Nowadays, learning a language on the computer is all the rage. More and more people are buying products like Rosetta Stone or subscribing to online services such as Mango Languages. Are these products really worth the money though? Let's face it, most people struggle to afford the higher end language products such as Fluenz and Rosetta Stone. It's rather hard to justify spending about five hundred dollars on software that you're not sure will work for you, but, it seems to work for everyone else. Let's take a more in depth look at Rosetta Stone and see exactly what it will and won't do.
Rosetta Stone is currently in its forth version and the price for its complete Latin American Spanish language pack is (at press time) $479.00. One year ago, when I bought it, the third version sold for the same price. I have asked Rosetta Stone Customer Support and they tell me that there no actual difference in the software between versions three and four. Rather, version four comes with access to Rosetta Stone's online learning community, TOTALe, which version three did not. After finding that out I decided not to upgrade to the next version.
So how does the software work? Rosetta Stone uses a method that is called "Dynamic Immersion", which is basically a fancy way of saying that it does not use any English to teach you a foreign language. Rather, the program uses pictures of people and objects, with their Spanish translation underneath. In my opinion, this makes Rosetta Stone by far the easiest way to learn vocabulary in a new language. Because there is no English, the translated words stick in your mind with the pictures, which leads you to think in that new language. Just that feature alone makes this software extremely useful.
The program is composed of several levels, which are composed of several units, which in turn are composed of several lessons. Each of the units focuses on a certain subject, such as school or shopping. In each of the lessons, you learn new vocabulary and ideas then, after the lesson, there are several activities which you can complete to further your knowledge of the subject matter. Each of the activities focuses on you being able to do a certain thing such as: speak, listen, write, understand, et cetera. A good deal of the exercises are repetitive, but that's part of what helps you remember the language.
The company often boasts about its speech recognition program that gets you speaking your new language write away. While it does help you to form sentences quickly, the voice recognition software is certainly not bug free. There have been many situations where I know that I said the write thing, but the software just won't recognize it. Sometimes I will just turn off the speaking activities to avoid this. Rosetta Stone also claims that it will teach you to speak without an accent, if you set the speech recognition to only recognize native sounds. There are many flaws since, with Latin American Spanish for example, there can be many different types of accents, all of which are from native Spanish speakers. Also, for most adults learning a second language, it is almost impossible to speak without an accent, and so it's very difficult to succeed with native speech recognition.
Another problem that I have with Rosetta Stone is its claim that it teaches grammar. The grammar lessons are short and simple. They focus on things like which article to use for a word, or which verb conjugation goes with a given subject, but these lessons do not explain why it has to be the way it. My opinion on grammar is that there is no way to successfully teach it, without explaining it. Rosetta Stone doesn't explain anything, because the company's theory is that, when we learnt our first language, we weren't explained anything about grammar. The difference is though that then we couldn't be explained anything about grammar, so we just went with the flow, now we are older and smarter. We question things. I used Rosetta Stone for Spanish, and I was already familiar with French grammar, so I had a pretty good idea of what to do in Spanish, but, if I had been learning an eastern language (or any language that unconnected to what I knew), Rosetta Stone would have probably been too confusing for me to use.
In my own opinion, Rosetta Stone fails to give users enough opportunities to write in their new language. Yes, as I said earlier, they do have writing exercises, but they are far and few between. Normally, each exercise only asks you to write a few words or short sentences. I believe that, to memorize spelling and punctuation in another language, one needs to have more practice writing.
After a month or two of learning Latin American Spanish just through Rosetta Stone, I found that I could speak quite well, and I had confidence that I was saying things correctly. It amazed people that I could carry on a (basic level) conversation with other Spanish speakers. The problem, however, was that I was a little shaky on spelling. I could read quite well but, when it came to writing, I often found myself questioning where to put accents. After you learn one Romance Language, the grammar of the others will be fairly easy. That being said, I had a good knowledge of Spanish grammar. This knowledge, however, came more from my experience with French, rather than from Rosetta Stone itself.
So is Rosetta Stone worth it? I would honestly say that it is. Although there are many problems that I have found with this software, and it is not the godsend that many people assume it is, it will really help you memorize vocabulary words. I would not, however, recommend that Rosetta Stone be the only way you learn a language. It would be extremely beneficial to have a tutor as well, someone to whom you can ask questions. If that is not an option for, then I would suggest you buy a good grammar book to guide you where Rosetta Stone cannot.
Wilhelm Schulz offers both private tutoring and online classes for as low as $10 per hour.
To find out more on Wilhelm Schulz (Founder of Futurama Languages) go to:
http://futuramalanguages.weebly.com/
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