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Why don’t people here like Rosetta Stone? | ||
Tags: Rosetta Stone | Usefulness | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| johntm93 Senior Member United States Joined 5123 days ago 587 posts - 746 votes  2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 41 of 93 28 June 2010 at 8:12am | IP Logged | ||
They have this, but I don't know how helpful it'd be. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5782 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 42 of 93 29 June 2010 at 2:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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Over the years I've dabbled in a lot of languages, and I fell for the
Rosetta Stone marketing in about 2002 or so. I bought German, Japanese, and Spanish, if I remember correctly. I now speak German, but only because of considerable effort 8 years later using totally different methods. I'm not necessarily a "hater", but I usually recommend people away from Rosetta Stone. Here are my main problems with it: 1) it doesn't give beginners what they need to feel more comfortable 2) it doesn't have enough content to take you to an intermediate level 3) the content is boring 4) it doesn't help you develop the skills that you will need in order to get through intermediate and advanced levels (because this would contradict the promise that buying Rosetta Stone gives you EVERYTHING YOU NEED!) 5) it's expensive I'll go through these in a minute, but firstly let me say that I'm still impressed that they continue to tell people that there are different ways to learn languages, and that languages can be learned by "absorbing" things without necessarily fully understanding them in an academic / mathematical sense. These are important concepts. Now, onto my beefs. 1) "They don't make beginners feel comfortable." I think that when a lot of people start learning a new language, they want something that makes sense, something they can hold on to and feel secure. This makes it hard to advocate that they start right away with an "absorbing" method where there's a long period of semi-confusion before the full absorption has occurred. For that full-absorption to happen, the learner has to listen to hundreds of hours of content in order to feel secure in the language. Most beginners are going to give up long before then, because they don't know how long they might have to wait, and they're unsure about their progress. As an alternative, what I like to suggest to beginners is to do a "bootstrapping" phase, where they get themselves a little bit familiar with the language and start to feel more comfortable with it. I think it helps to just know what's out there, what types of things exist in the language. Do some reading ABOUT the language first, like what types of sounds exist, what types of grammar ideas exist (like genders, cases, etc), how the language relates to other similar languages, how the writing works, who the famous authors are, what the history is. None of this bootstrapping phase should be about memorization or perfection, but rather just about getting a little bit of familiarity. There's no test on this stuff, just read it and explore a bit, and see what's interesting and unique. This gives you a bit of grounding in the language and makes you feel a bit more at home. It helps give a framework to relate things to. One of the ways I like to do this (which I did recently with Swedish) was to find a book like one of those "Essential Grammar" books that tries to cover every topic. Instead of memorizing or doing workbook exercises or trying to calculate out my own unique sentences, I merely read the examples. Just look at all sorts of different example sentences in there, to try to get a sense for how things work generally. Ideally you want to be able to say "oh neat, I see how that sentence is put together now", but there's no need to be able to put together your own sentences yet. An exercise like this lets you see a new sentence with all sorts of strange words, but it will still feel a little bit familiar because you can kinda see how it fits together. You can't create yet, but you can recognize a little bit, and this makes you feel more confident. It generally takes very little time to get to this point. Rosetta Stone did not give me this feeling at all. I just felt confused, until I got bored and quit. 2) "It doesn't have enough content". In order to really absorb a language, you need to expose yourself to a lot of real content. Just to give you a sense of the scale, you probably will have to read a few hundred thousand words in that language (I like to aim at 1 million, personally), and listen to hundreds or maybe thousands of hours of audio. This is what I think you need in order to reach some sort of basic fluency...if you just want to ask for train tickets, then clearly a lot less work is required, but if you want to talk to cute people in a bar about things that interest you generally, then you need wide-ranging comfort in the language and that comes from lots of input. Rosetta stone just doesn't have that much in it. I think it's good that it has a lot of stuff that might not be in a typical textbook, or maybe it comes at it from a different direction with a different conception of what's "hard" and "easy", but in total I just don't think it has enough substance. To get real substance and to make real progress to fluency, you need a way to get lots of interesting native content. And the word "interesting" is key here, which leads to my next point. 3) "The content is boring" To make progress in a language, you need to maintain your motivation. For me, this has been the single biggest obstacle to learning other languages, because when I get bored of the content I tend to jump to the next new shiny topic. I used to spend a few weeks on one language, then I'd get bored and stop, and a few weeks later I'd pick up a new language because it was bright and shiny. Rosetta Stone didn't help with this. Seeing these dumb pictures and simple sentences about counting tennis balls, and which color the clown's hair was, did not keep me interested and motivated, so I'd usually give up after a while. What really interested me was reading books (especially fantasy novels) in other languages. I thought it'd be super awesome if I could read alternate language equivalents of Robert Jordan, Tad Williams, and J.R.R. Tolkein. I wanted to find cool books like that in German and Spanish. I also developed an interest in poetry after reading a dual-language english/spanish book of Pablo Neruda poems, and wanted to find more like that....but listening to a bunch of lame sentences with funny pictures didn't really help me get there... 4) "it doesn't help you develop skills" Rosetta Stone markets itself as an all-in-one package that will teach you the language. When I used it, I really felt that I had to force myself to work through it from start to finish so that I'd get awesome! They didn't give any suggestions about how to work from other materials using their ideas. Also, because their sentences were generally stupid and boring, and all isolated from each other, with no sense of context, it kept me thinking about learning in a counterproductive way. I was still thinking in a textbook mindset, where I had to master simple context-free examples before I could tackle real native content, which I think is totally backwards. Now I think that context is king. It doesn't matter if you understand every little detail of a sentence in a book as long as you can get the general idea from using the context. Reading a book is not an exercise in perfection, but actually starts like a picture loading on the internet. First you get a blurry approximation, and then you improve over time until you see a precise image. You still get a lot of good information from the blurry approximation, but it doesn't work too well when you just read one sentence at a time that is totally separated from everything else. 5) "It's expensive" This one is a no-brainer. Back in 2002 I spent hundreds of dollars buying Rosetta Stone in German, but it got me basically nowhere. I couldn't converse, I couldn't read a book, I couldn't understand TV. In 2009, I spent hundreds of dollars buying DVDs of my favourite TV shows dubbed in German, like 150+ hours of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, along with some CSI and South Park, etc. I also bought a bunch of Harry Potter books with the audiobooks. This stuff was all fun and very interesting to me. It was very challenging at the start, but I found that by doing a lot of listening and reading, combined with some occasional dictionary lookups (but not too many), then I made steady progress. I spent less money than I did on Rosetta stone 7 years before that, but I had way more fun and got way better results. Now I'm off in Germany (actually, technically I'm in Austria this week but I'll be back in Germany soon), and I'm speaking with cute girls in a bar about general topics of interest. Mission accomplished, no thanks to Rosetta Stone. In summary: you need lots of content, it has to be fun otherwise you'll quit, and Rosetta Stone doesn't give you these (plus it's expensive). If you really want a very structured approach to starting a language, I recommend Assimil, because it mostly solves the 5 problems I listed above. It helps beginners feel comfortable, has more content, is more interesting, it helps you develop skills that will enable you to move quickly to real native content, and it's not as expensive. I still think you need more content after Assimil, but at least it helps you go in the right direction. 19 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| joebelt Diglot Groupie United States Joined 6129 days ago 51 posts - 68 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 43 of 93 30 June 2010 at 5:10am | IP Logged | ||
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doviende,
Sounds like you were in the 22.5% of the Rockman Evaluation Report. :) http://resources.rosettastone.com/CDN/us/pdfs/Rockman-Evalua tion-Report.pdf Edited by joebelt on 30 June 2010 at 5:11am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5807 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 44 of 93 30 June 2010 at 9:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm confused. The study says "Anyone with prior experience with
Spanish was not included, and the pool was weighted towards individuals with no foreign language experience." yet it also states that "Of the 89 participants who took the ACTFL OPI-C pretest, 84 scored in the lowest category, Novice Low. The remaining five scored in the next level up, Novice Mid." How can people with no knowledge of Spanish score Novice Mid in a pretest? And is a 2 level increase worth anything if you can be level 2 without any knowledge of the language whatsoever? Anyway, there's a vital piece of information missing from the study: how long does it take learners using other methods to make similar gains? There's no control, so the conclusion is effectively "you'll know 2 more at the end than when you started". But what does 2 mean? And finally: most Rosetta Stone learners won't be opting for the 6 hour tutor package, so the test isn't a test of their core product. (Oh, and did the tutors know that they were teaching for this? Experimenter bias and all that...) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| cm006j Newbie United States whitehindu.blogspot. Joined 5090 days ago 23 posts - 28 votes Studies: Mandarin, Hindi, Sign Language | Message 45 of 93 30 June 2010 at 11:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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I really love Rosetta Stone. It was my introduction into language learning and I've gotten so much mileage out of it. I think it is a high quality product and I value the time and effort put into it by so many people and I'm happy to pay them to do it. I'm not rich, but I didn't regret putting it on my credit card.
It might be a slower way to learn and I've now started to piggyback into new things and methods. But it gave me an extremely good basis in the language I am learning, made it so I feel and think and understand in that language in a really deep way. I wish there were a better way to test it out before paying because it really is great for some people and not great for others. Anyway, just pure emotional response from me. I love Rosetta Stone so much that it's hard for me to hear people criticize it. It changed my perception of myself as someone who can't learn languages to someone who is going to know languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| CaucusWolf Senior Member United States Joined 5068 days ago 191 posts - 234 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Arabic (Written), Japanese | Message 46 of 93 01 July 2010 at 3:55am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm another unsatisfied Customer of Rosetta Stone. I would say it definitely wasn't for me and I would never recommend it to anyone. The problem I had was the idea of Rosetta Stone is like teaching a child his first language. This premise sounds nice in writing but when you're an adult its different and we crave more knowledge when we're older because we understand more. There was also no way of learning how to write in Arabic as far as I could tell and as others have said as well Grammar wasn't addressed at all.(Although I did use the demo) Fortunately I found FSI and I stand by it and will use it in future language learning ventures. I'm not saying that its going to teach you the fastest way possible but it will certainly teach you 100% better then I felt RS did. Rosetta Stone is also very overrated and it's unfortunate that everyone who has no idea of language learning has been brainwashed to say that RS is the best option because its used by the military or whatever. Its very sad that programs like FSI get spat on before being tried.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| joebelt Diglot Groupie United States Joined 6129 days ago 51 posts - 68 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 47 of 93 01 July 2010 at 3:57am | IP Logged | ||
I think the point is that in the States everyone is Novice Low in Spanish. Hard to find someone that doesn't know how to say "hola" or "gracias", which pretty much qualifies you for Novice Low. The description of ACTFL's Novice Low level is someone who has no real functional ability and, because of their pronunciation, they may be unintelligible. Given adequate time and familiar cues, they may be able to exchange greetings, give their identity, and name a number of familiar objects from their immediate environment. Had they tested Chinese, most people would have been true beginners. One can only imagine the outcome... If you note, they say that 47% jumped one level (achieving a Novice Mid), 25% jumped two levels (Novice High), and 23% did not make any measurable progress. What's hilarious is reading the ACTFL description for a Novice Mid level: Speakers at the Novice-Mid level communicate minimally and with difficulty by using a number of isolated words and memorized phrases limited by the particular context in which the language has been learned. When responding to direct questions, they may utter only two or three words at a time or an occasional stock answer. They pause frequently as they search for simple vocabulary or attempt to recycle their own and their interlocutor’s words. Because of hesitations, lack of vocabulary, inaccuracy, or failure to respond appropriately, Novice-Mid speakers may be understood with great difficulty even by sympathetic interlocutors accustomed to dealing with non-natives. When called on to handle topics by performing functions associated with the Intermediate level, they frequently resort to repetition, words from their native language, or silence. People should feel good achieving this level after spending $1,000+ and studying for 70 hours??? This is a selling point? Really? Does anyone know if other companies have made ACTFL testing claims? Assimil? FSI? Berlitz? Living Language? Pimsleur? Edited by joebelt on 01 July 2010 at 3:59am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| hobbitofny Senior Member United States Joined 6029 days ago 280 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 48 of 93 01 July 2010 at 4:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Joebelt, Yes, Pimsleur: "Nine out of ten Pimsleur users report they have acquired specific, measurable spoken foreign-language communication skills when they have completed the first thirty lessons of a Level I Comprehensive Program. This means that even with as little as 15 hours of Pimsleur language training, ninety percent of Pimsleur learners are able to converse comfortably with native speakers.
This is the Intermediate-Low Level of proficiency on the ACTFL Spoken Language Proficiency Scale. The next level of proficiency is reached in another 30 days, in only 15 more hours, at the completion of a Comprehensive Level II program. At this level the learner will be proficient at the Intermediate-Mid Spoken Proficiency Level. Then, in another 30 days, after completing the Level III Comprehensive program, in another 15 hours, the learner will be proficient at the ACTFL Intermediate-High Proficiency level." It is found on http://languagelovers.com/index.php?option=com_content&view= article&id=122 Edited by hobbitofny on 01 July 2010 at 4:21am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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