I have tried to learn Spanish on Rosetta Stone and can recognize the Spanish words for the objects, I can even pick out some words that I did not know before, but I still don’t feel as though I have really learned anything other than rote memorization. Even worse, the knowledge is fading fast.
Anyone have any success with Rosetta Stone?
SSG Schwartz
I don’t, but now I’m subscribed to this thread.
Try Pimsleur. I can hold a several-sentence conversation in Vietnamese and am using their Spanish to brush up. It’s great for the commute or for a long walk, as long as you’re willing to talk out loud in another language in public.
Thanks, susan, but I really don’t need to learn a foreign language, but am interested in if Rosetta Stone is as effective if the ads promise. I took the Pimsleur test many years ago in High School and did badly. The reason that I am asking about Rosetta is that I can take the classes for free.
SSG Schwartz
I said this in a previous thread.
Just a quick hijack, why are you interested in learning Vietnamese susan?
The program I am in has a very intense 10 week language program (4 person classes 4 hours a day, plus total immersion and home stay) and they almost always get people to the point they need to be to travel, do daily stuff and deal with work within those ten weeks. This year they tried giving some trainees access to Rosetta Stone a few months before they left in order to see if that helped.
The conclusion was that it was useful for improving pronunciation, but was not very helpful in teaching people actual language skills. The people who did Rosetta Stone came in with a small advantage, but the rest caught up pretty quickly.
Personally I’ve been using Pimsleur in conjunction with my regular language classes. In the past I’ve found Pimsleur pretty useless, but when used alongside regular language classes it really does a good job of reinforcing what I’ve been learning.
If you are interested in language learning resources, your public library may be useful. Oakland public libraries give cards to anyone who is a CA resident, and they offer Pimsleur courses completely free online. They also have a variety of language software available for check out without the $400 price tag.
I assume you are using it free of charge courtesy of the US Taxpayers… I, too, use Rosetta Stone in that manner for Asian languages. I find it to be fairly helpful. For me, it didn’t seem all that helpful, and then one day, it just clicked. Good luck!
I used Rosetta Stone to refresh my German after going a few years without practice. While I could remember my numbers easy as you please, the rest of the language was getting murky in my head. It did help, though I don’t think it could have made me anywhere near fluent if I wasn’t already familiar with the language. It’s a great stepping stone and I found it highly enjoyable–much moreso than any other language program I’ve done–but it is only a stepping stone and can only take you so far.
IME, it’s like learning a language the way a child would. It’s very naturalistic, which makes it seem overly simple at first, but it sets you up for going further on your own.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to. Pimsleur is a tape or CD language system that emphasizes aural learning and out-loud repetition. I’m not familiar with a test.
I’ve been working and doing professionally-related voluntarism in Vietnam and Cambodia, and I try to learn at least enough of a language to be polite and carry on a simple conversation. At the moment my dilemma is that I’m trying hard to pick up some Khmer while retaining my nominal Vietnamese, and I have to brush up my Spanish for a work trip to Mexico in late August.
I find a combination of a class or tutoring plus auditory practice works best for me, especially for alphabets I can’t read (Khmer is very hard for me–I just can’t read it). While there are some good Vietnamese tapes/CD programs, the Khmer programs are terrible. In fact, I have Routledge’s old Khmer tape running as I work online today, and it’s just not very helpful. More helpful was to have a native speaker record all the sentences in key Khmer sections of the Lonely Planet’s Southeast Asia language guide.
My husband started a coupla-three weeks ago with Rosetta Stone for Spanish also. I think he’s doing well and he’s certainly learning a lot of new words, but he’s getting a bit discouraged. He’s starting to realize just how many vocabulary words there are that he’s going to need for even basic conversation skills. And he’s definitely starting to be scared of grammar stuff - verb conjugations so far. I don’t have the heart to even mention noun cases. Having looked over his shoulder (which must help enormously), I see that the graphics are really good - they mix stuff up (a series of mundane stuff like the pen is on the table, the cat is on the chair, I like cake, interspersed with kind of unexpected stuff, like the dog is under the shirt) so that you really have to think sometimes.
The other day he was doing his Spanish lesson at the kitchen table as I was preparing to leave for work. He had his headphones on, so he didn’t hear me behind him, but just as I walked by, he repeated “Ella va a trabahar”. I giggled and said, “Es la verdad, yo voy a trabahar!”. I love coincidences.