I’ve been using Rosetta Stone for Japanese and German, Japanese since late August and German since Christmas. Curious as to how I should rate these fluencies on my resume I did a Google search, paraphrased:
“How fluent will Rosetta Stone make me?”
On one forum, general consensus indicated Rosetta Stone as nothing but glorified flash cards. They continued, saying that you do not form sentences on your own, and that by the whole 3 level course’s end you will only have a very basic competence in your target language. This hardly indicates that the program will take you to fluency and sounds like an indictment of the program’s benefits. Rather than rage about how it can’t make you fluent, how about we take a step back and think for a second.
These people are expecting a computer program (however great) to make them fluent. No program that I can think of, including my numerous experiences with academic language teachers, has ever made me fluent at anything. Developing fluency takes years of application, self-discipline and effort, far beyond the pale of what most wish to put in. So people expect some fairy to show up and wave a magic wand, that fairy being either a tutor, immersion, RS, a textbook, or a teacher.
In the first place, fluency is hard to define. Let’s take Japanese, since it’s my most proficient foreign language. Looking at wikipedia’s entry on the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), N1 or Level 1 Proficiency, the top level, requires passing a three hour test at 70% or higher. This test covers ~2000 kanji, ~10,000 vocabulary words , advanced listening and almost every grammar structure a native Japanese person would have reason to know. Using this definition of fluency (big companies do, so why can’t we?), nothing, not even two years of college Japanese, could prepare you for this test. I’ve researched German less, but I assume (perhaps wrongly?) that it is just as intensive and painful: Learning a new language to fluency is hard work, and often tedious!
But wait a second. Rosetta Stone doesn’t promise fluency and neither do academic language courses. Not even immersion promises fluency. So fluency isn’t the goal, the goal is entry-level language learning! The purpose of an entry-level course is to familiarize you with the language and to demystify the learning process. In this regard, Rosetta Stone does a far better job than any language teacher that I’ve had, and I’ve done coursework or had tutors in Latin, Japanese, Spanish, German and Old English. I’ve had the bad personal fortune of finding disagreeable teachers, or ones which conflict with my personality and learning style. Worse still were the ones who had the same language experience as they planned to impart to me: ~2 years at the college level. Compared to this, Rosetta Stone is a far better choice.
Depending on where you live, college courses and textbooks can be expensive, far more expensive than Rosetta Stone, even if people complain about how the package’s price. Perhaps you expected it to cost the same as Dragon Age: Origins? No? Then shut up. This is teaching you something, not entertaining you. Quit pretending that intellectual betterment comes cheaply or effortlessly. Besides, if you scalped their product off the internet then you have no right whatsoever to complain about what price point their marketing team chose.
Another benefit is that with Rosetta Stone, you know what you’re getting, whereas you have no idea what you’ll get with a language teacher. I tested out of the first three semesters of Japanese at Louisiana State University. This ticked the teacher of the fourth and last semester off, because I had not “gone through the same things that my class had.” Long story short, she made it her goal to flunk me and only failed at that because I withdrew from the class. Meanwhile, I was tutoring her students and they were getting Bs and As on the same homework I’d helped them with… and had gotten Fs on. With Rosetta Stone, if you’re incorrect, it’s just a flat simple fact, whereas with a language teacher, the arbitrary nature of evaluations is, for me, an enormous cause for concern.
Even if you’re dead set on learning a language in an academic setting, Rosetta Stone can be a good idea. The program is friendly, intuitive, time effective, and self-paced. Going into an academic course never having even heard the language generates a cliff-like learning curve; trust me, I know. The worst part though is instantly being slammed with grammar tables and vocabulary lists to memorize. All the lists and tables make my head spin, though English grammar and vocabulary, taken in high school, was easy. Why? Not only because it was my first language! Most English speakers don’t cover grammar until they can at least speak English poorly, so why do we take this approach to our second or third languages? Studying grammar before acquiring even a basic grasp of how the language sounds is at best putting a secondary task before the primary task and at worst is discouraging and frustrating. I remember when I began learning Latin, one of my key frustrations was that before I could even hear spoken Latin, I had to memorize tons of vocabulary and learn all the tables. Perhaps if more time was dedicated to hearing the language, speaking the language, writing the language, with contextual clues as to the meaning, it might have been less difficult.
My anecdotes aside, if fluency or even passable listening is your goal, you need the self-discipline to study possibly frustrating or boring material on your own, for a prolonged period, possibly an hour a day for two years. Rosetta Stone doesn’t require you to go to class every day, it doesn’t require you to do your homework, it doesn’t require you to wake up on time for your exams. Sounds like the perfect slacker way to learn a language, right? Wrong. Self-discipline differs from discipline. Going to a class each day is far lazier than taking the initiative to learn on your own. Self-discipline requires your discipline to come from yourself, not an imposed environment. If you need a language teacher, a syllabus, a certain amount of foreign language credits required in your degree audit, whatever, to learn a language, then you might not have the self-discipline to make your target language competence impressive. There’s no silver bullet to learning another language, certainly not Rosetta Stone, and certainly not academic coursework. Not even immersion is a guarantee; I’ve met people who have lived in Japan for 7 years and can’t speak a lick of Japanese. They had every opportunity, so why didn’t they? Lack of interest or lack of self-discipline.
In closing, learning foreign languages, in the true sense, not just the ‘doing it for my degree’ sense, is a difficult pursuit that will be frustrating and tiring. You need self-discipline and a well-informed study program, such as a standardized test from the country in question (JLPT for Japan), as well as at least a year’s time if you’ve lots of time on your hands. Getting language speakers from online swap trades could be a good way to practice conversational skills, but first you must know enough of the language to manage conversation. Of the two options presented (academic courses or Rosetta Stone) my personal experience has indicated Rosetta Stone has done a better job for preparing me for the language and for the environment that it was in. Sure, it’s glorified flash cards, but I recall making quite a few flash cards for my language classes too. Best still, Rosetta Stone won’t go on your permanent transcript. Save taking the class for after you’ve done all you can to ease your way in.
Trust me, your GPA will appreciate it.
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