Rosetta Stone - Tips

[taijidan]

Hi Guys & Gals,

I was wondering how many people out there are using this Rosetta Stone.

There have really been a lot of mixed reviews for it.

And although I didn't like it originally - I can't help but feel it has some potential,

but is let down by lack on instructions on how to use it and a structured training plan.

Anyway I would be interested to hear from people who have had sucess with it and found it useful, or those who thought it was just useless and gave up.

Rgds

Chi

[flameproof]

I didn't liked it. Sitting all the time in front of a PC is not really what I want. The sentences are also not that exciting. That's how far I got.

Somebody said you take the audio and play it in your audio CD (while driving or whatever). I haven't tried that, but that would be maybe a plus point.

That was at a time I also did Pimsleur, which I found better. If I would start again from zero I would probably buy the Assimil book and CDs (and I would do characters from day #1)

[xianu]

I have heard that it is mostly just vocabulary. Not a lot of linguistic or just language instruction. Just vocabulary. There is a program I got called Interactive Chinese, put out I think by twinbridge, that a student was trying out and he really likes it.

[sui.generis]

Sitting in front of the computer was acutally a bonus for me--it's how I'm used to studying anyway, but I can imagine how that wouldn't work for everyone. Rosetta was a big plus for my speaking speed and tones, though not by using the intergrated speaking system, I just repeated as I went through the normal exercises. If you do that all the way through, that's a lot of speaking practice, and if you need a sentence repeated, just click the button next to the picture in question and it repeats, you can keep that up until you get it right.

Though I never did, you can also use the included books for writing practice.

Back when I was using it, I did a couple of units a day, took forever, but I was motivated. I wouldn't have wanted to have learned the language that way, but it was great for drilling myself. I'm not sure what additional structure could be added. It's already nicely divided into units and subdivided into types of exercies, and only you can decide how much at a time really fits into your schedule. What sort of direction do you feel would have helped?

[kdavid]

I thought it was useless. I think the $250 USD would have been better spent on Pimsleur, some introductory textbooks (i.e. New Practical Chinese Reader), a subscription to Chinesepod and setting up a Skype account for language exchange. Even after all that I wouldn't have been able to spend the $250 US I spent on Rosetta.

[Hero Doug]

They just throw Chinese at you (no pinyin) and let you figure it out. You can't copy and paste the Chinese characters into a translation program, so for many people it's just memorizing what's shown and guessing the proper meaning. No grammar explanations either.

It's just pictures and sentences. There are no practice exercises that force you to use what you learn; I found it came down to be memorizing what sentences went with what picture.

A note on the built in pronunciation tool they have, it's not the best. A couple native English speakers and myself all failed the English version of the speaking portion, and a couple Chinese friends failed the Chinese speaking portion. You really need to speak so unnaturally to get the meter to go to green.

I also had the pleasure of taking a look at a Pimsluer course, and if you go to easymandarin.com (*I THINK*) they have the transcripts there so you're not guessing tones and pinyin.

I'd recommend buying Chinese Made Easier over Rosetta Stone. The second edition has cd audio, it's less then half the price and contains way more information.

Bottom Line: I don't recommend Rosetta stone.

[koreth]

They just throw Chinese at you (no pinyin) and let you figure it out.

Actually there is pinyin. You can select whether it displays pinyin, traditional characters, or simplified characters.

I wouldn't say it's worthless, exactly, but it's certainly not the most cost-effective learning tool out there.

My big beef with it is that it is clearly a translation of a Western-language lesson plan. For example, in English you'd see four pictures and hear, "a boy, a car, a book, a cat." The Chinese one says "yi ge nan hair, yi liang che, yi ben shu, yi zhi mao" and, as a beginner, you have no idea why there are these extra measure words, or worse, you come away thinking the word for "cat" is "zhimao." Then there's stuff like "a boy under a table" which is more grammatically complex in Mandarin than in English -- again, you get extra words (zai, mian) and no sense of why they're there.

However, once you're past the raw beginner stage, I think it's an okay tool for testing your listening comprehension. Not a great tool, but an okay one.

Agreed about the speech recognition, though; when I say words that I've been told by native speakers I pronounce very well, it often tells me I'm nowhere close.

[thph2006]

I gave Rosetta Stone a pretty serious try and personally found it more frustrating than useful but I did just recently find an interesting use for it now that I've graduated from newbie to sort of a high elementary level. I just play the program's 8400 mp3 sound clips directly without going through the program's lame user interface. It's a bit like drinking water from a fire hose with the clips playing one after another non-stop but amazingly it seems to kick my brain into a sort of native-mode where I stop trying to translate to English and just directly map the sounds to the meanings. I find it's really a great and efficient way to refresh my memory. I'd love to figure out a way to display the pictures and text along with the sound in the same rapid-fire fashion.

[taijidan]

Hi Guys,

Reading your replies is interesting.

I don't think the "dynamic immersion" concept aped by marketing works.

But as sui.generis has mentioned I have found by just repeating the phrases

going through the exercises or even just doing the preview and practice repeating the

phrases was very useful. (this is using it a bit more like the pimsleur system, "listen and repeat").

Then flameproof mentioned this idea of of taking the audio and playing it on a cd player.

I am not sure if the files will play on a cd player. They have a file extension .swa, but I found if I copied to my mp3 player and changed it to mp3 they work fine.

Listening like this is really useful for listening comprehension and I find the images from the software flash into my mind when I hear the related phrase. It also made me realise the spoken pace is actually very fast for a lot of the phrases. Like thph2006 says the pace is very intense listening to each phrase in rapid sucession, I was thinking it might also be useful to have a short break in between sometimes so I can do "listen and repeat" for new phrases.

Also as most of you mentioned - It is impossible to work out all the translations just from the pictures, so I have found it useful to go through the preview with Wenlin (or online dictionary) to look up the words/phrases which are new.

Actually - I have never bothered with the speech recognition or typing features - I don't think anyone has found them useful.

If anyone else has some novel ways of using this study system then please post them!

[thph2006]

I think the Rosetta Stone concept has a lot of potential but it's really unrealzed in the current incarnation of the program. The environment isn't immersion as they like to claim and never will be until they invent a virtual language partner you can interact with. Having said that, there are several things I think they could do if they wanted to improve things. One would be to use video instead of the pathetic quality still-pictures they use. It would be far easier for them to communicate the intended meaning using video and they'd avoid the situation I had happen many times where the photos were so vague I actually memorized some of the phrases to mean something completely different from they actually meant. It's also too difficult to review and refresh using their method and at least in my case I ended up forgetting a lot of what I had supposedly learned. They should bundle the pictures and audio snippets into multimedia flashcards for the iPod. That would be a hot feature if you ask me and would allow me to review constantly on the go.

[renegadedog]

I really liked Rosetta Stone. Then again, I discovered it after having been in China 2 years, having a lot of vocab already, but having no idea how to put it together, and no confidence in speaking. I found that once I started using it I started improving really really quickly. Probably not the best thing to use for a total beginner, really.

[renegadedog]

I personally like their approach much more than the Pimsleur 'spoon feed' approach. The approach pimsleur uses is precisely what us English teachers are told NOT to do when we do our CELTA/TEFL courses, i.e. say "Here's how you say asparagus: xxxx".

Rosetta Stone treats you like a child, and gives you a more instinctive take on the language. That's my view anyway.

I found that learning Chinese while in China (and teaching) was not that easy, Rosetta Stone really helped me improve a lot, so I won't moan about it.

[Luobot]

I would agree with all of thph2006 earlier comments. The only thing worthwhile are the actual audio files. The question is what to do with them. Creating playlists out of them is a good way of using them for rapid fire review, as mentioned.

Another way of getting some use out of them would be to hook them up to another program that offers a useful interface but not so good sound files. The perfect program for this would, of course, be the incredible and free ZDT. If ZDT allowed you to link your own audio files to one if its dictionaries or to a custom dictionary, then you could create word lists and use ZDT’s flashcard feature (which, by itself, is already much better than anything in Rosetta Stone); or if you don’t like flashcards, you could just quickly review the word lists and listen to the audio files.

[renegadedog]

All of this stuff assumes that everyone has loads of frfee time to just go and interact.

95% of FTs will tell you that that isn't possible, cos of the setups over here.

OK so 55% of those dont' give a shit.

I guarantee that the remaning 40% (leaving out the 5% who have somehow jammily picked it up) do want to learn

We aren't all like the sort of lar dee dar bastards on this site who just walk down the road and learn fluent chinese

some of us need a tool

i found rosetta stone really helpful

i still can't write

but i now speak pretty well

my chinese wife noticed how muc i was improveing after using rosetta stone, to a noticeable degree.

i think people on this site have come to china on some mega expensive college course, don't realise how hjard it is for some of us who actually live and teach here, and how useful something like rsoetta sone is.