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Rosetta Stone problems. | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| ALS Senior Member United States Joined 5803 days ago 104 posts - 131 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian, Finnish, Russian | Message 1 of 11 15 January 2010 at 1:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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As much as I like Rosetta Stone, I can't stand the "absolutely NO help whatsoever,
figure it out" approach. I'm on lesson 2 of the first CD of Russian, and it just presented me with a whole bunch of noun inflections. How am I supposed to remember this from the last lesson and how am I supposed to comprehend this? It's a man standing in front of a car and both the words for "man" and "car" decline differently than what I've seen so far. Does this mean "the man's car" or "a man with a car" or what? And then it goes back to negatives and it all declines in a whole new way. And this is an hour into the software. I know Russian is very grammar-heavy but this is completely overwhelming and is no better than glancing through a high school grammar book. I understand the whole "learn a language like you did as an infant" thing, but how can I be expected to get these questions right when nothing is explained and there's several possible answers? Especially when there's many new grammar points presented at once and none of them are very clear. I think Rosetta Stone is a great program, but only for languages that have simpler grammar. Once you get into languages with more complex inflection systems, the complete lack of explanation really hurts it when you're trying to understand why these two seemingly similar images have completely different grammar rules. Edited by ALS on 15 January 2010 at 1:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5520 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 3 of 11 15 January 2010 at 2:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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That's one of the major problems with Rosetta Stone. An actual child has much more time to devote to his studies, in fact all day every day for a dozen years and more. Prehaps even more importantly, they will be receiving much better feedback than you. The infant says "lamp green" and the mother looks at the lamp and says "yes darling, the lamp is green" giving him not only a corrected version of what he just said, but also confirming that it wasn't that far off by understanding and looking at the lamp.
Another problem is that sitting in front of your computer screen and seeing endless numbers of pretty boring pictures is much more tiring than running around in real life and do actual things that you want to do anyway, and all the time interact in the language you are learning. You can get a much better approximation by going to the country in question and try to do stuff, like buying milk and asking directions. The trouble with this is that you can't be too self-counscious and you certainly can't worry about saying things the right way before you even open your mouth. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6469 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 4 of 11 15 January 2010 at 3:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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Try LiveMocha, it's like Rosetta Stone but free and people typically post translations or hints, so that you don't have to do without help.
Or scrap the method altogether, as I believe it is a lot slower and more tiring than learning by reference to your native language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ALS Senior Member United States Joined 5803 days ago 104 posts - 131 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian, Finnish, Russian | Message 5 of 11 15 January 2010 at 3:42pm | IP Logged | ||
I agree completely. I think Rosetta Stone would be helped immensely if there was just a little button you could push on the screen that gave some information on the new grammar points presented in that group of pictures. Why these two pictures have this noun suffix, why these two have a different one, etc. One of my favorite methods is Michel Thomas. The teacher explains grammar points in very clear, simple ways, there's built-in spaced repetition to help with memory, and the students make mistakes which the teacher corrects. Infact, the only things I don't like about MT are most of the students annoy the crap out of me and the lack of transcriptions. Edited by ALS on 15 January 2010 at 3:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6010 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 6 of 11 15 January 2010 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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But LiveMocha has it's own problem: between each prompt you've got to wait for the next sound file to download. It really slows things down.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5559 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 7 of 11 15 January 2010 at 5:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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The uncertainty of what the pictures are supposed to represent is my own pet hate with
RS. I've only done a few levels myself, but I did find that when a new concept was introduced, you could usually work out the correct answer by elimination (and using the previous knowledge) and then it would be reinforced in the next level. A lot of language learning guides suggest working things out for yourself improves the memorisation, but I'm not sure if "by elimination" counts. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6010 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 8 of 11 15 January 2010 at 7:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, the original research into "discovery learning" has been badly abused by a lot of people. I think Rosetta Stone's problem is that you can work out how to give the correct answer without knowing why it's the correct answer.
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