Software Review: Gair Wrth Air

QaQ Software, a small publisher of language study aids, recently gave me the opportunity to evaluate their product offerings for the Welsh language. There is already a handful of comprehensive CD-ROM language courses out there for Welsh learners; QaQ Software has provided, rather, a set of tools to help learners review and expand their knowledge in conjunction with a teacher or a course.

QaQ offers an interactive dictionary and phrasebook, which I will be reviewing next month, as well as Gair Wrth Air, or Word-by-Word Vocabulary Trainers which help beginning and intermediate students with reviewing and expanding their geirfa through examples, games, and quizzes.

The Gair Wrth Air program is text-based, which works in its favor (and endears itself to me!) by taking up very little space and running very quickly on a PC. The only major drawback to this format-and to the software itself--is that there is no accompanying sound to help directly with pronunciation. Hence, using it concurrently with an in-person language class, a CD-ROM course, or book/CD combination would make it most helpful for those who need pronunciation help. This is really the only limitation to the program in my opinion; many people learn better by hearing the vocabulary words at the same time as reading them.

Aside from this, however, Gair Wrth Air is a very nice, very simple program that presents both vocabulary words and common grammatical structures in short, phrase-by-phrase "mini-lessons" within each chapter. Each "mini-lesson" shows a highlighted word or phrase used in the context of a sentence, and prompts the reader to first pronounce the word or phrase being focused on, then shows the Welsh side-by-side with the English.

The user then is asked to translate the English into the Welsh, and the Welsh into the English, prompted to visually and mentally review the phrase a few times before moving on. At the end of each chapter, the user is quizzed on the vocabulary learned, using games such as hangman, as well as multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions. I felt that these were not particularly challenging as a form of quizzing, but they did provide a useful review before moving on to the next chapter.

The navigation through the software was easy and self-explanatory, using a small menu of keystrokes. It was possible to scroll through the chapters by chapter title, or by looking at an overview of the contents. There are 160 chapters of about 15-20 phrases/words each, divided thematically-this makes for a nice and extensive vocabulary list for the beginning or intermediate student. Chapter themes include a wide variety of the usual basics for conversation and daily life: writing a letter, discussing politics or school, pets, colors, giving directions, and so on. A nice thing about the way the software is set up is that highlighted words help those just learning vocabulary to pick it up, while those more advanced can review not only the highlighted words but the sentence structure as a whole.

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