Rosetta Stone - Love / Hate

[Soclydeza]

1e4e6-
"would the equivalence be worth it if you could use something else in its place?"
That's what I meant when I said there are better places I can put my money that will take me further, many sources that are absolutely free as well.

"but would it not be the same for any other course(s) that if you got them for free, the price problem is eliminated? "
Sure, and I by no means think that RS is the best program, but then it comes down to preference. I absolutely loved Assimil German, so much that I did it again when the 2014 edition came out. But with French, I got up to lesson 10 and was just not feeling it, got demotivated and stopped for a while. I've been using RS French for a while now and, though it would be objectively more efficient to use Assimil, RS has me wanting to continue learning French with it, so there's a personal value of motivation that it gives me over Assimil at the moment (I'm also using other sources for French, I'm just using this as an example; I do plan to return to Assimil in the future once I'm a bit more familiar with the language).

Think of FSI. FSI is completely free and can take a learner far for absolutely no cost. But many people that try to use it are bored to tears and give up using it, so what value does it then have? Many people opt to pay for another program that'll keep them motivated.

"but if assumed that one had to buy the courses, the question would be which one would give the ratio of most returns per €?"
Objectively, Assimil, TY, LL, FSI (can't beat free), there are many language specific courses that are either free or pretty cheap, there are many. But again, it comes down to what keeps the learning wanting to learn.


I don't think RS is the best course or that it's anything that it's marketed to be, I just don't think it's as bad as people make it out to be. If it's free and enjoyable, why not use it?

[Hypatia]

"I think RS takes you to somewhere around B1"

Really? I've never used it myself (too much of a cheapskate), but that seems like a big claim. By B1 level one needs to be engaging in conversations and producing one's own verbal and written uttterances, albeit a bit slowly and with mistakes and circumlocutions. Can a computer program really take one that far?

A friend told me recently that the UK's Foreign Office, which used to have a big Rosetta Stone subscription to start employees off on languages they needed for work, has now cancelled it and just sends them to Duolingo. (Which I really rate, bar a few quibbles, and has all the advantages that pir mentioned on the previous page in terms of practising speaking without shame, going at one's own pace, visible sense of progress, etc. However, I've done Duolingo German all the way through and would say it takes one to A2 at best.)

[Elenia]

I've never personally used RS. I remember my dad offering to buy me RS French (and then again at intervals, offering to buy it for my younger brother who is studying French at school). I refused every single time, and I refuse to allow him to buy it for my brother, either. Apart from a brief period at around age eleven/twelve, I had never once thought that RS would be useful to me. I simply couldn't see how their method would get me anywhere.

The reason I block the attempts of my father to buy RS for my younger brother is because of the price to quality ratio. The pros mentioned by other people - in particular, the motivation it provides - simply aren't enough to justify the cost. I also happen to know that something like RS won't motivate my younger brother to learn, and it certainly won't motivate him to learn effectively. The sad fact is that he doesn't want to learn French, and RS won't change that.

However, I am glad to see that it has worked for other people, and I am always interested to read about others success stories using RS. By 'others' and 'success stories', I mean people from the HTLAL community, who I trust, more or less, and by success stories, I mean something that isn't whitewashed to make RS out to be the alpha and omega of language learning. I know on the .com site, Lorren* had used RS to learn Spanish and, last I read, was using it to learn Russian. She was also using it with her kids. She supplemented her usage with a LOT of reading. I noticed gaps in the things that she knew, but gaps can happen to anyone. I have the kind of gaps in Swedish that may have been plugged if I'd opted for RS rather than a reading only method. What is important is that RS gave her a framework to work from, it helped her get the confidence to pick up the books and the magazines in the first place. For Russian, she is also supplementing her study with an online grammar resource, as far as I can remember.

I don't think that others success stories would ever persuade me to use Rosetta Stone. I think that young[er] me was perfectly right in refusing to allow my dad to buy it for me, and current me is perfectly right to veto all attempts from him to buy it for my brother. But I can see how others can and do make use of it.

*Can't check if that is actually her username, as the site is down, but I think that is it?

[PeterMollenburg]

I've used many courses and like a lot of them!

But... Rosetta Stone is complete garbage.

For what it's worth, my current top 5 courses:

1. Destinos an introduction to Spanish (all components)
2.Assimil New French with Ease.
3. French in Action (all components)
4. Fluenz French
5. The "Hugo (whatever language) in 3 months" series.

All of these turd in the face of RS. What crap.

[Cavesa]

I think soclydeza basically hit the point from the other side, if you know what I mean. But what they find to be minor troubles (if I understood correcty) are in reality the largest faults of the program.

Being overpriced is a problem, when the real value is like a tenth of the price and the rest is just marketing costs. It might be personal, but I find overpricing products for profit somehow easier palatable than making customers pay you to lie them. And you basically said it is a good supplement. Trully, most people cannot pay that much for a supplement and I don't think they should, as it deforms the market. Fortunately, people are learning to distrust adds when it comes to food and other things, however, they are not that critical when it comes to education. And too many still believe throwing money at a problem is necessarily a solution. I second Elenia's point of view, based on experience with her brother. While RS may be motivational for some learners, it is certainly not going to turn a someone who just thinks "oh, it would be nice to learn a language to earn more money, but I don't want to put any efforts in" into a serious learner. And if you want to learn a language, you need to become a kind of serious learner once your beginner course of whatever kind ends. RS doesn't help people learn to learn a language, the strategies used, even if they work for the real beginnings, are not transferable to the later parts of the process, are they?

And getting it for free is a matter of luck or piracy. I actually think having it borrowed from a friend might actually be a kind of piracy as well, producers of computer based programs tend to write the rules in a way that makes selfishness the only legal choice. I haven't read the RS policies but this is an issue I dislike about today's take on computer based tools. You are free to resell or lend or share a paper based book and audio cd, you are often considered a criminal for sharing the same computerized thing with the same people. The fact you still can break the rules is a pleasant hole in the system, that may not be there forever (for example, win 10 can block illegally downloaded software, I suppose this trend is gonna spread), and it still doesn't mean the system works.

The false advertising actually bothers me much more as that is something I hate no matter what kind of product is being the subject of lies. RS claims to be a standalone tool that will teach you everything you need. That is simply not true.

But, Soclydeza, I would be excited to hear you trully got to B1 in a language with RS alone or mostly RS. That would be the kind of success story that could trully make me reconsider. So far, the closest to this is Stella's experience with RS being a good resource for Tagalog, where resources are scarce.

[pir]

I think RS takes you to somewhere around B1

Really? I've never used it myself (too much of a cheapskate), but that seems like a big claim. [...]

However, I've done Duolingo German all the way through and would say it takes one to A2 at best.)

I've never taken an RS course to its 5th level; I didn't go past the first since I could get that for free from a friend. But their website used to claim that you could get most of A2 with level 2, and up to B1 (not master it) with level 5. I couldn't find that again when I looked just now, but everything has become harder to find there, so I don't know whether they quietly withdrew the claim or it's just buried.

IMO Duolingo French doesn't even take one fully to A1. Not on a simple run-through with strengthening when reminded, which I have just finished. Because while you see sufficient vocabulary and grammatical structures, the vocab doesn't stick well enough for the most part, the grammar is really wobbly past half the tree, and you don't produce enough French even in writing (their speech recognition is much worse than RS). If one also does the reverse tree, uses Memrise for vocab, and practices speaking somewhere else, one can get a solid A1 and into A2, but that's no long just Duolingo then.

It's really ironic that I find the reverse tree considerably better for producing French -- and consequently I see French speakers complain about not getting enough English. I'd really love to compare that to RS since Duo makes such a big to do about how much better they are, but I don't want to shell out that sort of money just to evaluate it.

[Gatsby]

[quote="zenmonkey

Somewhere in Chicago there is a vendor in a mall that is probably still recovering from our conversation - the entire French package was OVER $600 dollars - she told me it was very successful, she had used it and felt she had strong skills. I felt this was such a farce that I may have told her, in French, what I expected to get for that much. I can report that by the color of her cheeks, she understood at least a good part. [/quote]


Or probably more likely, she blushed because she didn't understand a single thing you said. She was afraid she was going to have to come up with a response to you and knew she couldn't.

(Sorry for no quote 'boxes.' I have no idea how to get those to pop up).

[tomgosse]

I see them all over the bookstores in Anglophone countries though. Why is it that the Rosetta Stone section is sometimes as big as ¾ the non-Rosetta Stone section, is beyond me. And the fact that one programme costs about 6 Assimil SuperPacks

.

It's called paying for shelf space. It is quite common in the publishing / bookstore industry. If you walk into a big chain bookstore in the US and see all those tables piled high with new books, be sure that the publisher paid to have them put there. Same as language courses.

[tomgosse]

I dont know of any universities that use it but I would be completely and utterly unsurprised if government institutions/organizations used it in part because of an unwillingness to actually pay for adequate language instruction ...

Except for the Defense and State Departments the government does not want to invest in language education for its employees. I knew of a government employee who was being posted overseas and was given a copy of Rosetta Stone and told to study at home on his own time.

[MorkTheFiddle]

By coincidence in a bookstore this morning I saw a placard advertising Rosetta Stone I-V for $209 total. Having once used Rosetta Stone for German, spending about $400 for just that basic course and finding it as much "fun" as advertised but not as far-reaching as I hoped for, I must say that $209 for all five seems almost reasonable.

[cynicism] As for the business of institutions and what-not paying so much for a language course, the cynic in me reminds me that Rosetta Stone comes in nice pretty boxes to placate the person or committee that authorized the funds for buying it and, just as important, that some courses in school or whatever are offered because some governing body says that they have to be offered, and not because it is seriously expected that the students will actually learn anything from them of lasting value. How many colleges and universities that require completion of x number of hours in a foreign language really care whether any of the students is proficient in that language? [/cynicism].