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| Anyone tried the Rosetta Stone Language software? |
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| shmokes:
That's the next step for me, though it's only four weeks. Nine weeks is out of the question financially, and leaving my family for that long would be over twice as hard as the 4-week program I'm going to do. But I'll be studying in a language institution for four hours a day with students from all over the world, so the only common language is French. Plus, I'll be living with and having dinner every night with a French family and they are not supposed to speak any English to me (and won't even be able English, for all I know). I'm hoping that seeing as I'm already getting quite good at French, having completed a bachelor's degree in the subject, that four-weeks will be enough to push me into what would be described as fluency. I'll tell you one thing: my daughter will speak French from the moment she can talk. Good god, I have worked ---my bottom--- off to acquire what limited French skills I have. Four years of studying, and doing exercises and reading books and listening to CDs, and attending French tables religiously (that I don't get any school credit for). I look at my nieces who were just raised bilingual to begin with (English/Spanish) and they have always simply spoken each language with equal ease. They have never had to work at being bilingual. It's SOOO much easier to pick up a language as a child. If it's not already too late, get your toddler speaking another language! If you can't teach it to them, pay someone to do it. It's an opportunity that you can never get back once you've missed it. |
| patrickl:
It really depends what you want to use the course for. Indeed they dont't work to teach you a language fluently, but it's nice if you go on holiday and want to learn the local language. I would never buy a rosetta stone course again. For that money and the time you have to spend on it, it's better to take a course with a teacher. I like the audio CDs though because you can use hem in the car when you would otherwise just be wasting time in a traffic jam. I have been making my own CD that I use in my car. Just to learn vocabulary. With a product like Textaloud you can have your computer speak any language you like. I was really impressed by the quality these voices. |
| DrewKaree:
--- Quote from: shmokes on January 31, 2007, 03:30:02 pm --- I know Drew has had some experience with the Spanish Pimsleur program, so you might ask him what he thought of it. I got the impression that he was very impressed. --- End quote --- Shardian, I have no idea what your contact with people who speak Spanish will be, but the Pimsleur program worked/works quite well for my particular situation, I believe. I work with Spanish-speaking people all day long. There generally is one person who speaks English passably, and perhaps a handful who can manage a few job-related words/phrases. The Pimsleur CD's jam a ton of vocab down your throat through sheer repetition, although I liked the way they changed up the usage of the words - meaning you weren't always repeating "Where is my dog?", but you'd get several different sentences with "dog" in them - "What is your dog's name?", "Does Mary have a dog?", "Please give the dog a bath", etc. You get the same words over and over, but you only realize this because they group certain words in chunks. Over time, you will use some of the basics you've learned less and less (simply because there's SO much vocab that you could easily spend a CD's worth of time repeating everything you learned up to that point and nothing else!), but as with your native language, you'll find yourself using common words quite often. Once the few Spanish-speaking people I regularly dealt with found out about the Pimsleur CD's I was listening to, they made it a point to help me with pronunciation (although they felt Pimsleur was pretty darned good at that aspect and how they taught it) and to let me know when something may or may not be useful. Usted, for example, was explained to me about when and/or why it might be used, and why it is more commonly dropped in casual conversation. As far as becoming conversational, I felt Pimsleur gave ideas and concepts about stringing together sentences, but was lacking a bit in that area, although I can't even imagine how a CD or video course would go about trying to teach that concept in the limited amount of space these types of courses typically cover. Being in the situation I was in, I haven't ever taken a single Spanish class (not even in high school), and have simply learned Spanish over time - reading the boxes of products I dealt with at a restaurant and having the Spanish-speaking people correct me or help me remember the name of something, or picking something up and asking what it's called and trying to remember it, etc, and then adding the Pimsleur CD's....I'm still not completely conversational, but I can at least understand what's going on in a conversation now, whereas before I went through the CD's, I only caught bits and pieces of a conversation. There's 3 programs - beginner, intermediate, and advanced. I hit the beginner program hard - probably listened to it 8+ times and followed everything to a "T". The intermediate, I've listened to 3 times and will go through it again before I make the move to the advanced set, which I've never listened to yet. That's my experience and the background behind what and how it's worked for me. My guess is that if all you will be doing is listening to the CD's and trying to pick up the language and hoping to run across a few Spanish-speaking people to test out or see if you can understand them, no course will teach you as well as using and testing yourself by being around Spanish-speaking people in addition to whatever other method you wish to try. You've just got no one to practice with other than the voice on the CD. If your situation is similar to mine, I wholeheartedly recommend the Pimsleur series. |
| patrickl:
--- Quote from: DrewKaree on February 01, 2007, 06:22:51 am ---The Pimsleur CD's jam a ton of vocab down your throat through sheer repetition, although I liked the way they changed up the usage of the words - meaning you weren't always repeating "Where is my dog?", but you'd get several different sentences with "dog" in them - "What is your dog's name?", "Does Mary have a dog?", "Please give the dog a bath", etc. You get the same words over and over, but you only realize this because they group certain words in chunks. --- End quote --- I guess that's what I didn't like about it. It all goes so slow. IIRC it took a whole lesson just to say hello. I guess each course has it's strong and weak points. - Pimsleur was too slow for me, but perhaps it teaches you the most words. - I liked the Michael Thomas course because it teaches how to form sentences and because of the background information of the language. It teaches you how the language works rather than just repeat sentences. It's like being in a classroom with a teacher on a CD. Trouble with it is that it doesn't teach that many words (it mostly focusses on the verbs and ways to use them) and the guy is a bit of a annoying old geezer. The sometimes rather dumb students that "take the class with you" get annoying too. - I'm not sure what the strong point of rosetta stone would be. Biggest drawback was that I felt was that it only teaches understanding the sentences. It didn't enable me to form even the simplest sentences myself. Personally I used flash cards software (on a PDA) and self made audio CDs (in the car) to learn the vocabulary and the Michael Thomas course to get the fundamentals of the language. |
| shardian:
Me and the wife messed with the Rosetta Stone software last night. It is pretty neat. It has several different ways to test and teach you for each section. There are no instructions really - it just dives right in. It introduces new phrases, nouns, adjectives, and verbs everyonce in a while, and you use the pictures to determine what the new word means. I find it very neat, because you become an active part of the learning process. It says it uses the basis of language development, and I would say that is correct. I'll have to look into the audio cd's. I have a 30 minute commute and I get pretty bored. |
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