Thoughts, advice?
Curious to know if anyone has used Rosetta Stone to learn German? The program is rather expensive but does have a satisfaction guarantee. We aren't moving till next year but I wanted to get a head start at home trying to learn as much as I can.
I'm using it to learn Italian. It is a good system but very different from traditional language courses. Their method is based on learning a language the way a child would, thus it teaches you complete sentences and phrases from lesson one. The pictures and interactive programs are quite enjoyable.
Wife is using it to learn German and making progress, as previous comment, it is a different way of learning, but does start with the basics as you did as a child.
I used to learn italian with it it's pretty good and you get a free CD(answeres are at the back!).
I haven't used it to learn an entire language, however through playing around with a trial disc I have found that I learn very, very quickly with their program. I was very impressed with how much I picked up in just two or three lessons. The price is what gets me, but if I had the money, I would definitely go for it.
I was going to post a new thread about Rosetta Stone, but now I've found this old thread, so I'm posting here, to add to what others have said.
I just completed the Rosetta Stone online course in an incredibly intensive 7 days. The complete course consists of 3 levels, each containing 4 units of 4 lessons. I opted not to have the microphone sent to me, so I didn't do the speaking excercises. I found this to be no hindrance, as I spoke out aloud along with the program voices most of the time anyway. On most days I managed to do 2 units, one unit of 4 lessons in the morning/lunchtime, the other unit in the afternoon/evening. Apart from breaks between lessons and a siesta, my days from 8am to midnight were spent with Rosetta. I started as a good A2 level, now I'm a solid B1 level.
I highly recommend the course, but with caveats.
First, to really benefit, you need to have a grasp of basic grammatical concepts such as tenses, genders, cases, and sentence structure. The reason for this is that the program is indeed immersive, it does not provide 'metadata' about what is being learnt. In other words, you have to pick out what is being taught by observation. For the most part the concepts and principles are very clearly discerned. However, this will only get you so far, to a good level A1, or a low A2. If you want to learn more from it, you need to be paying close attention, and with that, the program can take you to a solid B1, preparing you for a B2 course. At $199 for something you can complete in a madly intensive 7 days, that's excellent value. It should go without saying, serious dedication is required.
But the program is far from perfect, and I'm really only recommending it so highly because it is such good value, not because it is without fault. For a start, there are typos and things being spoken that don't match the text, I came across three or four such occurences. Thankfully nothing that would affect your learning.
Further, as you progress through the lessons, one or two of the voices become annoying. And the supreme quality of the photography that you encounter at the beginning is increasingly replaced by the more mundane, less appealing kind. The effect is subtle, but it does matter.
A weakness of the program is also that it is made for a global audience. I, as a European, found the early pronunciation exercises that seemed to be endlessly repeated useless, though I appreciate they may be necessary for someone from the Far East.
In fact, repetition is both a strength and a weakness of the program. You learn by repetetion, but if there's too much of it you get bored. You then start to skip parts of lessons, only to discover you have missed things... Then, trying to go back, you find that the navigation of the program is rather poor, there is no clear signposting. My tip is to skip only when certain that you know the subject, if in any doubt, patiently do the exercise. In many cases, I was pleasantly surprised that an exercise I thought I was uselessly repeating in fact contained a new nugget of information. I would say I skipped about 25-30% of the content in total.
I found the incredibly politically correct nature of the program distracting. It presents an impossibly rosy, multicultural, inter-racial world. I don't have a problem with such a world, but I was distracted by the rather falsely constructed intentionality of it here. Instead of concentrating on the language, I would be noticing the political correctness of the pictures. Granted though, you could say that about any of the picture content, anything could ultimately be distracting. But my point is that the distraction should be relevant to what is being learnt. At no point in the course is the multicultural, PC nature of it touched upon in the language, which really is a missed opportunity. If it had been discussed, it would have given it more validity.
Overall, I'm very pleased to have done this course, it has saved me weeks of time and hundreds if not thousands of franks in comparative courses at Migros. That said, for those who have more time available, I recommend a trip to the German section at a large book store, where you can by two German-made software courses (for Windows only), each costing 81 franks, that will take you to B1 level, and they do provide more exercises and narrative about the grammar being taught. I have forgotten what they are called, but you should have no difficulty finding them, there should be a whole shelf dedicated to them. So if you can spare the time, they seem to be better value than Rosetta.
One final observation about the Migros online test, which I took prior to the Rosetta, and following. I have discovered that it will give you a B2 result only if you get a maximum 2 out of the 36 questions wrong. Therefore, even if you're a strong B1 level, it will recommend that you take their B1 course! The Goethe institute, however, assessing you as a B1, will suggest a B2 course. Now that I've looked at some of the books of the different levels, I am convinced someone of a good B1 level should be taking a B2 course, not B1. A point worth considering before paying large sums of money for a course...
There, I hope someone on this fine forum finds this of use!
I think MountBerg gave an excellent summary. I am using it MUCH less often and dilegently and only can tell my colleagues:
the girl is on the plane
But I think it really has alot of potential and it previously had helped with learning Italian.
The microphone part can be great but both the word pronunciation and the sentence cadence can totally through it off. In fact I failed on some of the American and British English units
Just got my hands on Rosetta and a fair few languages... I'll try German, Spanish and French over the next year and see how it goes.
Where can one find the program ? Does it offer the possibility to learn Swiss German ?
You can find it by purchasing it online, or by "acquiring" it online through slightly more techie means (not that I would ever advocate this of course). The official site and shop is here http://www.rosettastone.co.uk/personal/languages/
No swiss german as far as I can see, but I would reccommend learning "High German" first anyway and then learning Swiss German.
I think rosetta stone is great for basic languages tips, but it hasn't got any gramm info, so we have to look for it in the www. !!
I have Rosetta for French and German. Having only started on the French practices, my input is pretty much exactly what MountBerg had posted. I just dont want to write as much, of the exact same thing.
I am getting Rosetta Stone in a couple days. My friend loves it, so I am going to give it a try.
Here's a review by WSJ's Mossberg on Rosetta Stone Totale: http://bit.ly/30OqLh
Some people do quite well with recorded and online lessons, others not so well.
It is said that Swiss German is better learned first, for all but the most linguistically talented.
I travelled all over Switzerland with my Mum, who spoke the Swiss German of Aargau of 1917 (the year she and her mum left) and people treated her nas a linguistic museum -- she studied formal German only later, when she began university at age 60. We would talk to hoteliers and merchants, she in Swiss German, I in French, and between us in English.
Sorry, but Rosetta Stone, not even the one in the British Museum, can't reproduce that.
Andy
1897 Bouveret (VS)
I had a few friends use Rosetta stone and they liked it, however, for conversation and sounds they also used the audio based Pimsleur series and said this was the best to actually start speaking quite quickly...
I was thinking of Rosetta Stone basically just to pick up the basic words for the simplest of conversations, for example, "please, thank you, where's the schnapps?" and other extremely important phrases like these.
I do not seem to pick up languages ver well just by studying them. I lived in Spain for two years and Italy for two and and still speak Spanish every day so it is pretty good, but although my Italian was acceptable, I have no one at the moment to practice it with, so I have probably forgotten about 3/4 of what I knew.
I'm guessing that if I use Rosetta Stone to pick up a few things before we move, it will act as a base. And in thus manner I hope to practice and learn more quickly/efficiently once we are there.
I tried Rosetta Stone for a couple of weeks when I couls squeeye a lesson in here and there. I found it to be very irritating and slow and opted out after that. I then went to german.about.com and found it to be much better as it explained the 'why' and 'why nots'. I find it to be more efficient where as the Rosetta seems to be more for teaching young children.
Did anyone use the online version? I want to know if it is basically the same as the CD's.
thanks MountBerg ~
I use Rosetta Stone to learn French, it easily-remembered and nice programme. But, sometimes it is really boring.