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Rosetta Stone Q&A (Former Employee) | ||
Tags: Rosetta Stone | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| TerryW Senior Member United States Joined 6385 days ago 370 posts - 783 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 9 of 109 10 June 2012 at 5:41pm | IP Logged | ||
Could you elaborate on why most of the forum members here refer to it as Blows-etta Stone? ;-) 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5458 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 10 of 109 10 June 2012 at 7:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've always been curious about the bad reputation that RS has here at HTLAL. I have never used the product myself and have no opinion about it. Generally speaking, I've never been impressed by self-study products, but I have nothing against them per se.
I would like to add that something that has always irked me is the fact that none of these materials make any kind of reference to a specific level of proficiency. Other than becoming "fluent"--whatever that means--,just what will you be able to do after level 1, 2, 3 or whatever? The other thing that I would love to see is a user of a given product come on Youtube and actually demonstrate what he or she can do in the target language. I'm always struck by the number of people talking about learning a language with some fabulous product and yet nobody actually seems to have used the product with tangible results. Edited by s_allard on 10 June 2012 at 7:34pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5910 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 11 of 109 10 June 2012 at 8:06pm | IP Logged | ||
Aside from being mind-numbingly boring and, IMO, very inefficient....and that it doesn't really cover that much vocabulary (ok, I could go on and on, but I'll just respond to the quoted point. And yes, I did buy two versions, V2 of German and the TOTALe version for Korean - the German product was ok, Korean was terrible. In fact, I'd say V2 was better than V3 and on. It was more free-form and gave you a good number of choices on how to review the material to the point that you could review all of the material in every possible way. V3 cut down on that and now only has a fracture of the exercises V2 offered. But it sure does look prettier!) Even if Rosetta Stone were the best way to learn a Romance language, I still would not buy it. For $400, I can buy Assimil, Teach Yourself French, Teach Yourself Perfect Your French, a few other self-learning products, a dozen novels, a few audiobooks, a few vocab books, a grammar reference, several dual language books, a few workbooks and I would still would have plenty of money left over. I can't afford to spend thousands of dollars on every language I want to learn. Given the choice to spend $400 on Rosetta Stone, or going with the option and spending less than $400 on all of the things I listed above, I'll go with later every time even if RS were objectively and provably the very best way to learn a language. It'd be nice if I could afford everything, including RS and Fluenz, and not care about "bang for my buck", but I can't. (And just to add that, IMO, Assimil and Teach Yourself are 1a and 1b for learning a new language.) I'm a programmer. I get why it costs so much. Most people say the marketing (which is part of it), but there's a ton of work that goes into the product, and I'm assuming the voice recognition part of the program is licensed, which costs a good amount of money (if they make it on their own, then that's even more expensive). Plus they added online tutoring with TOTALe. All of those people need to get paid. So I understand why it costs so much. But after you add up everything, IMO, the sum is not worth the cost of the parts. 16 persons have voted this message useful |
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