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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| AlexL Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7086 days ago 197 posts - 277 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 9 of 34 28 June 2008 at 11:03am | IP Logged | ||
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Rosetta Stone German Version 3 uses "du" lots of times, whenever it would be appropriate. This is also true of the informal forms of address in other languages; in Spanish and Italian, for instance, users get plenty of practice with "tu". I'm also not sure I'd say that the material is "all in all quite limited". While it won't make you fluent, I've been using the Italian program with great success. I'm halfway through Level 2 and have already been taught the present tense, two past tenses, and future tense. All six conjugations are covered, including the informal and formal forms of "you". Furthermore, in response to one of the posts further down, sentences like "the boy is on the horse" have been removed from the third version of the software, released in 2007. There is now a much bigger focus on conversation, with most sentences involving "me" or "you". The software is very expensive, but I find v3 to be pretty effective, at least for languages that you have a little background in. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| J-Learner Senior Member Australia Joined 6032 days ago 556 posts - 636 votes Studies: Yiddish, English* Studies: Dutch | Message 10 of 34 28 June 2008 at 4:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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I feel that Rosetta Stone is simply a fancy looking vocab list. Its repetative nature can only be offset by creating your own lists of the lessons and working through them while crossing them off the said list. Well at least that kind of worked.
I would rather be able to print the pictures and create dual language pretty flash cards then actually use it. Actually that is not a bad idea...screen capture is my friend! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| AlexL Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7086 days ago 197 posts - 277 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 11 of 34 29 June 2008 at 12:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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J-Learner, I wonder if you have the latest version of Rosetta Stone? I've learned more than vocab with RS Italian--
though its wide range of vocab is its best feature. There are now grammar exercises, along with a suggested course of study so you're not constantly guessing which activity to do next. If you are using the old version of the program (v2), then there is actually no need for screen capture because all of the picture files are already stored on the language disk, and can easily be copied over to your hard drive. :-). The audio files are all separated and available, too, on the CD in the older version. Alex 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| J-Learner Senior Member Australia Joined 6032 days ago 556 posts - 636 votes Studies: Yiddish, English* Studies: Dutch | Message 12 of 34 30 June 2008 at 5:01am | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, I have got the new version. it is ok but I just find it too repetative. This is for someone who can listen to the same radio broadcasts 100 times and write out the same sentences constantly and never get bored.
I feel that no course is complete by itself and that RS seems to be less complete than the others. I will certainly give the Hebrew version a go once I have reached a a better level with it to find things I may have missed and to get some other structures more cemented in my mind. I find that I have no problem guessing what to do next. I Preview, do A1 to A4 one day, next day do the tests for those 4. Then I move to the next group of words. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 13 of 34 01 July 2008 at 5:36am | IP Logged | ||
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I tried the Rosetta Stone sampler CD-ROM and I hated it.
The all-visual approach ignores one important thing: language is the most powerful tool humans have. A good teacher can tell you what something means, even if it means two or three things. A picture cannot. Looking at a picture of a man drinking and seeing a sentence, I have no idea whether the sentence means "the man is drinking" or "the man drinks" or both. I find it very frustrating because even though I can say it, I don't know what it means. Verbs just cannot be expressed easily in anything other than words. Urgh... this reminds me of the TeachMe! series. They're basically flashcard drills, reasonable ones, but basically flashcards. (A bit overpriced, IMO.) The old version use linguistic prompts, but the current version uses some words, some pictures. All well and good, but how can a static picture of a light switch show unambiguously the difference between "switch off" and "switch on", and a picture of a door "close" and "open". Verbs are very difficult to draw, even when you're not considering tense. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| J-Learner Senior Member Australia Joined 6032 days ago 556 posts - 636 votes Studies: Yiddish, English* Studies: Dutch | Message 14 of 34 01 July 2008 at 9:46am | IP Logged | ||
I think yes and no. For only a picture yes it will be largely difficult. But some verbs can be displayed and have people understand them. smile, laugh, walk, run, stand, sitting Some verbs need to be shown in action (transitional states). sitting down, standing up, opening, closing And even some verbs are completely abstract so as to be only be learn in context. to think, to believe, to feel. Since verbs are NOT just doing words (as we might have been taught in school), some cannot be taught at all, but known only experientially. The word 'experience'...both a verb and a noun (at least) - shows this phenomenon. Correct me if I am on a wild tangent hahaha. But yes Rosetta Stone is just another incomplete program like all the others. May those who find it useful do well with it and for those who do not, may they find other methods compliment their learning style. Shalom, Yehoshua. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 15 of 34 01 July 2008 at 11:43am | IP Logged | ||
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The picture is still abiguous in tense though.
For example, Rosetta Stone may present a picture of a boy running. In my childhood, pictures accompanied a past narative. "The boy ran." I may alternative treat it like sports commentary on TV, which gives my two options: the progressive "The boy is running." or the present simple "The boy runs."* Or maybe I was brought up on "modern" picture books using the present simple and I think "the boy runs". What I infer from the picture is based on my previous experience and the software makes no effort to determine what my internal interpretation is. As such, there is at best a 1 in 3 chance that any individual [*] Although there's no such thing as the present simple in English outside the world of live sports commentary and brainless books that are naively designed to make reading easy for children. Easy? Kids of 5 can say "I went" and "he did" at least as well as "I go" and "he does", so what on Earth is wrong with using the past tense in books? Isn't that how stories always worked? Once upon a time there was... and all that! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| J-Learner Senior Member Australia Joined 6032 days ago 556 posts - 636 votes Studies: Yiddish, English* Studies: Dutch | Message 16 of 34 01 July 2008 at 12:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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Indeed. Tense is not to be worked out from a picture. I am not sure what stories have to do with it though. I'll leave it to you to think about that hehehe.
In some languages, as you would know, there is no distincion between: he runs, he is running and even sometimes a form of future he runs. These, while being the same word, must be understood in context. No vocab list will ever acheive the total understanding of that. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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