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Rosetta Stone success? - mentat_kgs - 2009-04-19

Just to warn you guys. This post came back from the dead.

As far as I can remember, later Nukemarine changed his opinion on Roseta Stone.
Now he seems to be strongly against it.

@Nuke, if you are reading this, I'm sorry to put words on your mouth, slap me if I said BS.

Rosetta Stone success? - squiggyflop - 2009-04-19

mentat_kgs Wrote:Just to warn you guys. This post came back from the dead.

As far as I can remember, later Nukemarine changed his opinion on Roseta Stone.
Now he seems to be strongly against it.

@Nuke, if you are reading this, I'm sorry to put words on your mouth, slap me if I said BS.
my bad.. i didnt realize how old it was .. i just ran a search for rosetta stone.. i figured it might be better to bring back a dead thread than to start a new one and have a bunch of rosetta stone threads cluttering up the place.. ive been told off on other forums for starting new threads when there were existing threads on a topic.. i guess the rules are different here..

Rosetta Stone success? - Thunk - 2009-04-19

doh! This post is 2 years old! Yeah. I missed that part. Sorry!

Rosetta Stone success? - Nukemarine - 2009-04-20

Amazing what two years can do to an opinion.

Yes, I'm not in favor of Rosetta Stone as it's laid out. The only thing it had going for it was native audio and photos for the sentences. However the audio was slow and the sentences too close to one another (think i + 0.01). Oh yeah, it's also 300 to 400 dollars.

The materials from RevTK, Tae Kim and Smart.fm mixed with Anki as the SRS create hands down the best learning tool for Japanese. The only thing you invest is time in order to figure out how to get them all to work in a way you like.

I do not recommend Rosetta (even v3) to anyone serious about learning a foreign language.

Rosetta Stone success? - Tobberoth - 2009-04-20

Just going to complement Nukemarines post with japanesepod101.com. Smart.fm has some audio mixed in of course, but it's also important to train listening to longer conversations. Going with radio and TV works but if one wants i + 1 learning, japanesepod101.com is a good option.

Rosetta Stone success? - Jarvik7 - 2009-04-20

On major problem I've heard with RS is that it is completely culturally ignorant and doesn't teach language as it is actually used (teaches 直訳 instead).

The example I heard was something like the sentence in russian was a direct translation of "Bob is on the boat" which made no sense in Russian(?) because you would only say "Bob is riding the boat" in that language.

When I tried RS I found that it was pretty craptastic so I never got far enough into it to see any of that myself though.

http://www.learnthatlanguagenow.com/articles/rosetta-stone-review/6-good-reasons-why-rosetta-stone-sucks

Rosetta Stone success? - gyuujuice - 2009-04-22

(This might be a little late)

I have actually seen typo's in the Japanese and Chinese versions.
They even mix symplified with traditional characters in the Chinese.
I went through the version 2 and quit when I realized it was the same thing with every language with just different words. (Every language was in the SAME order. Japanese ISN'T English.) So I decided that free websites like, Lang-8 and iKnow are just better.

Rosetta Stone success? - Codexus - 2009-04-22

My opinion on Rosetta Stone is that it's pure genius... from the point of view of the guy who invented it and made tons of money selling that crap.

The software is the same for all languages, you just need to get the original English sentences translated into the target language and recorded by native speaker. Why bother making something that actually takes into consideration the specificity of a language? That's expensive and it's not going to increase the sales. Instead invest that money into marketing.

And anyway 99% of the customers are just going to give up on learning a new language after 2 weeks. So it doesn't matter if it's good or not.

So yes, Rosetta Stone is awesome as a way to make money by exploiting the willingness of people to spend a lot of money when learning a new language. But they never cared about making a useful product.

Rosetta Stone success? - Thunk - 2009-10-02

So yeah. I got Rosetta Stone. And I like it! *ducks tomatoes*

I got so dang busy over the summer that I didn't have any uninterrupted time to study, so I decided I needed to be spoon-fed Japanese in the few moments I did have.

I burned through the kanji in 2 months earlier this year, then I learned the kana. Then I was on Tae Kim's Grammar, and couldn't go full speed anymore. Aside from this, I have NO EXPOSURE to learning Japanese. Never taken a class in school. Nuthin'. So that's what Rosetta Stone has done for me. It's given me exposure to audio and grammar.

And it goes very slowly. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Add new thing. Repeat repeat repeat. Go back to old thing. Repeat, etc. And since I know the kana and kanji, it seems ridiculously easy at times. But with the whole headset, and audio recognition software, it's very interactive and very fun.

Yes. It's fun. I'm having a blast. I don't have to force myself to study. When I go back to Tae Kim's grammar after Rosetta Stone, then it won't ALL be new, which will in turn make it also fun. I'll have a lot of "oh yeah..." moments, which will reinforce what I've already learned. Same with iKnow's lists. I'm hoping.

So Rosetta is helping to build a foundation for me in a fun, easy way.

Rosetta Stone success? - kazelee - 2009-10-02

Rosetta Stone would be ten times better if they didn't target it to casual language learners. I've recently tried the Spanish version. I liked it for a while, but the slow speed is killing me. i+.01 might be a bit too accurate.

Rosetta Stone success? - Surreal - 2009-10-03

I tried Rosetta Stone for a while. At the time it seemed okay. But once you turn to other learning materials you'll probably find how painfully slow RS really was. You want fun in your language learning? Immersion? Well uh, immerse yourself. Listen to Japanese radio (loads of free material), watch japanese movies, read manga. Of course, with stuff like Tae Kim as more focused studying on the side. That's... that's what the posters recommended back in April pretty much and it's what most of the forum members use.

Though in the end, it's really your choice and you can continue doing RS if you feel it's fun enough as casual learning. Just realize that it's not efficient and to a degree is keeping you in a safe zone where you don't feel the effect of "oh man I hardly understand ANYTHING". I actually think that's one of the most fun parts of learning a language, understanding more and more gives pure satisfaction.

Rosetta Stone success? - Thunk - 2009-10-03

I do skip a lot of parts, granted; lessons from previous sessions, the writing (got that from iKnow), kana recognition & speech... I just started putting some of it into anki, too, audio & all, but only the things that demonstrate sentence structure and grammar.

And with all the repeating they do, it's like over-SRSing. They could space the repetitions out more... But then, if I didn't know kanji & kana, that slow pace might be more appropriate.

Rosetta Stone success? - sethg - 2009-10-03

I didn't like Rosetta Stone. If I had paid for it, I would've been very disappointed. That being said, however, it did teach me the ～て form of verbs pretty well. So, I dunno, maybe if I'd kept up with it, I would've learned more useful things... but, yeah, it was too slow.

Rosetta Stone success? - ahibba - 2009-10-05

How can we extract the audio or the pictures in Rosetta Stone v3?

Is there any way to unpack .rsd files?

Rosetta Stone success? - Thunk - 2009-10-05

That'd be good to know. Right now, I just hold the mic up to the earphones. It's fuzzy, but it serves its purpose.

Rosetta Stone success? - gyuujuice - 2009-10-09

I'm not sure if you still need my comment but when I di the Chinese version of Rosette Stone they had major mistakes such as Traditional characters when they said they were simplified and mispelling, but, this was version 2 not 3.

Rosetta Stone success? - kazelee - 2009-10-10

Thunk Wrote:That'd be good to know. Right now, I just hold the mic up to the earphones. It's fuzzy, but it serves its purpose.
You could also try recording the audio output with audacity or sound recorder.

Edit: Accidentally hitting the 'edit' button instead of 'quote' is getting quite annoying.