I bought Rosetta Stone’s Latin American Version of Spanish. Afterwards though, I noticed there was a linguist trashing Rosetta Stone’s Russian language software saying it was using words no native speaker would ever think of, and that Rosetta Stone makes false promises that doing the software teaches you the language when in truth it lacks grammatical foundation.
So, having been somewhat disappointed of my purchase, nonetheless I have started to use it.
But does anyone know how accurate the Rosetta Stone AmLat is? Are we talking massive errors and bizarre usage that will get me laughed at in Guadalajara?
Rosetta Stone uses more formal language than is generally used by native speakers, but that’s true of just about any language teaching method.
I’d caution you that Spanish dialects vary wildly even within Latin America; RS’s Latin American program is probably keyed to Mexican Spanish speakers, but not necessarily. I’d call their helpline and ask.
I would wager that the majority of people you’re likely to interact with in Guadalajara are likely to speak better English than the Spanish you’ll learn from the Rosetta Stone program, and most of your spanish-speaking is going to be on the order of “how much for this shirt?” In those cases, the Guadalajaran will have a vested interest in not mocking you for your language skills.
Like what? Rosetta Stone seemed like one of the better programs in my (very) limited experience; if there are better things, I’d love to hear about 'em!
My cousin and his wife were in Mexico City early this morning, saw this one on the Dope, and he tried it out.
His trial was very quick and fair, and he will be buried with full military honors as soon as the rest of his body is recovered.
I found rosetta stone Japanese to be pretty useful, but more as a secondary to a textbook or two than a singular method for learning language.
And as an English teacher I can earnestly tell you that no matter what you use to learn a language you will be learning a much more formal version of the language than anything actual people are going to speak. You should see some of the contrived and weird conversations the characters in my “New Horizon” textbook have. I sit at my desk scratching my head at them pretty often.
I had to do 12 hours of Spanish Rosetta Stone for a class, and it was absolutely awful. It’s all memorization of extremely basic vocabularly words, most of which are nouns, and a lot of which are cognates anyway. And it pronounces the letter V as a hard labial fricative, which is never done in Spanish.
As the Prince George from Blackadder once said, “Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but it sounds damn saucy, you lucky thing! I know some fairly liberal-minded girls, but I’ve never penultimated any of them in a solar sojourn, or for that matter, been given any labial fricative.”
I’ve been using RS Japanese for a while off and one. While I agree that it’s great for teaching you vocab and phrases it doesn’t EXPLAIN anything. I’m the kind of person who wants to know why the sentence was constructed like that. Rosetta Stone doesn’t even have a supplementary file with grammar rules or anything. Basically it’s impossible to freely form sentences after using the program and you’re limited to what phrases it taught you.
I’ve never taken a Spanish course and I’ve been using Rosetta Stone Latin American Spanish. I think that while it’s fairly slow (I think I spent 10+ hours on the program before I even got to numbers) and limited in what it teaches you, it’s great for the content it does cover. I’m almost 3/4 done with the first level disc, and I’m finding that I’ve forgotten almost nothing and I’m capable of randomly making (mostly silly) sentences with the words and structures it’s taught me so far. The thing is, though, on grammar points I’m confused about, I do end up Googling a lot to actually understand how it works. I think if you’re willing to do that, Rosetta Stone is a great introduction into the language (I’ll see how the second and third Spanish levels hold up). Using other Spanish-learning methods at the same time probably helps a lot, as well (I love looking up all the words to songs and trying to figure out the grammar).
*“El gato está sobre la mesa porque el cielo es rosado!”
“Tu madre!”
“No, no está aquí!”
*
