I often see Rosetta Stone advertised and mentioned, and I even briefly toyed with a demo version in the past, but it didn't click for me.
Can anyone provide their own success story for Rosetta or a competing alternative?
Can anyone provide their own success story for Rosetta or a competing alternative?
There is one positive item, one huge negative and one poor implementation point.
The positive is that I think the mechanism, or put another way the Rosetta Stone platform, is mostly good. The combination of visual and aural, with a relatively simple screen-is-one-concept approach, is good.
The negative for me was the actual content itself. I learned about ladders, and horses and crazy things that not once have I encountered here in Paris. It would have been helpful to learn food items, grocery store items, things folks (even tourists) would likely find useful.
I hesitate to mention this because it might not have been a Rosetta Stone objective, nor might it fit into their framework/platform. But, there were no verb tense lessons. Even just rote learning of "je voudrais ..." [I would like ...] would get you out of 80% of the conversational jams when trying to get a sandwich, or similar.
The poor implementation point is that I did not experience any good luck using their voice recognition engine. Perhaps it is because I really have horrible French pronunciation. However, isn't that the very situation Rosetta is trying to correct? I found no way to discover why it was upset with my pronunciation. It was just a very frustration experience.
But yes, after hearing all of the raving reviews in this thread, maybe I should give it a closer look.
It is "one way", but if you're able to dedicate time to it, the "they pronounce", "you pronounce" will probably work well. If you're halfway listening in the car, then it probably won't work.
There definitely are verb tense lessons if you get far enough! It doesn't teach you by rote, but that's the whole idea, I had lessons in French at school where we did rote learning and Rosetta Stone seems to be working a lot better (I feel more confident in my ability to actually speak and read) than my lessons in school ever did.
I tried a copy a few years back and wasn't too impressed, then saw it again last year and they actually had working voice recognition that judged your pronunciation! They also have an iPad version out now which seems like a great fit.
The one big thing I've noticed is that they're a bit random on what they teach you. I remember the Arabic 1 program taking quite a few lessons before teaching 'bathroom', for example.
Rosetta Stone isn't supported by most linguists who study foreign language acquisition. It is also ridiculously overpriced and never explicitly teaches even basic grammar, something which FSI points out helps almost 100% of learners.
Anyway, I am at a point now that I am learning new words every day just by speaking.