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Rosetta Stone is without a doubt one of the most famous language learning programs. But is it correct? The answer is yes, especially if you are new to a language and want to develop a solid foundation of vocabulary and grammar. It's well structured, clear and ahead at a steady pace. Use Rosetta Stone faithfully for a few months and you will learn to speak, read, write and understand basic words and phrases. Rosetta Stone is the best comprehensive language learning software, it's our choice of publishers for paid programs.
Languages offered by Rosetta Stone
Rosetta Stone offers programs in 28 languages (to the exclusion of American and British English): Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), Dari, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Irish , Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Pashto, Persian (Farsi), Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish (South American and European), Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish, Urdu and Vietnamese. Not all languages are available on all platforms.
If you need a language not on this list, you can try other applications. Duolingo covers 30 languages, making it an excellent starting point. Some languages that you can find in Duolingo and that are not covered by Rosetta Stone are Danish, Esperanto, Norwegian, Romanian and Welsh. Simon & Schuster Pimsleur Premium, available in 50 languages, is another source. Although Pimsleur is one of my favorite language learning programs for content, the problem is that it relies almost entirely on audio. If you do not mind learning while listening, give it a whirlwind.
Rosetta Stone Prices and Plans
Rosetta Stone's prices are very high compared to other language programs, but they are well within the average range. It is sold only as an online subscription now. Disk purchase or digital download options have been removed, although you can sometimes find sets of physical CD-ROMs at retailers and second-hand markets.
Rosetta Stone charges $ 79 for three months, $ 119 for six months, $ 179 for one year and $ 249 for two years. Most other language applications using a subscription model charge between 10 and 12 USD per month. The two-year subscription price of Rosetta Stone is $ 10.38 per month.
A subscription to Rosetta Stone includes all the lessons of the chosen language, available both in a web browser and in mobile applications for Android and iOS. Mobile apps also allow you to download offline lessons.
You can optionally add an online tutoring to your course. A 25-minute group session costs $ 14 or $ 19 for two lessons, and private sessions cost $ 19 or $ 29 for two lessons. These sessions are virtually in a webinar format with a live instructor.
How does Rosetta Stone teach?
Over the past decade, I have used Rosetta Stone both personally and to test it and write about it for PCMag. I have used it for Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Turkish, Russian and even English.
How is the experience? You learn by doing exercises in the application that often start with deductive reasoning. For example, if you hear the word cat two or three times when you look at a cat picture, then you hear a new word and you see pictures of a cat and a dog, you can to deduce that the new word means dog. . You click on the dog's image and Rosetta Stone plays a harp trill that says you're right. If you find this sound irritating, you can turn it off.
There is a lot of "drill-and-kill" type teaching. Once a new word enters your vocabulary, you're hit on the head. You hear it, say it, write it down and choose it from a list of options in multiple choice questions. Retail teaching can be effective for adhering new material into the brain, although this may seem tedious at times.
If you have already tried Rosetta Stone in any language, you will experience a familiar experience. The basic curriculum has changed very little over the years. Rosetta Stone uses the same pictures – the same goldfish, the same green bike, the same bowl of rice – whether you learn French, Chinese or any other language. The home page and course start pages have recently been redesigned. You can see the new design in the beta version of the application, available to all users. It reflects what you see in mobile apps, creating a more seamless experience when using Rosetta Stone on multiple devices.
The program starts with a fairly universal vocabulary, such as girl, boy, man, woman, eat, drink, run, swim, water, milk, rice, bread, cat, dog. Do not expect to learn travel phrases or conversational phrases from the start. These come much later, unless you return to the bonus phrasebook material where you can learn travel phrases and common phrases.
Rosetta Stone is consistent, predictable, stable and reliable. Since each program is almost identical regardless of the language you are learning, you are losing some cultural backgrounds. For example, as universal as the words rice, bread and milk may seem, there may be languages and cultures where cabbage, potato and sour cream are more useful. Conversely, Rosetta Stone incorporates images of other cultures. By learning the words for man, woman, hello, goodbye, etc., you see pictures of people from all corners of the earth. The words you learn are both visually diverse and not at all culturally specific.
Design and interface
In terms of design, Rosetta Stone is a work of art. The interface is polite and graceful. Microphone setup and sound checking have always been simple and successful in my tests, with or without an external microphone. You need Adobe Flash for the Web application, but a representative of Rosetta Stone told me that the company was working to make it useless.
The program is extremely intuitive with almost no written instructions. You can work on the lessons in order or advance if they are too easy. From a dashboard, you can see what lessons you still have to finish, which ones you have completed and your score for each of them.
Newly designed landing pages give you more flexibility in choosing the way you want to use the material. Each lesson contains a main lesson, followed by additional modules, such as pronunciation, speaking, reading, listening, vocabulary, grammar and revision. Previously, you worked on hardware in the order of Rosetta Stone. Now, depending on how the app defines them, it's easier to choose the exercises you want to do. You may want to record pronunciation exercises when you are alone at home, for example, and focus on listening during your ride.
By moving from the web application to mobile applications, and vice versa, your progress is always recorded and synchronized. No matter where you are, it is easy and really pleasant to dive in. A sense of play surrounds the interactive experience without ever being juvenile.
Immerse yourself in a new language
Rosetta Stone is proud of her immersive approach, which means that there is no instruction in English (or whatever your native language). The only english you meet is in the help menus, settings and title screens. Rosetta Stone has long used the phrase "natural language acquisition" to describe her program, but it really involves repetition and deductive reasoning.
When you start, you see images and you see or hear (or both) the words badociated with that image. After being exposed several times, you must then speak or write the word. For voice responses, a voice recognition system decides if you have said it correctly. You can disable this feature or adjust it to require more or less accuracy. As you progress, you may need to write the word. The same words and images appear again and again. With each lesson, your vocabulary is built, so simple words are transformed into short sentences and statements.
Repetition is necessary to some extent with any learning process. With Rosetta Stone, however, it's heavy and comes without cultural context. If you are under the shock of repetition fatigue, I recommend you try games and activities instead. They are found in a section called Extended Learning. I particularly like the reading activity, in which you read or listen to news that match your skill level.
I have mentioned earlier that inference reasoning is another essential element of learning in Rosetta Stone. At first, you learn simple nouns and verbs using deductive logic, and later, it becomes more complicated when you have to explore new verb forms and plurals ("he ran," "ran," " they run "), but that is never. difficult.
This approach has its challenges, however. Because you do not receive any instruction in your mother tongue, it is impossible to know if the Erwachsene means "people" or "adults". is Hello formal or informal, or does it not matter? Rosetta Stone does not tell you.
Rosetta Stone is extremely useful for learning about bad, plurals and some verb conjugations, but it is less convenient for the things I want to know as a traveler or professional in a foreign country. While it is able to help you build or reinforce a basic vocabulary, it's not great with complex grammar, nuance or cultural context.
Another point to note is that Rosetta Stone does not have a ranking test. If you have already studied a language, it is difficult to know where to start. At least you have the freedom to go through different lessons and try them out. This is the exact opposite of Duolingo, which does not allow you to move on to a next lesson unless you have completed all previous lessons or have tested them. That said, Duolingo has an initial ranking test so you can start at the right time.
Rosetta Stone Tutor
In addition to basic lessons and bonus content, Rosetta Stone offers optional tutoring sessions where you can practice your language skills with a live human instructor. These courses take place via one-way videoconferencing. You see the instructor sharing his screen, but no one can see you. Your audio is turned on so you can answer when the instructor asks you questions.
To register for a tutoring session, you must reach a milestone in your program. Each tutoring session is a lesson, and what you do in clbad is almost identical to what you have learned so far in lessons. The clbades are numerous. It is not difficult to find a free slot, regardless of your time zone.
Group clbades only contain a handful of students, four at most. Private tutoring is individual. The instructor speaks only in the foreign language and sticks to a script that may seem restrictive. If you do not understand something or if your sound is cut off momentarily, they can not tell from your facial expressions what's going on. A discussion box allows you to contact the instructor if you are having problems. You can also mute your microphone and identify yourself as if you have an urgent need to move away from the clbadroom.
The instructor shows a picture and asks you a question about it. You must answer it. Again, it's almost identical to what you do in the app, only now, you're talking to a real person.
I like lessons because there is a huge difference between speaking a foreign language to a computer and having to listen to and respond to another person. This can be intimidating, but at least with Rosetta Stone, you have the opportunity to train without shame for your language limitations in a safe environment.
Rosetta Stone's tutoring sessions are useful, but they can not replace being in a clbadroom. Keep your expectations clear, though, and you can certainly enjoy some benefits.
Games and bonus content
A section with bonus content and games offers more ways to study and learn. You can play some games solo while others put you in touch with another learner or a native speaker. Whether you find someone online at the same time as you are a kid's game.
The games are a little dull, but they use lots of skills. In a game, for example, you have to speak short sentences. Another asks you to listen to a story and click on the words you hear that appear on a bingo card.
The reading section is my favorite here. It's full of short stories designed to be at your fingertips. You can listen to them, read them silently, read them aloud or any combination of these options.
If you also enjoy reading content, another language learning application, called Beelinguapp, might interest you.. It contains a variety of texts for different skill levels and topics in 13 languages.
Building a foundation with Rosetta Stone
Rosetta Stone is a wonderful, sophisticated and technically competent language learning program. This is our preferred choice for paid language learning software, which we particularly recommend to beginners who need vocabulary and grammar basics. As with all apps and services, if your goal is to master your language perfectly, you will probably want to consider other types of instruction, such as local courses or tutoring, but Rosetta Stone can certainly help you build a strong foundation.
If you've ever used a language, Rosetta Stone may not be the best solution because it does not include any type of ranking test to let you know where to start. You might be better off playing Duolingo, our choice of publishers for free language learning apps. Or you can explore other free language learning apps to find one that matches your level.
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