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Rosetta Stone
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Vendor Commercial
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ASOTVI Review
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July 31, 2008
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 What is it? PC-based Foreign Language Courses featuring Speech Recognition technology and Immersion Learning.
The Rosetta Stone language courses consists of a CD application and CD-based language levels that are purchased individually. We evaluated the course offered for the German language, which included all three levels available. Each level is a separate CD, in the case of German, consisting of around 600 MB of data files each. Each level was broken into four separate Units. Each Unit had upwards of 30 to 40 Lessons, and each Lesson had anywhere from 10 to 40 exercises. Each exercise can take from 10 to 30 minutes to complete. It’s quite exhaustive.
This program distinguishes itself from just about every other language course on the market with two key elements:
- The use of Speech Recognition technology to ensure the student is saying the right words when prompted, and saying them correctly; plus
- 100% Immersion learning technique – taking the student into the language without any native language translations.
With this product, you only ever see English on the Home Page, when selecting your lessons and when setting up the included USB headset and microphone. Once a lesson starts, it’s the language you are studying only, starting the learning process as a child would, visually learning the words for “man,” “woman,” “boy,” and “girl” from pictures, and then plunging you into lessons using those words in different pictured contexts of common activities. As you learn new words, nouns and verbs, they are then used in more complex contexts to grow your vocabulary organically, not ever with rote memorization and regurgitation.
Now what is genuinely challenging about this course is that not only are you learning an entirely new vocabulary, noun-verb combinations, colloquial expressions, idioms, and the like, but they also expect you to be paying attention of how it’s all spelled. Yes, there are spelling exercises where you have to type. This can be especially challenging when you realize that with many other languages the computer keyboards are not the same as your English QWERTY keyboard. German, like a lot of foreign languages, also have letters we don’t have in English. The Rosetta Stone program helps you with this in that they provide stickers to attach to your computer keyboard to show you where these other keys are, or where they’ve moved existing ones (e.g. on a German keyboard the Y and Z are swapped).
We found this product to not only work as advertised, but deem it (with any language course that Rosetta Stone offers) to be a Must Have for the simple reason that in an ever homogenizing global marketplace, being able to speak only one language can be a significant handicap. Most High Schools require students to take a year or two in a foreign language, as do many colleges. Being multilingual is becoming less and less of a “nice to have” in life, but rather a “must have.” So finding the most effective tools to opening up an entirely new language for a person is truly a great thing to have.
Evaluator’s Note: As someone who has taken numerous self-study German language courses over the years—cassette based, book based, and even computer CD based; someone who paid to study at the Goethe Institute in Atlanta with a private German tutor; and someone who also actually lived in Germany for four years, I have learned more useful and retained German in a few weeks studying with the Rosetta Stone course than in all previous courses combined. And that’s just halfway through Level 2. The course is fun, and actually somewhat addicting.
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Product: Rosetta Stone
Available From: Rosetta Stone, Ltd.
Summary:
- Uses speech recognition software to ensure proper learning
- Learn at your own pace in the comfort of your home
- Uses 100% immersion teaching
$219.00 - $499.00 + S&H (depending on level and package purchased)
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