Hello dudesndivorce.com readers!
Today I would like to review a product I have purchased and used, the Rosetta Stone Language Learning Software. Perhaps you have heard of it or seen the many advertisements for it in magazines and on TV and radio. I certainly had. And since I wanted help to pick up another language, Mandarin Chinese, I purchased this product.
Let me compare the products actual use to the advertisements. In the advertisements we are told of the ease of the use of the software and how it simulates how people actually learn by relating what they see to words. All this sounds good!
Apparently to Rosetta Stone this means that they are under no obligation to give you, the purchaser and student, a usable set of instructions for the software. There is a set of instructions, but it is severely lacking in giving you any glue as to what to do with the software, thus leaving you to poke around and use trial and error to figure it out. Don’t waste your time trying to contact any customer service, like many companies nowadays they simply direct you to a webpage(s) that may or may not contain answers to your problem. Responses to e-mails are vague are simply frustrating.
Assuming you get past all this and try actually using the product you will come to a screen with 4 pictures. Clicking on them causes the software to pronounce a phrase in the language you have purchased. You do have a selection in which you can choose to have the words also displayed on the screen, but none of the selections are for English, so you are never quite sure what it is the phrase you are hearing is meaning. For example; you see a picture of a boy playing, you click and hear the associated phrase. Is the phrase simply about the boy? Is is about what the boy is doing? Is it about what the boy is wearing? Is it about where the boy is at? Or perhaps what the boy is thinking or feeling? You have absolutely no clue! The Rosetta Stone software does not give you an option for an English translation so you will know exactly what the phrase you just heard means! I had to spend months in study and more money on other books and study aids to simply make use of this tool.
If you have dictionaries that help you translate from the language you wish to learn and/or some other language learning tools to assist you, you can make use of the Rosetta Stone product, but as a stand alone learning tool it simply (in my opinion) leaves a lot to be desired.
Hope this helps. See ya later,
Russ
