WhySon is 15, going into Spanish I in high school. Because of a language processing learning disability, I suspect this is going to be a real challenge for him. My mother offered to purchase the Spanish I Rosetta Stone software for him to learn. My impression of them is quite good, based on Amazon reviews and the online demo. I think the intuitive imersive approach will be much, much easier for him than the memorize and translate approach of high school Spanish.
I’m also interested for myself, a 33 year old returning to college for nursing. I think knowing Spanish as a nurse in the city of Chicago would be an invaluable career skill, but I’m not thrilled with the idea of taking even more college classes than I’m already facing. I took 6 years of French, 4 in high school and two in college 15 years ago, but don’t remember more than a phrase here and there.
Anyone have any first hand experience or juicy anecdotes about Rosetta Stone? Or first hand experience with other, cheaper language learning programs?
I’ve used some of the basic Rosetta Stone software, and it’s good in a flash card sort of way. I think more full-featured (and cheaper!) things like LiveMocha offer a fuller solution, though I don’t have extensive experience with either.
I was generally impressed with Rosetta Stone. Our local libraries have it, so you may be able to use it without buying it, or try before you buy. That’s something to consider.
It’s not cheaper, but something I wholeheartedly recommend is the Concordia Language Villages in Bemidji, MN. They really do an immersion approach and have one-month summer programs that count as a year of HS Spanish. Plus they are fun, since they are full of outdoor and social activities. If your son is in danger of getting derailed due to struggling with Spanish, this might be something to try: http://www.concordialanguagevillages.org/newsite/
Also, back to the very affordable, does your son like music? I found that listening to music in Spanish really helped me learn. iTunes has a free Spanish-language song every week.
Once we can search again, look at my previous comments on Rosetta Stone. In short, given his situation, maybe. Given yours, probably not.
But, before your mom slaps down its ridiculous asking price, check with your local library - both library systems in my area allow you to access all the Rosetta Stone lessons for free. Even if you love the program, free is better.
www.mangolanguages.com is a free site that teaches the basics of conversation in many languages. I found it a pretty fun and easy way to pick up some Japanese. I think it would be a good supplement to Spanish classes that, in my experience, focus mainly on grammar.
I’ve used rosetta stone for russian to supplement actual russian classes I was taking and found it very helpful. I seemed to pick up the standard lessons much faster having worked with the program first.
The main thing that I found was made easier with the rosetta stone method was the foreign alphabet. I took russian years ago and struggled a lot with the alphabet. The rosetta way of learning seemed to allow me to pick it up much more naturally.
Thanks for the replies! I will definitely look into some of these cheaper alternatives, and the local library. I’m not ruling out Rosetta Stone, mostly due to the fact that someone else has offered to pay for it ;), but it’s clear that there are plenty of options I didn’t know about.
Thanks for addressing each situation independently, I suspected there might be two different answers.
(Is anyone else totally digging how quotes now have a link to the quoted person’s post? I love that! So much easier to check for context in really long threads!)
I had to do 12 hours of Rosetta Stone for a Spanish class, and in my not-so-humble opinion it sucks. I don’t see how it’s not memorization. It totally is, and even a little worse, IMO. They’ll give you a big long sentence and you quickly realize only one word in the sentence matters, and it’s usually a cognate.
There’s 4 pictures: a frog, a pencil, a bicycle, and an airplane. Which one are you going to click on? You don’t need to know Spanish for that.
If your heart is set on it, though, I know I can’t stop you. Just so you know, at my public library you don’t even have to check it out - you can access it for free online if you have a library card number.
I had to do 12 hours of Rosetta Stone for a Spanish class, and in my not-so-humble opinion it sucks. I don’t see how it’s not memorization. It totally is, and even a little worse, IMO. They’ll give you a big long sentence and you quickly realize only one word in the sentence matters, and it’s usually a cognate.
There’s 4 pictures: a frog, a pencil, a bicycle, and an airplane. Which one are you going to click on? You don’t need to know Spanish for that.
If your heart is set on it, though, I know I can’t stop you. Just so you know, at my public library you don’t even have to check it out - you can access it for free online if you have a library card number.
Love it. It’s a really VERY decent program. It won’t get you to fluency, but it will get you speaking like a pro within a month if you really try hard. The guys at my work use it before going to foreign assignments with a great deal of success.
I’ve not tried Rosetta Stone, but I’ve done similar a similar program while learning French in college. In my opinion, these programs don’t work. Its all repetition and drilling, which aren’t helpful when learning a language.
The only way to acquire a second language is through interaction with communicative intent aimed at the learner. I would recommend waiting until he starts his class and then supplementing that class with a Spanish conversation group for learners at his level. You can find loads of free groups like this on http://www.meetup.com. Perhaps you can go together.
All language learning other than complete immersion is repetition and drilling to some extent. Rosetta stone is much less so than the classic way of learning a language.
Not saying I agree that repetition and drilling are completely irrelevant to learning a language, but they are very relevant to passing a language class at the high school level.
I think **vintageloveletter **and **Cisco **have a point, though, which is that forcing someone to use Rosetta Stone won’t be effective. I felt one of the things that let me learn Spanish very easily was doing exactly the opposite of what Cisco did. While you *can *reduce the sentence to “bicicleta=picture of bicycle,” you can also challenge yourself with the same sentence. Think it through with other nouns, other verb tenses, other conjugations.
Those two comments seem kind of contradictory to me, but I think the key is whether the person’s goal is passing a class or learning a language. Rosetta Stone could help with either, but clearly isn’t a magic bullet.
Check with your local library- mine had all kinds of software, even stuff you could download from their website.
As part of my 8 week immersion Mandarin training, half of our group used Rosetta Stone beforehand. Mostly they said it didn’t help much, and after a week or two the differences between the groups that used it and the groups that didn’t pretty much evened out.
I came to the same conclusion and tried doing that, but it’s just natural that once you know the answer, your brain wants to move on to the next question. I would try to parse the sentences like this and it might work for a few minutes but eventually my subconscious would tell me “it’s alright, you know this” and I would click without even thinking.
Different people learn in different ways, though. What has helped me learn the Spanish I know (I’m still not fluent) is knowing where the words come from. Understanding something is infinitely more helpful to me than memorizing it or just learning “that’s the way it is” at face value. I used to get frustrated when people told me some Spanish word or phrase “doesn’t translate.” Come on, just tell me exactly what it means. “A direct translation wouldn’t make any sense!!!” After getting the right professor (a linguist and PhD in Spanish), I realized most stuff DOES translate. It might not translate into a phrase we would use, but it absolutely translates into a phrase we can understand, especially if we have a good understanding of words and word history.
(Example: I had a Spanish teacher who, on the second day of class, went out of her way to tell us that the word ‘adios’ has NOTHING to do with god. I sat politely until the end of class and then walked straight to the registration office and dropped.)
This isn’t visual so I don’t know if it’ll help your son more or less, but I’ve enjoyed the Radio Lingua Coffee Talk Spanish podcasts - start at lesson 1 and work your way through the 80 lessons (about 15 minutes each). The podcasts are free, and additional materials can be downloaded from the website for small fees, including vocabulary sheets. They’re going to be redoing their lessons soon, so they’ll be releasing new podcasts from lesson 1 onwards.
Just a heads-up - they’re in Castilian Spanish (the major difference is “lisping” certain sounds, like turning “gracias” into “grathias”), and it’s taught by people with Scottish accents. If that’s not distracting for you, I highly recommend the series if you want something audio-only as a supplement.
You can get those via iTunes as well, as well as those for SpanishPod. This offers free newbie lessons and the option to pay for higher-difficulty lessons. They’re American-based, and aren’t as structured as the Coffee Break Spanish lessons; I find them a good supplement.
So even if this doesn’t work for your son, you may like them. I listen to the lessons on my way into work at a large Chicago hospital and started up for much the same reasons as you.
I’m attempting to learn Japanese, not Spanish, but I wanted to mention that it might be good to try more than one teaching method. I bought a book that has an emphasis on self-teaching Japanese, as well as the first volume of the Pimsleur Japanese language audio lessons, and I have observed that one source/system can make up for the shortcomings of another.
For example, Japanese uses a particle to denote the subject of the sentence. This was explicitly stated in the book. However, in the Pimsleur lessons, it glossed over/evaded the point by describing the usage as “<subject>, as in a sentence.” “Say 'Japanese”, as you would in a sentence." Seriously, WTF does that mean? It was only because I’d read the book that I knew what they meant.
Also, I think your son needs to personally select the resources that work best to him. I chose both my book and Pimsleur over several other choices; they just seemed to make more sense to me. All the resources conveyed the same information; it was the presentation style that differed, and made all the difference.