Rosetta Stone

How about The “Rosetta Stone”? It’s efficient method for beginners or not?

Hi stariy. If you are interested on the Steve’s opinion about Rosetta Stone, I would suggest you to check this out:

  1. It’s a slow and boring way to learn a language
  2. It’s VERY expensive
    LingQ is much better!

I do not know them - I just listen to the Rosetta Stone - 7 Reasons I Am Reluctant To Use It - YouTube
Maybe Rosetta is good for beginner in languages where it is more difficult to get material - more exotic languages - for sure not for uk,sp,fr,de,ru,jp,zh - I do not know about kr.

And what is exotic today could become less exotic tomorrow - meaning new material will appear sooner or later - for example I have now a text to speech in language I considered exotic as definite before like nl, dk, cz among others.

You could also try livemocha for free and working with a similar method than Rosetta

Hi OscarP. Thank you for powerfully links.

I found Rosetta Stone to be helpful for Spanish for some reason, several years ago, but I only used Levels II and III, but I didn’t know much about learning languages then, either.

I thought I’d use it for French, starting with Level I, and it was torture for me by that point. The context has no connection to real life. Each page of a lesson will include four sentences, like:

The boy is in the airplane.

The dog is under the airplane.

The plane is covered in milk.

The dog is flying the airplane.

They provide four pictures, and then you’re supposed to match the correct sentence to the picture. And sometimes you’ll get the answer wrong, and Rosetta Stone will beep at you, and then you try again until you get it right.

You will learn the language this way, they say, because this is how we learned how to speak when we were kids, connecting words to the images around us.

The problem with this method is that it neglects the importance of human intelligence, and the ability to create images in the brain. This is why reading is so powerful, just in general, even in your native language.

Maybe if the images were at all interesting to look at, like what you might see in children’s books, which at least have some artistic merit, it would have more value, but no, you just keep seeing the same people, walking in and out of buildings, opening refrigerators, walking down stairs. The images are cold and sterile. There is nothing to draw you in emotionally.

So yes, to echo a previous sentiment, it is boring and expensive. There are much better ways!

Stariy, thank Steve for the videos :wink:

The problem is that I have no occasion to speak something like “the boy is in the airplane.” when talking with native speakers.

I prefer to learn something like " Nice to meet you, I can hardly hear you, I don’t understand what you said, etc"

I’d say that Rosetta Stone and LiveMocha (try to) teach “grammar” via sentences. Eventually you have to learn grammar to some extent, and exposure to sentences with certain features is often less boring than studying rules (I’m not saying sentences are more effective, though).

So, in RS/LM you won’t find that many phrases useful for everyday speech, but that kind of content is available everywhere… As much as I rate either “method” pretty bad (since neither take you very far), I’m not saying it’s completely worthless. No method is complete.