Hi LingQ’ers,
This is just a comment about my experience with Rosetta Stone(Russian). First I must say that prior to Rosetta Stone, I used other methods of learning the langauge, so I had a pretty good base of nouns, verbs, pronouns, adverbs, etc. If I had not had this base, Rosetta stone would have been just another cd with meaningless photos. While a person might get the gist of what is trying to be conveyed, I doubt that it would help much in actual language learning. Moreover, there were never any real life situation segments for a person traveling or visiting a Russian speaking country. No metro, hotel, restaurant, emergency, time, money, etc., information at all. Not even " Hi, my name is Vladimir !! No introduction conversations at all. Instead, there were conversations about rodeo clowns ( I kid you not !) and jumping off a park bench. Wow! what a disappointment ! To their credit, it is a great visual program with great photos and a great variation of different approaches to learning the given information…e.g., sound only, no video, reading only, etc. Overpriced, diluted with too much useless information, not enough useful information, touted as ‘immersion’ but missed the boat. On a scale of 1-10…maybe a 3.
As a LingQer that just returned from a month in Russia…don’t waste your money on Rosetta Stone, especially if your a complete beginner (No explanation of Cyrillic fonts)!!! A few months of 20-30 minutes a day LingQing, working with tutors, etc…will give you much, much more for your money !!! An hour a day I feel would put you far ahead of the game. The LingQ method is much more natural and effective. I am even now encouraged to learn another language after seeing such great progress with this system !!! Thanks Steve. You are my inspiration !!! Tim
I’ll second that. Although it seemed cool at first, eight lessons into Chinese I still did’nt know how to say hello; instead I got zillion variations on “this is a this, that is a that.” Garbage.
Rosetta Stone recently raised over $100 million with an IPO on the stock market. I wonder where they will spend the money. I think I know, on marketing.
In the Polish version they complete missed the boat, they had me learning “The boy uses the boat.” No one in Poland would ever use the verb 'używać in that context, there are special verbs for going by foot,car.boat ect.
So they just totally missed the boat there… (they’d probably translate that directly too)
I have to hand it to Rosetta Stone’s sales & marketing people - I imagine they’re earning decent bonuses… I’ll bet none of them has actually worked through one of their “courses”.