hard games, you can have the word repeated.

There are a few other perks on the CD. There is an additional game, in which you can choose the level of difficulty and the vocabulary topic. This is a memory game which progressively increases the number of vocabulary items you have to remember at once. Another benefit

Go To Page: 1 2 3