What is your like and dislike about Rossetta Stone?

[GentaiShinigami]

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

That is not a good way to/for me. Showing you a random word and 4 random (to you) pictures and telling you to pick which one the word is makes no sense. That should be something that happens down the line a while after you've already been taught the words to help them sink in.

If other people like that method that's cool, I'm just saying I don't, which is what the OP asked for.

[saven]

Kids...kids! Ok thats fine, some people do jive to a diffrent beat of a drum. We all learn diffrent and see things in life diffrently. But thank you for your input and honest answer.

[Kerberoz]

It's good for vocabulary.

I honestly can't think of anything bad about Rosetta Stone unless you're a moron and try to learn a language from one single source. Use multiple sources. RS + textbooks + books/movies/misc media in that language, etc.

[Drex]

That is not a good way to/for me. Showing you a random word and 4 random (to you) pictures and telling you to pick which one the word is makes no sense. That should be something that happens down the line a while after you've already been taught the words to help them sink in.

If other people like that method that's cool, I'm just saying I don't, which is what the OP asked for.

the whole point is to get it wrong so you learn what the right answer is. if you get a low score on the section, you redo it knowing the answers and get it right. once you get a high enough score, you've learned the material and can move on. then when they ask again later (and they do, at least 5 more times) you get it right every time and it's ingrained in your skull. getting things wrong helps you learn. it's not like school where it drags down your gpa; there's no penalty for getting a wrong answer in RS.

rosetta stone is really good for vocab, pronunciation, listening, and spelling, but so-so for grammar. they do give you grammar, but it doesn't stick nearly as well as the vocab because they don't really hammer you on it like vocab. you'll fuck up conjugations and some structure, but you'll get the point across well enough. honestly though, once you know the vocab you have the pieces, and putting them together in the right order becomes a lot easier.

i would say an ideal course of study would be rosetta stone + grammar sections/tables from a textbook, followed by immersion when you've got those down. the vast majority of the digs i've seen against rosetta stone have come from people who were trying to sell me something else lol. at that point, i knew rosetta stone must be pretty good.

[Byrthnoth]

Saw a presentation about this at a Tedx talk today:
http://duolingo.com/

It's scheduled to go live (tentatively) next month. The idea is basically the same as the one behind the reCAPTCHA (http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore), except with a different motivation. Basically, computers are still really bad at a lot of really useful things, like reading old books (reCAPTCHA) and translating between languages (duolingo). The idea is to provide a service in exchange for performing a necessary task. For reCAPTCHA, you digitize old books while keeping websites secure against bots. For duolingo, you translate the web while learning a language. That way it's free for the user and something useful comes of it.

The duolingo system gives out a small level-appropriate passage of the web to people, which they translate and submit. It makes a composite of their submissions and that is the translation product. Piece by piece, it can translate the web from other languages into the user's language, and passage by passage, the user learns how to read the other language for free.

The presentation boasted similar results to Rosetta Stone and translation products somewhat comparable to professionals, and the professor that was giving the talk was very legit. Sign up to be notified now and you'll likely be included in their live beta next month, which seems likely to involve translating foreign wikipedia pages.

[Kerberoz]

So, instead of putting racial slurs for the scanned word in recaptcha, you can now translate things into racial slurs?

[Byrthnoth]

So, instead of putting racial slurs for the scanned word in recaptcha, you can now translate things into racial slurs?

Probably not. This is different from a reCAPTCHA in that the computer already knows at least a list of probable word translations for each word in every passage it gives you. It can probably tell if your translation is less accurate than Babblefish, even if you somehow manage to game the system enough to mess up the composite.

Which is to say, I guess you could, but that wouldn't help you learn a language and you have no other reason to be on the site. Furthermore, they probably protect against it.

[chikalin]

rosetta stone is great for some languages, and terrible for others. it depends on how grammar and writing heavy learning the language is, as well as how innately complicated the language is. the latin one is an abomination. the japanese one didn't help me at all. (i got the third level japanese one for review (i'm close to fluent but not quite) and it was on par with a 200 level college course i took.)

for languages like spanish or french, rosetta stone can be a godsend. no matter what, though, rosetta stone is not going to make you fluent. immersion is the best way to go about achieving that, but, if you can't, it's going to take more studying and variation than rosetta stone can give you.

[Odesseiron]

I used RS for a while for Spanish. I learned a good deal, but in the end was too lazy to stick with it.

Also, who the hell buys RS anymore with torrent networks? You can get like 50 languages in one torrent. Piracy Schmirachy.

[Xerlic]

Has anyone here used Pimsleur? If you have experience with both, how does it compare to Rosetta Stone?

[bungiefan]

Level 3 Rosetta Stone is basically enough to give you ability to talk as a tourist. Levels 4 and 5 teach you enough that you're supposed to be able to live there for extended periods, and those levels don't exist for most languages yet. Level 3 Japanese was only added in Version 3, Version 2 only had 2 levels for most languages. Non-Roman languages are limited in how well you can learn them since the writing systems are not explained at all, and there's no writing recognition.

For Japanese it seems to be good as a supplement to keep me in practice and learn some new vocabulary, but I still need my grammar dictionaries and kanji tutorial books to hammer some of this stuff into me.

That is not a good way to/for me. Showing you a random word and 4 random (to you) pictures and telling you to pick which one the word is makes no sense. That should be something that happens down the line a while after you've already been taught the words to help them sink in.

If other people like that method that's cool, I'm just saying I don't, which is what the OP asked for.

The idea is that it's an immersion method, like how you first learned words as a child. You don't learn an English translation for the word, you learn to associate it with an idea, a mental picture. This is especially true for concepts which have no English word. The first lesson is starting from nothing, but once you learn a few nouns and adjectives to start, they start introducing more. You start out with a boy, a girl, a cat, a dog, a horse, a car, and a plane. Once you've figured out those words, combinations of objects start entering the mix, then prepositions describing those combinations, and also colors to describe them. Knowing one word, you can make a an educated guess of the new word, and you're not supposed to use your native language at all. Classroom learning works with translations, which tend to be slower in your mind, because you get in the habit of thinking in your native language once you do the conversion. RS is supposed to help you learn to think in the language you are learning, which leads to better fluency.

However, with pen input on a computer being something that isn't standard, I haven't seen many language programs work with writing instruction and recognition. Rosetta Stone doesn't even provide Asian keyboards for you to do the writing composition exercises with anything but Roman letters. It's great for languages that use Cyrillic and Roman letters, but Asian support is lacking a bit, as I imagine Hebrew and Arabic are.

[Viq]

However, with pen input on a computer being something that isn't standard, I haven't seen many language programs work with writing instruction and recognition. Rosetta Stone doesn't even provide Asian keyboards for you to do the writing composition exercises with anything but Roman letters. It's great for languages that use Cyrillic and Roman letters, but Asian support is lacking a bit, as I imagine Hebrew and Arabic are.

This is actually not true. The Korean RS provides hangeul keyboard for the writing bits.

[bungiefan]

They must have fixed it then, or it hasn't been present just for the Japanese I've been using.

[chikalin]

bungie, have they come out with 4 and 5 in japanese? i got 3 a few years ago, i haven't checked since. xerlic, i don't have personal experience with pimsleur, but i've heard great things about it from someone that disliked rosetta stone.

[bungiefan]

Every place I see selling version 4 only has levels 1-3 for languages, except having levels 1-5 for German, English, Spanish, and French. I'll have to check their sit ein a bit. Version 3 is the last I have usage experience, and it's annoying becuase of the registration code and online verification. I bought version 2 discs in DC in 2004. Version 3's lessons haven't been very different for the time I got to use it selling it at a retail store. I quit before version 4 came out.