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Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
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i heart rosetta stone
This is the best way to learn a new language. The microphone/pronunciation feature is my favorite aspect.
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An Amazingly Fun and Easy Way to Learn a New Language
The Rosetta Stone system for learning a new language make it really fun and easy. After about two weeks of lessons, I was able to somewhat understand and speak basic German like counting, greetings, etc.
Rosetta Stone also helps with pronunciation (it makes you read works into the mic provided) which is great!
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Immersive learning, but don't try the repetition mode
Rosetta Stone promises learning a language by natural immersion. This is achieved by showing 4 pictures, while a speaker says a word or sentence relating to the pictures. The learner has to pick the correct picture out of the four by clicking on it with the mouse.
While this is the most basic way of using Rosetta Stone, other modes of learning are offered as well. Such as picking a picture without the text being displayed (focus on listening skill), or typing the text into an input (focus on writing skill).
It also offers a mode in which the user has to repeat the text spoken by the program. The wave modulation of the repeated text is compared by the computer which then shows a red, yellow, or green signal depending on how similar the two voices were.
This latter mode is a complete joke, however. I am am a native German speaker myself and bought this program for my girlfriend. The quality of the voice in the repetition mode is for some reason much worse than the voices in the other modes. It is high pitch, sounds computer generated, and probably was just made on the cheap. Unfortunately this also affects the recognition and I was most successful by adopting a high pitch nasal sound. While this creates some genuine fun for native speakers, it renders the mode useless for learning.
Fortunately, just listening to the speakers in the other modes and trying to repeat works well enough to learn pronunciation.
The program does what is promises. It gives you a new language from start by total immersion. While this method is less dry and more fun than grammar books and dictionaries it also suffers from some inherent problems.
While the meaning of most of the words are well introduced by pictures, more subtle concepts that are not easily described with pictures remain vague, and the exact meaning may remain hidden.
It is also not as simple to create grammatical generalizations and rules. Creating a grammatical rule set by trial and error is just a lot easier for a toddler who can spend a decade on it than for a thirty year old with limited time on his hands.
That being said, Rosetta stone is still tremendously helpful because it makes learning colorful. Used in conjunction with other books it is a powerful, quick, and fun way to learn a language.
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Rosetta Stone German
Very useful and easy to use. I have a background in German but don't get to use it unless we go to German speaking countries during the summer - which we do quite often. It is still extremely helpful for extending my knowledge.
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a software note
This product is sold as licensed software. Users will NOT be able to load it onto more than one computer. This aspect of the product is not clear from the blurbing on the Rosetta Stone website. It is a "single-user" product.
Don't think that you can share this with friends, or that it is appropriate for a lending collection.
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Speaking of Mini DisplayPort, here's another entry from Apple in the shipping hall of shame. They're shipping the five-inch Mini-DiplayPort-to-DVI adapter in a box that's bigger than the MacBook's. Check out the waste.
As Kevin notes, it might seem nitpicky, but when you compare this to how much Apple boasts on the MacBook's green packaging, it is kind of jarring:
