Rosetta Stone

[kenshinbebop]

Anyone ever try this program...it's highly acclaimed, just wanted to know if there were any success stories here?

I'd try it myself if it weren't fer the price...
I could DL it...?

[The Million Dollar Prons]

Don't buy it if you buy it I Will kill you.

Why will I kill you?

Well learning a language needs to be done in bits of pieces.

If you were learning english wouldn't you like to learn the words I, want to, and then vocabulary? So you could make your own sentences, like: I want to go to Japan? I want to eat dinner? I want to buy a newspaper? I want to listen to the pillows?

Also, do you think words like "hello," "how are you," "Do you speak English?" are important? Rosetta stone doesn't.

Rosetta stone feels like it was made on a shoe string budget, it has some nice features but the only time I've ever gotten any use out of it was for languages I already had an intermediate understanding of.

Every tract begins with teaching you words like this: boy girl dog cat car airplane man woman horse elephant ball.

Then it teaches you "There's a boy on a table," "There is a cat and a car," "The car is old," "Is the red car old? No it's not" but it doesn't really teach you anything about the grammar. So let's say you learn from rosetta stone and then you wanna make your own sentences, well you're screwed. It's actually more of a guessing game than anything else, I find it's really hard to retain language bits this way because you just remember which pictures to chose.

So what is rosetta stone good for?

Well for one it has a voice recognition thing that corrects you punctaiton but I've never used it. If you're using an asian language like Chinese and Japanese it will let you look at the romanized version AND the kanji\hanzi versions so you can learn how to write and read them. If you're using the korean russian or vietnamese versions they're all written in the authetnic language. It also helps because you can hear the language.

It's also got a multitude of features but they all fall short of being actual lessons.

Also they're culturaly wrong. What I mean by this is, there's no Elephants in China. If you're in Japan wouldn't you rather learn words like tea and sake rather than milk and orange juice?

It also doesn't introduce words to you, they don't tell you exactly what they mean. This can get really confusing when you're learning Japanese and it gives you something like this:

ピンク色の車は新しいですか?
いいえ、それは新しくはありません。

Eventually you'd learn to chose the pink car. But would you know what "iro" means? What atarashii means? What iie means? What soreha is?

To be fair I've never bought rosetta stone so I don't know if it comes with documentation you need to read before using it.

If you're learning japanese you could just buy a book, I'm sure there's books that come with CDs that'll teach you as much if not more. Go to the library and look at some, you could even look on the internet.

Notes: I've used Rosetta stone in Korean, English, Vietnamese, Chinese and Japanese.
Note2:Rosetta stone costs 250 dollars a unit. Granted the units are pretty big, but as I said before unless you supplement it with something it's going to be hard.
Note3: Rosetta stone claims the FBI and CIA use it, but I doubt it. Because I know our foreing agents know more than "The woman in the blue blouse is playing a piano and singing."
Note4: I've only used version 2 as most langauges haven't upgrated to rosetta version 3 yet. Because all the languages I just mentioned haven't as afar as I've known upgrated to version 3. So maybe version 3 was revolutionary new and exciting.

You could DL it and you'd probably like it if you supplement it with stuff that's more useful.

[Fobb]

To contradict Prons there, I've heard a couple success stories involving Rosetta Stone.

[Hara!]

If only there were an easy way...

[Leader Desslock]

I don't really have a lot of use for the Immersion Method of teaching languages.

The Immersion Method is based on two simple ideas. The first is that people are simply afraid to look like idiots in front of other people, and they won't speak out (and learn) if they're not forced.

This idea is perfectly valid. The Immersion Method does inspire people to more readily try and fail, then hopefully learn from their mistakes.

The second idea is: "Hey, children learn how to speak without being taught grammar. Humans just have that ability. So we don't need to muck about with all that grammar crap, we just need to speak the foreign language around people, and they'll pick it up naturally."

This idea would be valid if everyone was still two years old, and they were being raised in the environment of the second language. Small children have an enourmous absorptive capacity for this sort of information. They also have a lot of time on their hands. Time enough that if you start at age two, after four years of immersion, they'll be able to speak the language at a six year old level.

Unfortunately, that capacity diminishes very rapidly with age, which is something that programs like Rosetta Stone don't take into account. If you're old enough to have a job that can pay for the purchase of Rosetta Stone, it probably isn't the most effective method to use.

For me, the Immersion Method just doesn't work until after I have an understanding of the language. I need to know enough of the language to figure out the patterns I'm seeing. If I wanted to take a French refresher, the Immersion Method would do nicely. I could probably get by in German or Italian.

For me, I'd take the Grammar Method over the Immersion Method any day.

[The Million Dollar Prons]

So Desslock, I don't suppose you're a fan of those "instant immersion japanese" tapes that thought you could sublminally learn japanese if they said the English word and had the japanese word echo in the background either?

[Leader Desslock]

^ Not as such.

[kenshinbebop]

Alright thanks guyz. The demo was just as you said. It taught me boy, girl, man, woman, and red apples.

Maybe I'll check out the For Dummies series. :D

[Shiroiyuki]

So Desslock, I don't suppose you're a fan of those "instant immersion japanese" tapes that thought you could sublminally learn japanese if they said the English word and had the japanese word echo in the background either?

Even I don't believe in those such things. If I did, my sister would think she was a forty year old man named 'Stevie', wear her underwear on the outside of her clothing, and shave her head.



Why not just take a class or two? Check your local college to see if they offer any Japanese Language courses. Usually, if you are a resident of the area, you will be subject to a discount (not much, but a discount nonetheless).

The best way to learn any language is to surround yourself with native speakers (not to mention study partners to test/increase your skill), to practice (a class would give you incentive to do so, since if you don't study you don't pass), and to have someone checking your progress. That way if you are weak in areas, you'd have help. Live help.

[Tidusauron12]

Well, when I started to take Chinese, I studied from the For Dummies book on Chinese...

It didn't help much. A little, but not much. :lol:

It was much better when I just called my teacher and spoke to her in Chinese. Overtime it got better, and now... well, I can have at least basic conversations in Chinese. If you study from some book or something, and don't practice saying the stuff (like, actual communication), it won't help you very much.

[germanturkey]

i've used the chinese version of it a while ago. for what came from it, its above average.

[Old Ape Face]

My cousin in law tolled me something very interesting about learning a new language, What is the incentive of using a language if you're never going to use it?

I'm saying this becuase people who hang around other people who speak the language are more fluent in that language then say someone who only learns it in a class room. If this program is like hanging out with people on a day to day basis in which you are exposed to the language first hand in the open world, then by all means it's worth it.

[The Million Dollar Prons]

Maybe I'll check out the For Dummies series. :D

The problem with this is it doesn't give you the actual Chinese and japanese characters if you're doing those. At least it didn't in the versions I checked, remember they update the for dummies books once in a while.

My advice? The lonely planet books but they may have too much content for you but they'll teach you just about anything you know, here's whats in my LP manadarin book:


Introduction\History of the language
pronunciation
INtroduction to grammar (and in the mandarin chinese book there's a page about tones but japanese isn't tonal)
Counting, describing, conjugating, etc. etc.
Questions, this, there, where, here.
Expressing wants and needs, counting. (The Chinese people use a different finger counting system than the English speakers do, the LP book has a page about this)
Calander Money
Transport, Passports
Shopping, bargining, etc.
Phone
Banking
Sight seeing
Business
Senior and child travel
Social, greetings, titles, making conversation, talking about family and jobs, interests,a long section about music, movies, expressing feelings, talking about political and social issues (Too bad LP tends to neglect that you should never ever say anything about Taiwan to a mandarin person ever), talking about where to go (It even has instructions about how to ask where the gay bars are), dating, drugs (I hear the thai LP book even says how to ask for clean syrongies, the mandarin one's section about drugs isn't that impressive), romance, dating (even teaches you how to say stuff like she's a *****, and he's a stud) pick up lines, rejections, sex, safe sex, cultural differences, words about every sport ever even ones chinese don't play (read: Golf),
list of every food you'd ever want
health, safety,
mini dictionary

The price for this book was 8 dollars, and the most recent edition included the Chinese, the romanized chinese, and the english. I'd almost say every word you'd ever want to know is in this book, some of the translations are a little loose (It says "I'm still young" means "I'm younger than I look). If you ever go to a book store take a look at the one for the langauge you wanna learn (they make 'em in every language), and see which edition it is. They update these things every few years and make them even better, for example the korean one is getting a new issue soon.

Whatever you do don't download though, the Japanese Lonely Planet book on the torrent sites is from 1988. IF they update these books every three years that means you'd be reading one that's over 10 editions old.

To contradict Prons there, I've heard a couple success stories involving Rosetta Stone.

I had sucess with it too. By putting the words it taught me into a dictionary and picking them apart myself. But if I were to pay 255 dollars for something I'd want it to teach me without having to use an auxilary dictionary and asking my comrades to help me.

[Jia]

From what I gathered from the conversation **may be unrelated** -
I find it better to learn from people or books rather than a computer to learn languages.

[Scandiadream]

Sadly, my library system does not offer it anymore through our website.