blas. – Celtic Languages

I am not hearing any audio phrases when being drilled on listening, though the app itself is making little accomplishment noises, so it isn’t muted. I chose to learn Cornish, and since I have some Welsh under my belt it is easier to guess answers, but the interface is clunky for finding the “lesson” portion (rather than the drills) to start as a pure beginner. I had to use a reply from these reviews to even realize where to start. Morre hand-holding is needed for learning the app’s interface. It also begs too much to start a “premium” plan, and the grammar explanations touted appear to be locked behind this paywall. It is not intuitive nor easy to use for a pure beginner. I am working on Celtic languages specifically, I had high hopes that aren’t yet satisfied by Blas.

Even though there is the option to start as a complete beginner, I felt that the lessons did not teach enough information to follow the practise drills unless you already knew some Irish. For example, the lesson would teach you the word for ‘house’, but the practise drill would be ‘how do you say “the house is at the top of the hill”’ even though you haven’t learnt any of those other words or even the basic word order of the language. I also downloaded the app because of the Celtic-language-specific features like spelling lessons, but those assume you have lots of vocabulary already, which is difficult to learn if you don’t understand why they are spelled the way that they are. I was really excited to try this app but I just found it frustrating because I could not find the information I needed to do the exercises.