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Rosetta Stone revisited | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Lemberg1963 Bilingual Diglot Groupie United States zamishka.blogspot.coRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4035 days ago 41 posts - 82 votes  Speaks: English*, Ukrainian* Studies: French, German, Spanish, Polish | Message 25 of 51 29 April 2013 at 8:40am | IP Logged | |||||
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Warning: I’m going to be a devil’s advocate for Rosetta Stone in this post, so if the
thought of RS makes you froth at the mouth and speak demonic chants like the girl from the Exorcist, then just avoid reading this because you’ll hate me forever and I’d prefer that we remain friends. Secondly, I am by no means an expert polyglot and am speaking from my humble experience. The following opinions are based on the numerous mistakes I have made learning languages over the years. My credentials are fluency in English and Ukrainian and A2-B1 in French, Spanish, German and Russian. This opinion is also based on my experience with the demos and not the full product. With the introductions out of the way. I have always been skeptical of Rosetta Stone and looked at it with a degree of disdain, but I had never before actually used it. I recently completed the Spanish tree on DuoLingo in only two weeks, and I enjoyed that process greatly. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I become interested in education gamification and other online learning platforms, which brought me to Rosetta Stone’s Totale. I initially did all of the Polish demo lessons that they have (one for each level 1-3). I did Polish, which is similar to my Ukrainian, so that I could take a look at higher level grammar like prepositions and adverbs in L3 and see how the “no English” method performs at that level. I had no problems figuring out higher concepts, and was pleasantly surprised to find out that Rosetta Stone is actually how I am already learning languages right now. Rosetta Stone is n+1 content, it is filled with audio and images and uses a crude form of spaced repetition. All of these are tactics that I use daily for making Anki cards. Rosetta Stone would fit in my workflow perfectly. After Polish, I also did the first unit of L1 Farsi to see what it would be like to use RS with a language I have very no knowledge of. It didn’t start out well. I spent the first fifteen minutes raging out loud about what the hell does dorad mean in dokhtar dorad ab midovad. Then, in a moment of clarity, I realized something about myself. I suspect that most active language learners (by which I mean nerds like us who are willing to write long posts on a language learning forum when most of the general population doesn’t even know what a forum is) tend to overanalyze the language they’re learning. We want to know every nook and cranny of the language, and although we say that we hate grammar, we do feel a sense of achievement when we master a certain conjugation or pronounce a word correctly. With a product like RS, where the English is hidden from you, you have to be zen about the process, just let go man. The dorad will be there whether you go out of the way to figure out what it means or not. Just accept that dokhtar dorad ab midovad means the girl is drinking water and go on to the next lesson. I finished the unit, I still am not sure what the dorad does, and that’s fine. What I really enjoyed about RS, however, was the little bings that you get when you answer a question correctly, as well as the visual progression you see when you complete each lesson, similarly to the achievement tree in DuoLingo. Yeah, I know, it’s cheap Pavlovian training, but it’s cheap Pavlovian training that works. I’m lazy, incredibly lazy, and I tend to get distracted easily, but those little bings kept me motivated to keep moving. I know that if I start a Rosetta Stone product, I will finish it, and from my numerous failures in language learning I know that motivation and consistency is the thing that matters most. Now, of course, the price of Rosetta Stone has to be addressed. Is RS pricing outrageous? I personally don’t think so. For $300 Rosetta Stone will bring you to around a B1 level, which is enough for you to stop “studying” and start progressing by watching L2 news and reading native books. Programs like Pimsleur ($200) and Michel Thomas ($330) are arguably worse deals since they bring you up to only an A1 or generous A2 level. Heck, my $4000 Introductory Spanish semester course would have brought me up to only A1 if I hadn’t been studying on my own. A much better argument can be made in comparing RS to TY or Assimil, which are significantly cheaper than RS. If you can get TY or Assimil to work for you, that’s great. I’ve read the posts on this forum and it seems Assimil especially works for a lot of people. I know that they’re not realistic options for me because I would never finish them. There’s a reason I’m only B1 in my four intermediate languages. I get bored of doing paper exercises and then skip a day of studying, which turns into a week, and then a month etc. Is RS marketing telling the truth that it will get you to fluency? Absolutely not. Is RS marketing telling the truth that it’s the fastest way to learn? Probably not. Does that matter? Not to me. What matters is that Rosetta Stone works for me because it is the language learning equivalent of Barney. There are lots of pretty colors, tons of loud noises, a lot of movement and the end result is that it keeps me learning. Heck, the price itself is a factor that motivates you to finish (marketing 101: it’s not a flaw, it’s a feature). Until recently, RS was a no-brainer purchase for me because they had a 3 month subscription to Totale for only $130. It seems that they’ve since removed the option, although I know that I’m not crazy because there’s still a dropdown menu even though the 3 month option is no longer there. So if I were to buy RS today, it would have to be the 12 month subscription for $300. I think I still would make that purchase, the product is worth it FOR ME PERSONALLY. In the grand scheme of things language learning for me is like a hobby. People are willing to spend thousands of dollars to get a new engine on their vintage car or buy packets of Magic the Gathering cards. I’m willing to spend $300 on a product that gives me n+1 introduction to thousands of words with native speaker audio and visual reinforcement. To make this post meaningful I’d have to put my money where my mouth is, which I’m not going to do right now because I’m already at a B1 level in Spanish and getting RS would be redundant. I am, however, going to start learning Portuguese in January to go to Brazil for the World Cup, and Rosetta Stone is definitely in my shopping list. TLDR Conclusion: Great for learning vocabulary using SRS, images and audio. Excellent for motivation using positive and negative reinforcement. Yeah, it ain’t free, but it’s worth it FOR ME PERSONALLY and anybody else who gets bored of paper exercises or doesn’t like working with CDs. Should be used alongside another resource (DuoLingo for me) and as a source of words for your Anki deck rather than as a replacement of Anki. Edited by Lemberg1963 on 29 April 2013 at 9:00am 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Tsopivo Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4267 days ago 258 posts - 411 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Esperanto | Message 26 of 51 29 April 2013 at 10:23am | IP Logged | |||||
That's quite an overenthusiastic plea for RS for your first post :D. I am not going to answer every point but I think that the passage I quoted is important. One of the main question, beside efficiency, is: Do you enjoy using this method? I have tried it and hated every minute of it. I hated the feeling of being treated like a 1 year old, the whole pretending it's a game thing, the outrageous claims... that you very well described as "a cheap pavlovian trick". I would not be able to sit through this 200+ hours if it was the only way on earth to learn my target language. On the contrary, my boyfriend also tried it and found it fun. So maybe for people like that, this product could be useful - or at least, would not be a waste of time - even though I still have my doubts on its efficiency and cost.
Seems like a good comparison: I did not know what Barney was so I googled it and I was not able to make it through the 56 seconds of the video I found. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6393 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 27 of 51 29 April 2013 at 2:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
2. What were those mistakes? How is RS better? 3. What have you used to learn German and Russian? edit: oh, do you mean this?
we're honest here :) those who hate grammar usually try to learn it using the alternative options. most notably, you need a lot of input, far more than what RS offers. another problem with RS in this regard is that nobody can guarantee that you'll not think in English or your native language. But more importantly, most members of this forum don't hate grammar (and they NEED to know what each little word means), and many of those who do are very much willing to use translations. Edited by Serpent on 29 April 2013 at 2:57pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5356 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 28 of 51 29 April 2013 at 3:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
We also like burning infidels, so watch out. You need to fix the link to your blog, but I managed to find it with google. You seem to be who and what you say you are, but it's still a bit odd to launch into your very first post with a lavish review of whatever commercial product, as it is bound to be viewed with a bit of scepticism. You can buy B1 Vocabulary trainers for $20. Admittedly they don't have pictures. Edited by schoenewaelder on 29 April 2013 at 3:11pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5141 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 29 of 51 29 April 2013 at 4:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
The price in fact is quite simply outrageous and for that money you won't get anywhere near B1. For $350-$500 which is what Rosetta Stone charges for their complete programs you could purchase a number of textbooks, manuals and readers that if well chosen can take you to a point where you could engage native materials with success, whereas if you use Rosetta Stone by itself you won't be able to read a children's book or newspaper headline once you're done with it. Rosetta Stone can be very useful for complete beginners in language learning as well as as a trainer, but for the service it provides it is absolutely not worth the asking price, which is rather a shameful attempt at conning unsuspecting novices who have no means of assessing the real worth of the material they're receiving and are misled by pervasive marketing into believing they will achieve far more with it than what the program actually provides. As for the rest, it is always positive to have different and "unpopular" viewpoints offered on this forum which has sadly been stifled by a drive towards unanimity and a mortal dread of controversy, but it also seems to be the case you have a stake in the product you're ostensibly casually reviewing. Edited by Juаn on 29 April 2013 at 4:59pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lemberg1963 Bilingual Diglot Groupie United States zamishka.blogspot.coRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4035 days ago 41 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English*, Ukrainian* Studies: French, German, Spanish, Polish | Message 30 of 51 29 April 2013 at 6:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks for the heads up about the broken link, I didn't know I had to use the full http url for it to work. I'm glad that you're skeptical, because as a responsible citizen you should be. I know that I don't have any credentials in the community, but everybody has to start from square one. To be honest, even I am skeptical of myself. My opinion of Rosetta Stone is based on a very limited experience, only three units out of 20. Perhaps Juan is right that I won't reach B1 with RS and that I won't be able to read children's books or newspaper headlines. I have severe doubts about that claim though. Some dude posted a video of Level 5 Unit 1 English on youtube and it seems pretty B1ish to me (http://goo.gl/2cFOq). There was also a PDF file (the link has since gone dead) on the RS website showing the topics they cover in each level based on CEFR, and they touch base on all of the B1 "requirements" from L3 to L5. Maybe that PDF was another piece of RS marketing deception, I can't tell, I'll give them a benefit of doubt on something like that though. I can't recommend anybody to purchase RS because I haven't gone from L1 to L5 using RS. I have no idea how successful it would be for me. I can, however, recommend people to take a thorough look at it. Tsopivo's experience is probably close to reality where some people hate how RS does things and some people love it, it's just a matter of figuring out what kind of person you are. Rosetta Stone won't work for everybody, and that's fine, it doesn't have to; like the saying goes, you can't argue with taste. Since it would be silly expensive to spend $300 on RS just to test it out, I'd suggest for people to spend $20 on TY or Assimil and if they see that they're not really enjoying it, to take a good look at the Rosetta Stone demo. Right now I'm working on my Spanish and I won't be purchasing RS since I'm already at B1. I'll start Portuguese in January, so in February I'll upload a video of progress using RS as the main source. I doubt anybody will remember this thread by then, but I'll put it up for the benefit of those who use the forum search function. Edited by Lemberg1963 on 29 April 2013 at 6:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6393 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 31 of 51 29 April 2013 at 9:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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nobody ever forgets any RS thread :) and if you post it here, it will bring the thread back to the actual topics page (and the first page of the Language Programs subforum, so no worries, people will see it if you post it :)
One thing I'm sceptical of is that there are tons of themed vocab books which on their own haven't made anyone fluent/proficient. RS is just a different medium for that. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5226 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 32 of 51 06 May 2013 at 3:16am | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't think that being a newbie and giving a limited defense of RS makes one a shill for RS. But that's another story. I want to make two points.
First of all, the price of RS is a a red herring. The issue is more the results. You can go to the library and borrow a book for free. Where I live, many libraries have language learning stations where one can use language software for free. I hardly see anybody there. There is no lack of products in the $30 to $300 range. At the same time, one can ask: "Why would anybody in their right mind spend $10,000 for 6 weeks of language instruction at Middlebury College?" I can only guess that all those supposedly crazy people perceive some value. So the real issue is what does RS do for you. For most people around here, the answer is absolutely nothing. But the other point I want to make is that some people seem to like RS. Where I live one of the elementary and secondary school districts uses RS in all its schools. I can't believe that something that is as dreadful as many people around here make it out to be was chosen by some intelligent and competent people and is still in use. I have no stake in RS and have never used it. But some people like it. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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