Fast forward to present day and I find myself watering tomato plants before work each morning.  Mom had two extra in the greenhouse that she didn’t have space near the house to plant.  I’ve always liked pulling weeds from flowerbeds — it reminds me of grinding in an MMORPG, another pointless repetitive task you have to keep on top of every day or else you fall behind the curve — but growing a crop, even something as easy as tomatoes, is incredibly fun for me.  Every day, I get to see them grow, tend them, and water them.  In exchange, they provide me with food in a couple months.  I enjoy our tacit agreement, care for fruit.

There’s no such agreement between the lawn and I, the lawn pretty much sits there and says “Hey, mow me.”  I hate mowing the lawn.  It’s not a matter of laziness, I’ll gladly jump at the chance at overtime, or weeding a flowerbed (see above), or any number of other tedious repetitive tasks.  It’s the principle of the thing.  I’m not a cow.  Why should I tend grass?  That and I could swear the lawn is talking shit about me.

“Yeah, mow me,” I hear it say.

“That’s right, I’m getting a little long again, time for a trim.  Chop chop.”  It’s so smug about it too, like I’m obligated.  My face fur is less smug.

But anyways, the tomatoes.  At first I was afraid that I wouldn’t take care of them properly, but I soon discovered that tomato plant greens have an addictive smell.  That’s right.  A smell that comes off on your hands and smells kind of pungent, kind of earthy, kind of… green.  Imaginative description, I know.  But the smell is amazing.  I look forward to going out and watering them each morning, and adjusting them in their little metal guides, simply so that I can smell my hands afterwards.

The smaller tomato bush has had two tomatoes for a while, and just today the bigger of the two just got its second fruit.  Both are loaded with little yellow blossoms that promise me even more fruit if I only tend it.  Growing tomatoes is highly rewarding, and the vine-ripened fruit is well worth it, at least what I’ve gotten from living at my parents’ farm… and I doubt they’re keeping secret growth tips from me.  The ease is what makes it particularly enjoyable though, since tomatoes are hardy and grow in a variety of soils.  A simple list of what’s needed is as follows:

1) A sunny patch of flowerbed, preferably in the backyard, so your neighbors won’t think you’re a nutjob.
2) A couple tomato plants, or seeds for the same.  (Inquiring at farmer’s markets about tomato plants might get you some decently started ones, starts can be troublesome for beginners like me.)
3) Some liquid fertilizer to prime the soil. (Or if you’re a hippy, go without and have less fruit.)
4) A gallon jug to water them with.
5) Oh, and some wire supports, easily gotten at a farm store (I think)

What to do:

1) Make really sure that the spot you think is sunny actually is.  I felt really stupid when I planted them where I thought it was sunny and it was actually shady most of the day.  Take a Saturday to watch the spot and really see how the sun hits it, just peek out every 30m or so and note the sun.
2) Plant the tomato plants (consult a real expert if you go with the seeds) and put those silly wire supports around them.
3) Water the tomato plants.  I do a quarter gallon of water on each plant, or about a liter if these tomatoes are destined to grow on metric soil.
4) Use some of the liquid fertilizer (cut with water as per the friendly instructions that they should have), about half as much as the water you feed the plants, until you’ve put about a half gallon on per plant.
5) Watch them grow, and continually try to move the shoots up to support on a higher ring of the support wires.

The best time to start them is as early as possible in the year without risking a freeze.  Heaven help you if your tomatoes freeze, because I won’t risk it.  This is what it looked like last time my mom’s tomatoes froze:

But then again, my mom’s fruit has always been just a little bit… evil.

“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.

Wait!  I created you!  You can’t do this to me!!!  ARGH!!!