Slashdot Mirror

http://www.rosettastone.com/learn-english

You would benefit from purchasing this

Crap. I need to stop putting it off and just go ahead and order this thing.

If I can get back in college, I'm on disability and couldn't afford to stay in college so I dropped out, I want to go to Brazil as part of a study abroad program. Before I can go though I need to take 2 years of Portuguese. I've thought about trying one of those programs like RosettaStone but I wonder how well they really are especially with pronunciation and writing.

Falcon

Rumor has it that the online Rosetta stone version is pretty good.
http://www.rosettastone.com/personal/languages/chinese-mandarin/osub
I will probably be signing up for that in the next couple weeks. It seems a lot more interactive, and I like the idea of paying for a service that can update as time changes rather than just pay for a single piece of software.

What I would really like to see is a list of good movies and tv shows in Mandarin. Pretty much every good Chinese movie I have ever seen has been in Cantonese, and I have never been able to watch a Mandarin tv show all the way through an episode.

When learning foreign languages, I'm still looking for a decent Japanese software title - but most edutainment (is that what they still call it?) sucks.

Keep in mind you're using your experience learning a language from which English is derived and assuming it works equally well wtih a language that has nothing to do with English.

The Rosetta Stone software is brilliant - check it out here: http://www.rosettastone.com/

It's quite effective at forcing you to think in another language - after a short while of trying the french course, I found that I was thinking in that lauguage which I believe is the most natural way to learn. For example, parts of the courses work by giving you 4 pictures of things to choose from and you have to pick based on what word you hear - there's no handholding if you don't want it. The later courses combine those words into phrases and you really are thinking in the lanuguage as opposed to translating it (from english) in your head. This happens because you associate the image with the word specific to the language you're learning - very cool and very fast. There are many other sections to the courses but they all work the same way - associate a word or phrase in the language you're learning directly with objects or things you can see or hear, etc. By the way, I spent a while after a couple of hours on the course walking around and noticing things I could name in the new language - it worked very well and there was no manual conversion from english going on in my head.
Most other software or books, cd's, etc I've tried seem to teach through repitition and what I've found is that I end up translating the language in my head from english to whatever other language. If you can *think* in that language from the start, it becomes far easier to become fluent and retain the language - after all, Japanese people think in Japanese, they don't convert it from english first!

Hope that helps :)

http://www2.rosettastone.com/en/?a=b

It's on the expensive side, but it is extremely fast and it works well. Instead of trying to teach you grammar and memorize conjugation rules and nouns, it immerses you in a Spanish environment so you learn in the same fashion a native spanish speaker would have at first (only sped up 100x).

To the best of my knowledge, Rosetta is even what the US military and Diplomatic Corp use for language training (although anyone with first hand experience feel free to correct me).

I've heard Rosetta works fairly well. It's not cheap though.

Rosetta Stone

"I Can READ That!" is a gentle introduction to reading Chinese characters, focused on stuff you'd see while traveling in China. Won't really teach you how to say anything, though.

For self-paced learning of conversational Mandarin, nothing beats the Pimsleur language programs. I can say from personal experience that after listening to just the first-level program, you will be able to ask for stuff in restaurants (and drop a few jaws in the process if you don't look Asian!), hold simple conversations with Chinese speakers, and start to make a little sense of the dialogue in Chinese movies and TV shows. There are three levels, each with about 15 hours of material.

If you have a Palm handheld, PlecoDict absolutely rocks for building up your vocabulary of both spoken and written Mandarin. It has a great graduated-interval flashcard mode.

The New Practical Chinese Reader is the latest edition of the textbook that's been used in just about every introductory Chinese language course in the English-speaking world in the last couple of decades. It is available with cassette tapes to help with pronunciation.

For more vocabulary, both spoken and written, Rosetta Stone is good. Its major weakness is that it uses the same vocabulary words for all the languages it covers, and the word list is based on some Western assumptions; some things that take just one word in a typical western language take several in Mandarin, and you find yourself getting a small flood of new words with no clear idea of exactly what each one means on its own. But once you've learned the basic conjunctions and so on, that's not a big deal.

For actually learning how to write (stroke order) there's Easy Chinese Tutor, not a great piece of software but the material is decent and it even comes with a bunch of character tracing sheets you can print out and practice on.

Zhongwen.com has a bunch of good resources.

What I really want, though, is for someone to do the equivalent of Destinos for Mandarin. Maybe in the form of a historical kung-fu soap opera comedy drama fantasy like the awesome Tian Xia Di Yi. I'd pay good money for that!

try http://www.rosettastone.com/home/ they sell products for learing different languages. their products are little expensive, but if you are a group it might work out cheap for you. try them out, they have different approach for teaching languages.

1) the gold disk in each of the Voyagers

2) Rosettastones Rosetta Stone google cache: Rosetta Stone Cache

I'm not talking about a new iPod, i'm talking about a new device. The one thing the iPod does really well is play music and store data. It's just a tiny high-capacity hard drive with a little os that lets you browse info and play music. It makes a handy if expensive educational aid for a music class, but with a moderate degree of improvement and cost and you could make a device useful for any (and multiple) classes.

Not a sub-notebook, more like a small tablet or PDA. The iPod is already capable enough for most of the features I mentioned (except flash, which if you went without would save you a lot of trouble, but has a lot of potential: try Rosetta Stone's onlive shockwave service), the hard part would be getting a decent low cost screen with today's technology. LCDs are almost certainly never going to be adequate. Probably we'd have to wait for electronic paper for it to work.

And I'll sell you Welsh if you need to brush up.

Latin, Welsh, Swahili--all languages that are very hard to find in computer-based language-learning products--and, of course, they don't have the Rosetta Stone method, which kicks some serious ass.

Jouster