I found this quote:
"If the only time you make use of your language is when you are studying, should you need to use that language you may well be stuck because you'll be in the wrong context for retrieving it."
on this site: http://gbarto.com/multilingua/confessions/
It's interesting. I hadn't thought about the situation from exactly that angle, but it does seem to make sense. For example, my spoken Spanish isn't terrible, but my written Spanish is much better. On the other hand, my written Norwegian is okay, and so is my spoken Norwegian - there is not nearly as much of a difference between them. Comparatively, my spoken Norwegian is actually better than my spoken Spanish, because I am more comfortable with it, and more rarely am frustrated because I hear my own mistakes.
I'm wondering now about whether or not Rosetta Stone gives you the right context. I tend to think it does, more than studying from a book or flash cards. Whatever I may think about the learn as a child situation, Rosetta Stone does help me to start associating the language very directly with real life. Just as I start to think of the new words when I see the RS pictures, when I go about my day later, the words echo back into my head when I see objects, actions, situations that remind me of what I learned.
This really does not happen as much when I learn a language through reading. I might remember the words fine, but they don't usually just present themselves in my mind in response to visual and aural stimuli. It might take me a bit longer to mentally access them, as well.
I think Mandarin will help me understand this process more. With Japanese, I learned a lot from Rosetta Stone, and I did pretty well with Japanese when I was in Japan. But I went into Rosetta Stone with a lot of Japanese experience, however scrambled it was. Mandarin is a fresh start that will let me look more purely at the Rosetta Stone method.
October 05, 2009
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3 comments:
I was required to use Rosetta Stone when I was studying Chinese in college. I had studied Chinese on my own and already had fairly good pronunciation, but I was basically starting from scratch. So, what was my impression? Well, I wouldn't recommend it as the primary means of learning, but it did seem to help me cement the language in my mind, more or less like you were thinking it could. However, I should point out that Rosetta Stone is essentially designed around European languages. You'd think that with a purely pictorial tool like Rosetta Stone, it wouldn't matter, but it does. The pictures embody contrasts that are more relevant to European languages, such as distinctions in gender, number or tense, all of which are irrelevant to normal, spoken Chinese. Most of the time, it isn't too big a problem but, if you imitate the patterns too literally, you'll end up sounding really strange in Chinese, sometimes. There's more I could say but this comment box isn't the best place to say it.
wisewit
Thanks for giving your perspective! Can I ask which version of Rosetta stone you used? I have reviewed version 2 and version 3 in this blog before. I agree that the Euro-bias is still present in version 3, but I do think it's less noticeable.
I have no idea which version; I wasn't paying attention. Knowing college budgets it was probably not the most recent version even for the time and that was three years ago. The pictures you have in your screen-shot have a different style from anything I remember seeing, so the version you're talking about here is probably not the same as the one I used. I'm guessing the one you're discussing is more recent (and probably better).
By the way what did you think of the feature where you talk to it and it says how well you pronounced the word. The version I used was not too good. I could get a better score with inarticulate vocalizations than with what I knew was a (reasonably) correct pronunciation. That's probably the one feature that I would give a failing grade. Otherwise I found it to be useful in spite of a few flaws.
wisewit
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