I played with Rosetta Stone (II edition) a year back when my library offered it online for free and I wasn't very impressed. They completely ignore the writing system. But on the bright side they don't use English, excluding ro-maji.

The new Rosetta Stone supposedly "teaches the writing system" now and uses mic technology. I played with this in the mall and while it was a major upgrade from the last version it still was lacking in other areas. At least they didn't teach Japanese in the same order and manner as they did for French. (Who the heck though to that anyways?)

"The one downside with this program, for the Japanese language at least, is the writing portion. You don't really learn how to write in Japanese, you just learn to recognize the characters. So if you're looking to learn how to write hiragana, katakana, and kanji, it's better to take that up on your own."

The majority of people assume that Rosetta is the best way to learn. I was told not to long ago that, "Rosetta stone is how they teach the army foreign langauges and it is th e best way." (He didn't think my methods were good either...)

Why do people spend over $500 for these? I guess for someone without any sort of initiative would use this but I have a higher image of the genral public than that. There are so many rumors and myths about learning langauges and most of them I just don't get.


(http://www.rosettastone.com/learn-japanese/level-1-2-3)
Discuss:

gyuujuice Wrote:I guess for someone without any sort of initiative would use this but I have a higher image of the genral public than that.

Welp, there's your problem.

No, seriously.

:/ I never thought of my self as "above average" or even "intellegent" but I think it's kinda sad that people aren't capable to even look up the leading compettion.

"Welp" <-- 笑

On a second thought, if they just marketed their product as the "best source for tourists" and lowered the price by a few hundred I think I would be WAY less offensive. But it's far from "native" or even "fluent".

Just my opinion though :\

It's the same reason why people buy overpriced Bose speakers instead of cheaper yet better sounding speakers: marketing.

It is not that the people who aren't capable to even look up the leading competition say Rosetta Stone is the greatest are inept. Most people who say that aren't even studying a foreign language; let alone reading articles and forums about learning foreign languages.

I have been using the program for Spanish. I think it is fairly decent if you are just starting out. I tried it for Japanese and personally I thought it was really lacking.

I would never actually buy the Rosetta Stone program due to the high prices of the products. The Army does provide it to soldiers for free online so I have been taking advantage of that.

So true, people who do say that are probably not interested in foreign langauges.
I agree, it is a good program for starting similar to みんなのにほんご but it just costs $400 more dollars.

"free" is always nice.

It's been discussed quite a bit. There are a number of us here that gave Rosetta Stone a fair shake and just find it lacking in virtually every area. It's strengths (Images, sentences, native audio) are done by other resources to a much better degree and it's weaknesses are numerous (price, speed, audio pace, etc.)

If it helps, just use Rosetta Stone to sell RTK, Anki, AJATT, etc. All you have to say is "It's better than Rosetta Stone" to someone that doesn't know better that asks how you learn Japanese. Don't insult Rosetta Stone, as that won't help anything.

The main problem I had with it, is that it's simply not worth the price they are selling it for. Other than that it's got some good features.

Another grip I had was after I finished a lesson, about two lessons later I was forgetting stuff from the lesson that I had 2 lessons ago. And then I noticed that the test at the end of each level required you to know or say things you couldn't have known. Instead of being a language interaction, it was more like "What does the program want me to say", like I'm trying to mind read it. I ran into this a lot the "how could I have known that?" feeling when I was wrong. Also it hurt my brain that most of the people were Hispanic or middle eastern. I had to imagine a pretend land settled by South Americans and Saudi Arabians where they adopted Japanese as their national language. It just didn't feel right. Also I found that I could cheat on a lot of the quiz like parts simply by knowing what was coming next, and to that extent I found the program moved WAY WAY to slow for me.

I had my Mom try the SpanishRS, and she said she was always forgetting stuff. Then recently I found out Smart.fm/iKnow has Spanish stuff too (hadn't occurred to me to look) and I turned her onto that and she says that it's a lot better than Rosetta stone.

"If it helps, just use Rosetta Stone to sell RTK, Anki, AJATT, etc. All you have to say is "It's better than Rosetta Stone" to someone that doesn't know better that asks how you learn Japanese. Don't insult Rosetta Stone, as that won't help anything."

Well I generally reply, "use ___ textbook" because most people want soemthing more tangible. My goal wasn't really to insult Rosetta stone, to some degree yes, but understand why it didn't work.

漢字武,
Smart.fm is an swesome site. I don't like the new form but it attracts people who like facebook. (It's layout is pretty much the same) It combines hardcore and softcore learners which makes it truly unique.

Aggressive advertising and the seemingly instant results plus good reviews from people who don't know better (beginners).

Not to mention, the ones who preach Rosetta Stone are likely to be the type of people who do Pimsleur and all the popular textbooks in the language they're learning. Looking at those, I'd say Rosetta Stone actually isn't that bad. But when you learn about more advanced methods like immersion and more specialized books like Kanzen or KO2001, you start to see how mediocre and overpriced it is. You can practically learn a whole language or two with $500.

Squintox Wrote:Aggressive advertising and the seemingly instant results plus good reviews from people who don't know better (beginners).

Not to mention, the ones who preach Rosetta Stone are likely to be the type of people who do Pimsleur and all the popular textbooks in the language they're learning. Looking at those, I'd say Rosetta Stone actually isn't that bad. But when you learn about more advanced methods like immersion and more specialized books like Kanzen or KO2001, you start to see how mediocre and overpriced it is. You can practically learn a whole language or two with $500.

haha, so true. I remember back in those days, i used to think all those things would work (Not saying they don't, but once you to a certain point you'll know it isn't all that great in the long run). If i did pimselur and Rosetta stone, i probably won't understand japanese aside from the basic things. (I have tried them both, didn';t really work, although i can't say i did it for the long run, only a month or so. Then afterwards felt i wouldn't get anywhere with japanese.) For the price of 500$ you could buy a huge load of native stuff, movies,games,music.

Rosetta Stone is designed to allow the reuse of the same content for all the languages they support. That made it possible to keep the production cost low and allowed them to invest in marketing.

Some people may find it useful anyway but it was not designed by Japanese language teachers to cover everything that's actually needed to learn the language. It's just the Japanese version of a very generic language teaching system.