What is your like and dislike about Rossetta Stone?

[saven]

So i've been going on day 4 with Rosetta Stone - French vol 1 and so far its wonderful. I'm sure most of you would say it doesn't have the "best" teaching habbits for we people to learn, but I seem to endure and enjoy it naturaly and relaxed. My question is what do you dislike -First- and like about it secondly? Has it helped you somehow in life or not? Looking forward to what BG people have to say! Ps..no trolols welcomed who flame or bash please. Thank you!

[Daydreamer]

I've used it for various languages and from what I did with it it was fantastic. Honestly I stopped going because I just didn't have the motivation, but after getting a German degree over the course of my college years vs Rosetta Stone I can say I was retaining the information a lot more quickly with Rosetta Stone.

I'm not actually sure if I've seen anyone that actually took the time to finish the first full level complain about the program. Most people just expect instant results or something.

[noblemountain]

Nothing beats immersion, but RS is a really good program to get a base to build off of. It won't work for everyone...but I enjoy using it and it isn't near as boring or repetitive as some programs out there. Taking college courses can be good, but it's all based on how good your teacher is and how much of a crap they give. With all the internet resources out there, practicing your language with native speakers should be really easy. You can voice chat with people almost anywhere in the world now.

[Ksandra]

what do you dislike -First-

wut?

I have never heard someone bash RS, it's pretty much the language program, and def can be more effective than even classroom learning.

Friend of mine got his for free because he did some stuff for the army for a bit, so I use the English one for some of my ESL students. Helps a lot.

[Talus]

Who bashes Rosetta Stone?

My sister bought the 3 different levels or whatever to refresh her French. She took 5 years of it (1 middle school, 4 high school) and then a year in college, along with a semester abroad in Lyon. She said it was helping out a lot, because she's planning a trip over there, and was kind of amazed at how much she had forgotten. That's pretty valuable considering she's 35, and the last time she formally took a French course she was like 20. Thumbs up.

I've never formally used an entire level of it, I did see the trial version for Turkish and the method seems to make a lot of sense (show picture, word, hear short sentence, etc).

Immersion of course is the best way to learn a language, for two reasons, 1) it's a necessity to function, a sink-or-swim situation, and 2) you don't hear your native language as much in an immersion environment, so you can focus more on learning the new language. However, that being said, some people definitely have an easier time learning languages than others, and children and adults have different skill sets that make learning languages easier for different reasons (children = blank slates, adults = already know the grammar rules of one language, so can extrapolate to similarly-structured languages easily, like learning Italian when you speak Spanish and English already).

I think the main beef with the basic Rosetta Stone is learning the grammar. With time, you can learn the conjugations and which gender applies to certain nouns (why is the word for "ship" female in so many languages? Who knows).

[Atreides]

yeah, Rosetta Stone is very weak on grammar, often choosing to put off teaching grammar until much later in the program whereas college-level language classes will start teaching students the basic grammar rules on the first day. I noticed this with Rosetta Stone too when I tried my friend's French version, right off the bat I got the basic concepts but I would have definitely appreciated an explanation of the usage of some of things like rules for pluralization or gender.

Having studied about 8 combined years of it, I can safely say there is very little substitute for college-level language classes, especially if they meet 4-5 days a week. Short of immersion you're not going to learn as much from anything, Rosetta Stone included. Rosetta Stone is good for learning the basics and learning them fast so it's great for something like a trip, but if you're trying to really understand why you're saying what you're saying then it's going to disappoint you.

[Senoska]

I worked for a language company that was a direct competitor to rosetta stone except ours was in a browser. That would be my main criticism. Fuckers took mah monies.

[Hyan]

So how exactly does it work? Does it bend to letters as well? I need a program to help me teach the kun-yomi and on-yomi (plus compounds) of kanji's, would this be a good method?

[Atreides]

no, if you want to learn how to read japanese make flashcards from a good dictionary. Learning to write asian languages is nearly impossible without lotsssss of repetition.

edit: the Kodansha's dictionaries (there's 1 for japanese-english and 1 for english-japanese) are pretty great, unless you're talking about mostly kanji in which case you should really plunk down for the New Nelson's Japanese-English Character Dictionary

[chi]

Most of my experience has been with the Japanese version. I don't really have any complaints aside from the price. It's not going to teach you how to write, but I don't think they advertise that it will.

My advice is that if you start from scratch and don't at least know how to properly read romaji, learn it. Many people will say it isn't necessary, but I find it's more effective to learn basic phonetic pronunciation before starting Rosetta Stone. And find a different program to teach you to read Japanese. It's not worth learning if you're kanji illiterate.

But even if you don't bother with that, you'll figure things out eventually if you're motivated.

[Senoska]

So how exactly does it work? Does it bend to letters as well? I need a program to help me teach the kun-yomi and on-yomi (plus compounds) of kanji's, would this be a good method?

Kanji is more than just the ability to read; With the ability to read you must also have the ability to write or your learning is going to suck. To look up kanji you need to know stroke count (and by proxy, order.) as well as radicals which Rosetta stone wont cover. Rosetta Stone is basically a vocab teacher and thats about it.

[Hyan]

I'm using the Heisig method to learn the writing and recognizing the Kanji, so that's taken care of. I'm just wondering how to proceed once I finish that (to learn the spelling and all the meanings).

I was thinking of using Anki(flashcards), I guess RS isn't a good alternative then?

[Ksandra]

RS is more focused on the speaking and listening part. There are Kanji sections, but if you just want to build your writing knowledge base then flash cards are going to be the way to go.

[Hyan]

Hm, sounds good for later practice then. Thanks.

[Obev]

Rosetta Stone gets better the closer the target language is to English. If your target language has strict S-V-O syntax in the Latin alphabet, you're good. If you've got loose S-O-V in a bastard 2000+ character hybrid of East Asian calligraphy, it's less useful. It's never a substitute for real immersion or a personalized one-on-one lesson with a good language teacher though. Using it to refresh my Spanish, I found it useful for vocabulary, but fairly hit-and-miss for grammar. In no situation have I, or would I, ever use Rosetta Stone as my only port of call for language learning: dictionaries, wikipedia entries for the language itself, and the myriad tools for language learning found on the interwebs are just as if not more useful.

I seem to remember that Rosetta Stone used to have a marketing strategy that made linguists the world over raise their palms to their faces. Something like "learn language the way a child does," which would be fucking great if your brain as an adult was as flexible and receptive as a child's, or if you weren't bringing the bias of a lifetime of language use to your study. Might've been Rosetta, might've been some other language company, but my internal bullshit detectors raged hard at that one.

tldr: good for vocab, meh for grammar, more "meh" the further from English you go. Not a substitute for actual study, but a decent helper.

[saven]

Very yummy replies here! But all I wonder about is will this be a great start to mastering RS all levels for a beginner like me? This and college class's 3-4 times a week should do the trick? No?

[Viq]

My experience with Rosetta Stone has only been with Korean, and I can echo some of the sentiments that if your native language and the language you want to learn are structurally different, then it's little more than a vocab builder. Also, having lived in Korea for the past 7 months while taking Korean classes for 20 hours a week, immersion is absolutely the way to go if you really want to learn a language. RS + college classes won't teach you half the things you would learn spending a weekend with some friends that speak your desired language as their native language.

[saven]

Great! I will take that into my learning steps and try to hook up with a french instructor first before I go making a fool of myself with some person that is french purely.

[GentaiShinigami]

I tried the first Japanese one (seemed the be the first one I could find...), but it started out too advanced for a fresh student. Asking me things from the very start like pick out the picture of the 4 that corresponds to this certain word, but hadn't taught me the f'ing word yet... How am I supposed to do that lol? So no, for me that ended up useless. I really hope there was just a missing part, but even if there was I liked the "My Japanese Coach" on the DS more for the more basic stuff. XD Actually taught me to write it, and it just jived with me better than RS did as far as how it was taught. I'm sure it probably goes nowhere near as advanced as RS though.

If I went back to it now knowing more after reading other books and using the other program (therefore knowing a lot more of the basics of Japanese) I think it'd be fine though. I just didn't get much use going in knowing practically nothing. Other than that gripe however I felt the program was fine.

[Viq]

That... that's how it teaches you the words...