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Can you become Fluent with Rosetta Stone? | ||
Tags: Rosetta Stone | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 17 of 24 12 March 2011 at 9:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
Exactly. It's like asking "Can I become a chef if I study book X?". No lesson plan alone can make you fluent. Becoming fluent in any language will require extensive interaction with humans. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Slacker Diglot Pro Member United States Joined 5454 days ago 62 posts - 99 votes Speaks: Spanish, English Studies: German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Arabic (classical) Personal Language Map | Message 18 of 24 13 March 2011 at 6:36am | IP Logged | |||||
Sanghee, That has pretty much been my experience as well, doing two levels of Italian. I just looked back through the course content guide to refresh my memory, and it is just like you're saying. I actually thought it was kind of clever, a picture of a lady looking into the window of a jewelry store -> "The woman wants a necklace", then a guy walking down the road, leaving his abandoned car behind, carrying a gas can -> "The man needs gasoline for his car". I like to think that, although the two pictures are separate, that the man and the woman are married, somehow that just makes it seem more "real" and sink in better :) As for "can", I'm remembering a 4-square picture story, in frame one, a kid is asking his mom "Can we eat outside" [In the picture, if I remember right, he and mom are standing inside, she is holding a tray of food, and he's pointing outside to a picnic table." frame two: mom says something to the effect of "No way, we can't eat outside!" [I think she's wagging her finger, maybe shaking her head] frame three: the disappointed kid is making the "why not?" face. final frame four (spoiler alert): mom is pointing at the newspaper weather report, "because it's going to rain." For the past/present/future tenses of the verbs, they use overlays of calendars and clocks, with the appropriate section highlighted... it sounds complicated, and if you just jump right into one of the "busier" pictures, it might be confusing while you decode it on first glance, but as you progress along, it actually makes sense. I think they also use comic-book style "thought bubbles" to convey concepts like "I used to" "I would have" "I wanted to" and the like. I would equate the difficulty of understanding the pictures to the same level of difficulty as understanding comic books... like, how they actually work, and the little semantic codes that you had to learn when you learned how to read a comic, things like thought-bubbles, flash-backs, flash-forwards, (even some flash-sideways)... matter of fact, I just Googled "How to Read Comic Books", and I think this sort of hits it: //below quoted from http://www.ehow.com/how_2103558_read-comic-books.html // 1 - Read the captions from left to right and top to bottom. Sometimes the conversation is layered because the characters are speaking back and forth. 2 - Be attentive to what words are being used. Since comic books have very little dialogue, it is important to see what carefully chosen words the author has selected. The writing will be extremely clear and concise. 3 - Examine the pictures first on a superficial level. Most of the story will actually be told through the graphics. Notice the characters, what they are wearing, the setting and any action being depicted. This will fill in some of the details left out of the text. 4 - Dig deeper into the picture. Notice the use of color, shadowing and facial expressions. Think about common dichotomies, such as white and light colors = good, black and darker colors = bad, smiles = happy feelings and frowns or eyebrows drawn in = sad feelings. 5 - Infer the transitions. You will need to examine the next frame the same way you did the first, then infer, or figure out, what details probably tied the two together. Unlike a book or movie, a comic is more of a snap shot portrayal of a story that moves from frame to frame. //end quote// -Slacker 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Slacker Diglot Pro Member United States Joined 5454 days ago 62 posts - 99 votes Speaks: Spanish, English Studies: German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Arabic (classical) Personal Language Map | Message 19 of 24 13 March 2011 at 6:49am | IP Logged | |||||
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Schoenewaelder,
So, to summarize what just took me like 10 paragraphs to explain, they use multiple pictures in a comic-book like format to develop more complex grammatical patterns, for example, using three distinct pictures to convey the following dialogue: A: Would you like to come to my birthday party Thursday? B: Yes, please. Can I bring anything? A: Bring salad, please. That explains it!... Although it doesn't explain why you would want someone to bring a salad to your birthday party. -Slacker 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Margarita Diglot Newbie Netherlands Joined 5576 days ago 19 posts - 22 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 | Message 20 of 24 13 March 2011 at 3:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Also, when you want to start a new programm try to find a sample first online. (like Michel Thomas offers as a sample bits of the first CD online to listen to) Then don't try the one in your target language but take the one teaching a language you already know.
My native language for example is Dutch and when I first wanted to try the MichelThomas method to learn another language I tried the Dutch sample because I am already fluent in that language and could check this way wether or not their lessons make sense. Different languages are often taught/written by different teachers in all those programms but it can give you a general idea of the quality. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6230 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 22 of 24 14 March 2011 at 3:06am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think the true value of Rosetta Stone software is not in establishing fluency in a language but providing novelty!
Example; My kids love playing with the RS program and it is exposing them to all kinds of different languages; Swedish, Japanese, heck, the other day we even did Navajo ( available free on the RS website). It is fun to "try out" languages with and see if they would be enjoyable to you. RS is a novel addition to other components of a language-learning program as others have stated in this post. When I'm feeling a bit stale with my books and tapes, I'll pop in RS and play with it for a while. I should also disclose that I get it free through my library. The prices RS charges are absolutely appalling! I think a fair and reasonable price would be $50 a level or all 3 for $125. Clearly RS is targeting corporate travelers with generous expense accounts! In summary:
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| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 23 of 24 14 March 2011 at 12:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
Syntax error in line 3. (Sorry, feeling a bit nostalgic for BBC BASIC ;-) Seriously though, I'm worried by this. In English, "can" functions as permission and polite request as well as its core meaning of ability or possibility. When the boy asks "can we", the English speaker sees that as a request, not a query of ability or possibility. But in this dialogue, the mother is responding by saying it's an impossibility, not denying permission. I think this crossing of the senses of the English "can" holds true for "potere" in Italian, but it is not true in many languages, and as I understand it Rosetta Stone still does not do much customisation for different languages, preferring to teach "to template". Even if they don't use this dialogue to teach languages that maintain a distinction between permission and ability/possibility, it still doesn't work, because the style of teaching assumes that these crossed senses are natural and understandable, but that same Italian course will be sold to people who don't think of the two senses as the same. The course appears to assume all learners know what a native English speaker knows. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Slacker Diglot Pro Member United States Joined 5454 days ago 62 posts - 99 votes Speaks: Spanish, English Studies: German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Arabic (classical) Personal Language Map | Message 24 of 24 15 March 2011 at 3:22am | IP Logged | |||||
Cainntear, I can't believe that my debugger didn't catch that! I'm usually pretty good about closing out all of my }'s, ]'s, )'s, and "'s. I see what you're saying, but I think that my English translation is actually more confusing than the Italian. Depending on the level of propriety/stiltedness, the boy should be asking "Mummy, MAY we eat outside?" {because, of course, they have the ability to do so, despite the fact that they might get soaked}, to which a response such as "No we may not" might be in order. In Italian; however, I think that the following makes sense: A: Possiamo cenare fuori? B: No, Non possiamo cenare fuori. A: Perche' no? B: Perche' piovera`. I think that in Italian, this makes sense (any Italian speakers, please feel free to correct me!)... to me it is similar to the Spanish "poder" ... but even then I think the "may" vs. "able to" distinction is about as blurry as it is in modern English. From what I'm finding of the newer (version 3) RS, they actually do customize to the specific language, at least as far as I can tell from only doing two levels of Italian and aborting level one of Arabic. For example, in Italian, there is at least one lesson that taught me that I use "a" for saying "in a city" (Io vivo a Parigi), but use "in" for "in a country" (Io vivo in Francia). I'm guessing this lesson doesn't exist in the Spanish version ('en' for both). And in the first few lessons of the Arabic, the lessons taught the differences between singular, dual, and plural. Regarding your statement "The course appears to assume all learners know what a native English speaker knows", I think this is true to a point, but less because of the need to know English, and more because of a need to know understand American imagery. For example, in the lesson that I was doing today (German Level 1), there were pictures of "The family lives in a house" and "The family lives in an apartment", as well as "she's in an apartment" vs. "she's in a house". It is only through very subtle visual clues that I, as someone pretty well steeped in American culture, could distinguish the interior of a house from the interior of an apartment. I could imagine that someone from a non-USA/Western-European culture might be puzzled, especially if there is not the same visual distinction in whatever language (Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Swahili) that they are learning. -Slacker 1 person has voted this message useful |
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