I found myself drifting away from Rosetta Stone and getting wrapped up in my other weekly activities, and I wish the company had been more persistent - pestering, even - in e-mailing me with reminders. The problem with such freedom, of course, is that you need to have the personal conviction to keep going. Compared to the price of your antivirus software, TOTALe's $999 retail price is enough to make you choke on your lunch.īut compared to a college-level language instruction course - which requires you to be in the same place, same time, every week, in person, with other people - it's a relative deal, particularly for executives who want to learn a language on the fly or for people who want to learn a new language as a hobby. Rosetta Stone TOTALe works on all major browsers, for Mac or PC.Ī four-digit price tag is a major hurdle with Rosetta Stone's TOTALe, but it all depends on how you look at it. But after a year, your $999 expires, which is disappointing but understandable as software moves toward a subscription pay model. You can go back in and reuse all features in TOTALe for a year, and the software allows you to reset your scores and start over with a fresh "install," if you will, as many times as you like. It's also not easy to simply whiz through the units - like an intensive class, it becomes exhausting enough after a point to need to give your brain some fresh air. In practice, it took me about a week or two to finish the unit, working the instruction around my personal schedule. Each level has four units, and TOTALe includes three levels' worth of instruction. To give you a sense of what you're buying with this software, I completed Level One, Unit One, which consisted of two hours and 10 minutes of instruction divided into four core lessons (themselves divided into 30 sub-lessons) and a final milestone review. The Rosetta Stone software is incredibly comprehensive. Instead of linking the new language's words with your current language, it links them to visual and aural cues - just like real life. It's interesting to note that Rosetta Stone never gives you the translation of the words you just learned. Each section itself uses repetition to reinforce learning, there are review sections built into the overall progression, and best of all, the software automatically prompts you with a five-minute "adaptive review" if you've spent more than a week away from the software, which I found quite helpful. Then a "milestone" narrative slideshow review of the entire unit, which I found very difficult.Īs you can see, Rosetta Stone does a good job ensuring you review what you learned.Then writing (typing words out onto a screen, like an e-mail).Then reading (more exacting pronunciation: an Italian example would be "chi" and "ci," which in English are pronounced the opposite).Then a short review of everything in mixed but ordered fashion.Then speaking (with words in front, then without, then answer conversation without using microphone).First a core lesson of basic words (could be nouns, verbs or pronouns).The first unit in the first lesson progresses like so: It introduces new words and constructions by keeping just-learned words constant. Overall, the software is a breeze to use, and flows evenly as you make progress, using inference and intuition as a guide.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |