Rosetta Stone

I've heard of this language learning software, and it's hefty price tag, so often that they've become almost mythical in my mind. Routinely, I have people ask me whether I use it. I'm finally trying it out. I'm working through Japanese, starting yesterday, and a friend is working through Farsi. We've been comparing notes. I also got on the Danish version for a few minutes for yet a third opinion. So far I have mixed feelings.

Rosetta Stone is supposed to be the best, period. Hence the price tag. It's supposed to be complete immersion, and bringing you back to the experience of being a child learning it's first language. When I see things like this, I can't help but think of two things. Firstly, that the way a child acquires a new language is in many ways mysterious, and we seem to lose much of our ability to do this past a certain age (around ten). Secondly, Barry Farber (who wrote a book on language learning, which I own), said that adults should learn languages as adult learners, with the disadvantages and the advantages that this presents.

So while, in theory, I like the whole 'natural method', 'any background', 'total immersion' idea, I can't help but feel that it's a bit of a gimmick. Also, while I sort of enjoy the challenge of puzzling out the different meanings on my own, I doubt the average language learner cares about a challenge... and didn't they just pay obscene amounts of money to have the language made easier for them? The trickiest parts so far have been a picture of man falling off a bull (I learned which gibberish went with it, but I still don't know what the gibberish is supposed to mean - the rabbit, or the scurrying), and a counting exercise that showed hands, but was counting fingers... this was before they had taught you any numbers over 10, and suddenly you see six hands full of fingers.

Still, once you accept this method, they do a pretty good job with it. The pictures that they use are very creative, and there is never room for ambivalence, once you figure out what it wants you to do. There is a good deal of variety for every subject. So far I've gone through a very few basic nouns, prepositions, verbs, and adjectives, as well as the colour section, and am midway through the number section, including telling time. For the numbers, they have pictures of the numbers on football fields, refrigerators, go-karts, etc. Numbers has you counting plates, balls, children, and more. The variety really is impressive, and I did find myself learning.

Now let's do some cross comparison. This is where I started to be disappointed. The Farsi version, from comparing my notes to those of my friends, seemed eerily similar. And that's just the problem. There are some things that should come early on or later on in any language. For example, pronouns should be introduced fairly early, whereas the names of different Marsupials can probably wait a bit. But that doesn't mean that all languages are the same. The Norwegian version, for example, would waste time in having a section devoted to conjugating verbs by person, whereas such a section would be quite useful in the Spanish version. There's no reason to go into noun gender in the English version, but it might be helpful in the German version.

We're in counting now, and counting is one of the trickier things about Japanese. You see, different words take different counters, which you can make sound easy or hard. If you want to make it sound hard, you can say, truthfully, that you use a different set of numbers to count different objects, depending on things like how they are shaped. You can also make it sound easy by reassuring the learner that these attach to the number stems, and aren't so different from counting bottles in English, instead of 'waters'. The fact of the matter, however, is that there are at least two full sets of number 'stems' that prefix these counters, and some of the counters are irregular. So when Rosetta Stone has you counting plates, and then windows, it seems to expect you to know that three (plates) is (sara ga) sammai, while three (windows) is mittsu (no mado). I'd love to see a learner, completely new to Japanese, work through this chapter and give me their impressions. I got through because I already knew about counters, and had a vague idea about the two sets of stems and even some of the most common irregulars. I knew, going into it, and it was still tricky. I admit it, tricky to explain without breaking the whole 'immersion' theme, but you could give the Japanese learners more time on a section that will be far more difficult for them than for say, Danish learners.

That's a real, practical example of when it might hurt the program to have it be so similar from one language to the next, but there's also just the idea of it. Rosetta Stone markets itself as the best of the best, and has a price tag to support it. So it's a little bit bothersome that the different languages seem so copied from each other. Did they expect that 99% of their users would simply use one language, and never ask questions? Well, probably. But it's still annoying.

Speaking of reusing content, I mentioned to my friend that, even if the subjects (and sentences, and even picture layouts) were the same, at least the pictures were Japanese themed. There were too many Kanji in the background, too many Japanese faces for it to be chance. The first non-Japanese used in a picture was introduced as a wakai, young, woman - I immediately guessed that wakai meant foreigner, or even white. When I told him this, my friend seemed surprise. He said that in the Persian version, the people didn't seem Middle Eastern at all. For comparison purposes, he asked if I had a little boy under a picnic table. I had a Japanese boy, he had a black one. I fired up the Danish version for another perspective. The pictures were different from the Japanese one, and from the Persian one too, I think. They weren't as strongly Danish as the Japanese ones had been Japanese, but it seems as though there was a good deal of effort made to customize the pictures, which I appreciate.

The best thing I have to say about Rosetta Stone is this - it's somewhat addicting. I'll be playing with this more before I leave for Japan - mostly Japanese, of course, but I'll probably try out a few other languages just to check it out.