Rosetta Stone to Learn Language

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sainthumbert

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Has anyone used Rosetta Stone to learn a language? Has anyone use it to teach young children? What has been your experience? How proficient in the language has it made you or your child?
 
My aunt liked it for homeschool but one that gets much better reviews and you might want to check out is Fluenz. I haven’t used either one, but Fluenz is reportedly built around the real world probabilities for using a foreign language, such as travel. Here’s a user review:

youtube.com/watch?v=GmHmFT0ENzQ
 
I am not a big fan of RS; it’s ok but to me, it’s way too expensive for what you really end up getting.

To me, a lot depends on what the situation is: age of students, motivation, reason for learning (travel or required), availability of native or fluent speakers, etc.

They have courses specially designed for very young children. Power Glide is one I would have liked to have tried out. Here is an article with a thorough description by a homeschool mother; she has also reviewed some other fola courses for children.

Part of the need for evaluation is the student’s learning style. So many modern languages are done with very little grammar support, and some students really hate this, while others learn very well.

It’s kind of hit or miss, and to be honest, I have found that whatever I pick will probably be considered drudgery no mater how many other mothers had children who clamored for it!
 
I speak (to varying degrees) 7 languages other than English.

I’ve never been out of the country, foreigners I speak with always ask me where I’m from or where I’ve studied (which I always find flattering) and I’m 22 years old.

Do not buy Rosetta Stone. It is outrageously expensive and largely ineffective. In my experience, the best way to pick up on languages is to get a good grammar book for the basics (it is essential, no matter what commercials might tell you) and then just do what you like doing anyway. (this works for kids, too!) When you watch your favorite movie, turn it on in another language. And if you insist on subtitles, have them be in the same language you’re watching the DVD in, otherwise you’ll just use the English as a crutch and not listen. You can get novels, children’s books, etc. and read them. You can watch news clips and sitcoms and many other programs in various languages online, find music, etc. And many of these activities are at no or low cost to you.

Good luck!
 
do not get Rosetta Stone. its awful. and it is certainly not worth the money. i speak arabic and french and i have looked at the rosetta stone thing. all they do is give you a bunch of words and phrases, repeat them over and over and switch a few words. like for french they may say, “je veux un soda” 10 times, then they say, “je veux un cafe” they teach you no grammar, no pronunciation. its awful. especially the arabic one. it has tons of errors in words and grammar and they never teach you the alphabet. buy something else! or get a native to help you.
 
Didn’t like it. Maybe it would be good for kids, but it is expensive, and they don’t teach you anything useful to say. You say stuff like, the dog is under the airplane and he is brown. I never said stuff like that even when I was learning English!!

Supposedly, it’s the way we originally learn languages. But the problem with that is: yeah ok when we’re infants, our brains aren’t developed and we’re just absorbing everything anyway so of COURSE thats how we learned our first language!! It doesn’t work like that once you get past age five for most people, our brains are different by then. So they’re whole philosophy just seems flawed to me.

But I know some people who liked it, so I guess it just depends on what your learning style is.🤷
 
My biggest complaint with Rosetta Stone is that there is no workbook to go along with the lessons. You can’t really tell what you are saying by just a picture. :confused:
 
Don’t get it. An adult can’t learn a language that way. I’ve tried it. You can learn a few words, but nothing useful.

I have used Fluenz, and it’s one of the few mass-marketed programs out there that I think actually lays a foundation for functional knowledge of a language, not just learning a few words and phrases useful to tourists.
 
I am a foreign language/linguistics major in college.

I do not recommend Rosetta Stone (I especially do not recommend Pimsleur or any such types). The problem with Rosetta Stone is that, as it is meant to teach you the language in a simulated way to primary language learning, it will show you a picture of a woman and then say “woman.” This is nice for learning the names of things, but it is not going to teach you sufficiently how to put those nouns together in a sentence. In my opinion through my own studies, the best way for a child to learn a new language is to do it the old-fashioned way – sit down with the grammar book. He/she needs to understand the structure of the language that the words fit into, not just the words without a context to fit them in.

The effectiveness of Rosetta Stone also depends on which language you are intending to study. For Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and German, it would probably be okay as an introduction to vocabulary. For languages like Russian or Arabic, I would discourage you. The problem is this:

In English, a noun is the same no matter where it is in the sentence. Rosetta Stone could show you the picture and then say “woman,” and the word “woman” will always be the same. In Russian, Arabic, and some of the other languages offered by Rosetta Stone, the word they teach you will actually change depending on where it is in the sentence! And the teaching method employed by Rosetta Stone will not help you account for this difference.

So, in summation, nice vocabulary introduction for Romance languages or German, but otherwise I would not recommend it.
 
I’ve never used it, but I was a subscriber to a foreign-language learning forum for a while, and the consensus there was that RS is definitely not worth the money.
 
I think it’s way too expensive and not that useful. Pimsleur is good. There are many online resources for language learning. I like Mango, which I access through the library online, but they also sell to the public some of the more common languages.
 
bluetopaz said:
I speak (to varying degrees) 7 languages other than English.

I’ve never been out of the country, foreigners I speak with always ask me where I’m from or where I’ve studied (which I always find flattering) and I’m 22 years old.

Do not buy Rosetta Stone. It is outrageously expensive and largely ineffective. In my experience, the best way to pick up on languages is to get a good grammar book for the basics (it is essential, no matter what commercials might tell you) and then just do what you like doing anyway. (this works for kids, too!) When you watch your favorite movie, turn it on in another language. And if you insist on subtitles, have them be in the same language you’re watching the DVD in, otherwise you’ll just use the English as a crutch and not listen. You can get novels, children’s books, etc. and read them. You can watch news clips and sitcoms and many other programs in various languages online, find music, etc. And many of these activities are at no or low cost to you.

Good luck!
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If you learned a language other than English at a young age, you have what I call an “extra room” in your brain for other languages to “decorate.” Or, you may just be extraordinarily gifted in languages, you polyglot you! 😉

I only WISH I could pick up a language the way you lay out. I do agree that immersion is the best way, but we older folks need some grammar as well. I think classes help, but not for normal conversation. For that, you need to hear and try to speak no matter how flawed the words happen to emerge.

I am PERFECTLY fluent in French. Inside my own head, that is. Once the words get to my tongue, I am horrified at the mess I make trying to speak the language. 😊

Many people have told me that RS is outrageously expensive for what it does. And I believe them. If one ended up fluent in the language selected, it would be worth it, but nothing of the sort happens.
 
bluetopaz said:
In my experience, the best way to pick up on languages is to get a good grammar book for the basics (it is essential, no matter what commercials might tell you) and then just do what you like doing anyway.
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I’m inclined to agree with this, on the assumption that grammar book also includes conversations.

When I was in college, language was required. I chose French for no particular reason. I learned to my horror within the first couple of days that most in my class had already taken French in high school. I could see defeat and doom very near to hand.

So, realizing I was very unlikely to learn the grammar as well as the others, I decided to memorize the conversations in the book. Absolutely memorize them. I found that when doing that, I retained not just words, but how to put phrases and whole sentences together. I surprised myself, no, astonished myself at how well I did, so I took a whole additional year of it which was not required, simply because I could get a good grade to bump up my average. I have forgotten a lot of it now, but I got to where I could actually think in French and sometimes do in bits now.

Thinking about it, that’s how we learn our first languages; by little pieces, then by bigger pieces, then by more complex bigger pieces, and so on. We largely learn our grammar from hearing and speaking it, not from books.

I’ll admit, I found French to be astonishingly close to English, which many other languages simply are not. So perhaps it’s easier for an English speaker to learn French.

I did have one surprise, though. After graduate school, I traveled to a French island in the Caribbean. The tourists there were all French but me, and the natives were French as well. I found to my surprise that I could communicate pretty well with the locals, but not very well with the French tourists. I learned that the locals had been there perhaps 300 years and most were originally from Normandy. I suppose that’s because the roughly 1/3 of English that’s of French origin was originally Norman usage. The locals’ French perhaps never changed much, but that of the French in France did, rather similar to the way the remnants of Elizabethan English exist only in isolated pockets of Appalachia, the Smokies and the Ozarks, but not (to my knowledge) anywhere in England.
 
TheRealJuliane said:
I am PERFECTLY fluent in French. Inside my own head, that is. Once the words get to my tongue, I am horrified at the mess I make trying to speak the language. 😊
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I certainly wish I was perfectly fluent in my head. For me, speaking it to the extent I know it is a lot easier than formulating it in my brain. Maybe it’s because of the way I learned.

But language is neat. Wish I knew several. 🤷
 
Ridgerunner said:
I certainly wish I was perfectly fluent in my head. For me, speaking it to the extent I know it is a lot easier than formulating it in my brain. Maybe it’s because of the way I learned.

But language is neat. Wish I knew several. 🤷
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Me, too. If I had 3 personal wishes, one of them would be that I would be fluent in at least the main languages on the planet - French, Spanish, German, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, etc. Heck maybe I should throw in English, sometimes I can’t get a cogent sentence out in my native language!

😉

I would love to be able to communicate with people of other nations.
 
TheRealJuliane said:
Me, too. If I had 3 personal wishes, one of them would be that I would be fluent in at least the main languages on the planet - French, Spanish, German, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, etc. Heck maybe I should throw in English, sometimes I can’t get a cogent sentence out in my native language!

😉

I would love to be able to communicate with people of other nations.
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Pretty ambitious there. Personally, I would be happy just to be able to speak Italian fluently. Not that I don’t love French. I do. But Italian! No language is as melodious to hear!

Having said that, I have become persuaded (or persuaded myself perhaps) that no language is as expressive as English with its dozens of ways to say ALMOST (but not quite) the same thing; the nuancing and sudden “shocks” or emphases available in switching from mostly Latin and French-derived words and structures to mostly Anglo-Saxon, and back again.

I love the “borrowings” of English. I read, for example, the assertion of an Argentine novelist famous throughout the Spanish-speaking world that some of English cannot be translated into Spanish. His example was “Harp Song of the Dane Women” by Kipling. One expression sticks in my mind: “…the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you…” It describes a drowned human body washed ashore. It’s a “borrowed” Scandiavian way of saying something. But it’s perfectly intelligible in English.
 
Ridgerunner said:
Pretty ambitious there. Personally, I would be happy just to be able to speak Italian fluently. Not that I don’t love French. I do. But Italian! No language is as melodious to hear!

Having said that, I have become persuaded (or persuaded myself perhaps) that no language is as expressive as English with its dozens of ways to say ALMOST (but not quite) the same thing; the nuancing and sudden “shocks” or emphases available in switching from mostly Latin and French-derived words and structures to mostly Anglo-Saxon, and back again.

I love the “borrowings” of English. I read, for example, the assertion of an Argentine novelist famous throughout the Spanish-speaking world that some of English cannot be translated into Spanish. His example was “Harp Song of the Dane Women” by Kipling. One expression sticks in my mind: “…the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you…” It describes a drowned human body washed ashore. It’s a “borrowed” Scandiavian way of saying something. But it’s perfectly intelligible in English.
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I forgot Italian!!! :crying: How could I forget Italian???
 
Ridgerunner said:
I’m inclined to agree with this, on the assumption that grammar book also includes conversations.

When I was in college, language was required. I chose French for no particular reason. I learned to my horror within the first couple of days that most in my class had already taken French in high school. I could see defeat and doom very near to hand.

snip
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An interesting story, and well done on your choice of study methods.

I self-learned French from BBC radio/TV courses while we were living in England, with the goal of making myself understood when I was to do the Liberty Trail Bicycle Ride in France (8 days, 800 miles). One evening I was sitting with a bunch of Canadians, most of whom were Quebecois, and when they heard me speak to the wait-staff, they thought I was French! (The BBC course used Parisian pronunciation.)

I never did speak French above a Level 2, but what I did speak, my pronunciation must have been awesome 😛

I used Pimsleur for modern Hebrew. I got only about half-way through the course, but I can testify that it’s good. There’s a lot of repetition, which really pounds things into your brain. The main thing I don’t like about it is that there is no grammatical analysis, and I’ve studied enough different languages that I tend to be very analytical when I’m learning a new one – what happens to nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc, when they’re put in different situations?
 
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