Rosetta Stone

[Master_script_maker]

Hi everyone. Has anyone used this product to learn a language? I am going to be learning Chinese through this program and was wondering if this is the right way to go.

[Schmoopy]

I thought it was terrible personally...

Yea you can learn vocab with it but it's not so great with the grammar side of things, lack of actual teaching how to conjugate verbs and more reliant on just teaching you common phrases. They make it look nice and visual and hi-tech with voice recognition but if I were to recommend anyone it would be Michel Thomas, unfortunately he didn't cover Chinese, only the romance languages and German I think.

Edit: Also costs A LOT...

[Twey]

I have had only bad experiences with Rosetta Stone — mostly having to explain the fundamentals of grammar and writing to people who have 'learnt' languages the Rosetta Stone way. I would certainly never recommend it for a language where the written language bears little relation to the spoken, such as the Chinese languages.

[Schmoopy]

If anything, just use if for vocabulary, the structure of the language will be harder to grasp, but this is just coming from experience in languages closer to home, chinese is a little more complicated and I'm not sure it's as simple as "this" = "this" like in the romance languages. If they do a free trial or something then try that and if you don't like it, don't buy it :)

I'm sure there are other, better language packs, just need to look ;)

[Lpe04]

If they do a free trial or something then try that and if you don't like it, don't buy it They do offer a free trial, but it is very short, not enough to tell if it is any good or not :( It is used by the CIA though ;)

[djr33]

I've checked it out. If it works for you, great. But it's no miracle. It's for people who won't deal with grammar, and it is very monotonous, gets boring after a while. It'll get you somewhere, but it takes a lot of time, so you better like doing it. It's a good addition (again, if it works for you) to another means, but using it alone seems like it would be hard to get anywhere, but I haven't done it long enough to really give a full opinion.
Some of the theories behind it are good, but I'm not sure where you really get after you get through it all-- you do learn, but what's the result? Fluency? Unlikely. (Maybe after you've gotten through their "level 3" you're close, but that's not likely either.)

On the other hand, if you have absolutely no idea what you're doing (language learning is something I do a lot, so maybe I'm not the one to ask), and you want to spend hours clicking boxes on your computer while imitating a language, it's one way to go. There's certainly just busy work required, which is, basically, how children learn language in the first place. But it's not creative, just brute force.

[Lpe04]

Have you tried Pimsleur?

[Twey]

If anything, just use if for vocabulary, the structure of the language will be harder to grasp, but this is just coming from experience in languages closer to home, chinese is a little more complicated and I'm not sure it's as simple as "this" = "this" like in the romance languages.It's not — it's actually considerably simpler, on the whole. The writing is the only thing that may present a problem.

[Schmoopy]

Well all I know is words are derived from categories like earth, water, fire and air - Then the symbols come from then, I mean it's just completely different to the language we've grown up with, you have to rethink how to structure sentences.

[molendijk]

The Rosetta Stone learning method is worthless. It starts from the false assumption that grown ups can learn a new language the way they learnt their own language. That is a very naive assumption, since part of a child's environment is language ... language ... language etc. (and some milk, toys etc.) all day long. You can not emultate that situation.

It naturally follows from the Rosetta Stone's philosophy that 'they' don't explicitly offer grammar, vocabulay, exercices in translation etc.

Worthless.
===
Arie.

[Twey]

Well all I know is words are derived from categories like earth, water, fire and air - Then the symbols come from thenThat's a bit of an oversimplification. There are a few very simple characters, and then, on the whole, a character is formed of a phonetic radical and one or more semantic radicals. For example, the character 語 means language, and is pronounced yu3 in Mandarin; so, it contains 言 meaning 'say', 口 meaning 'mouth', and 五 meaning 'five', which is pronounced wu3: 'sounds like wu3 and has to do with the mouth and speech'.


I mean it's just completely different to the language we've grown up with, you have to rethink how to structure sentences.Of course that depends on what 'the language we've grown up with' is, but if you mean English then that's not really true at all. Chinese grammar has a very simple subject-verb-object (or rather topic-verb-object, but in most sentences they're equivalent) structure, reminiscent of English grammar; there's no inflection; and word order is very regular, with moods and the like mostly indicated with particles. German, for example, is far more different from English grammatically than Chinese is.

[Schmoopy]

Well, as I said I don't really know much about Mandarin, and was purely going on what a chinese friend said.

[Lpe04]

At least now you can watch Kung Fu movies without the subtitles ;)