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Rosetta Stone: A Tour

Welcome to the Five-Week Linguist Show. If you want to learn a language or you teach a language, you’ve come to the right place. Join Janina each week for tips, resources, and advice for making engaging language learning happen anytime, anywhere.

Hello. Welcome to the Five-week Linguist Show. One of the questions I’ve been asked so many times over the years is all about Rosetta Stone. I’m going to start with what I’ve always thought of Rosetta Stone, and then I’m going to give you a tour.

For many years, honestly, it would have been something that I wouldn’t have thought to try, and there’s quite a few reasons for that. First of all, I don’t have time. A lot of my language learning has to be mobile, or if I have time to sit down in front of a computer, I’d rather be watching [inaudible 00:00:01:02], watching Netflix, working with a native speaker on Italki. I certainly wouldn’t gravitate to something like this with the very limited amount of time that I have to engage in this kind of thing.

Also, 10 years ago, I thought it was unbelievably pricey. I really believe in paying for quality. I would sooner spend money… In my opinion, a Mac computer lasts me a really long time, much longer than my PCs have ever lasted me. I’m sure they’ve gotten better, but I’m happy to pay the extra money knowing that it’s going to start up for 10 years. I’d rather have a car that I know is going to last for a long time and pay a little bit more for it. Now, we’re all different. We all have different needs, of course. But that’s my opinion. I’m not going to spend a lot of money on something if I don’t feel a whole lot of confidence in it.

Not knowing Rosetta Stone, I felt like the prices I saw were a bit much. What level do you pick? If you’re going to invest this kind of money, what level would you pick? But I decided to, after being asked so many times about it, to give it a little go.

It’s been a really interesting experience. Now that they have the program online, I think it’s very reasonable. They run specials all the time. I’ve seen lifetime offers for something like $150, very reasonable. If you’re starting out in a language, all the lessons are pretty much 30 minutes. We’re going to go through some of the features in just a second. But I think if you’re beginning in a language and you realistically have 30 minutes a day and you’re not using Pimsleur in your car, which is a big one of mine, Pimsleur and audio books in my car, just because that’s the way it fits. If I had a job where I was at a desk at lunch, and I was starting in a language, this might be something I would do. I would definitely explore. I would use it along with something else. Maybe I would do this and some Duolingo, because I really like all the features that Duolingo has added, and we’ll talk a little bit about the differences in their approaches and how I think the research correlates to what they’re doing.

So if you can see here, this is Italian and I haven’t felt particularly… I would say this is a good course. There’s 20 units here. This is a really good course for beginners to go through. And within these 20 units, I believe there are four lessons. Let’s take a look. Let’s look here. So yeah, there’s four lessons in each one, and then they have the pronunciation, the vocabulary and the grammar. So what I think is really interesting is that’s 88 lessons. That’s 88 lessons of 30 minutes a piece. And if you’re a novice learner,