November 8, 2008
I was quite a voracious little intellectual when I was a kid (I was always the one who’d sit in the library for hours poring over books on every subject), and I would have positively loved to have received a gift that would allow me to learn another language in the natural way that babies learn their native language. Even if you’ve totally ignored the bright yellow image at the top of this review, you have to know that I’m talking about Rosetta Stone, praised by Michael Phelps and other US Olympians and sold in a mall-kart near you, it’s the language learning software that guides you through the natural language learning process so that that foreign language comes to you effortlessly.
Rosetta Stone touts that their system of dynamic immersion as opposed to memorization of translations, the way language is generally taught in schools, is the reason why their software is so popular, effective and so loved by its users. There are 31 language courses available for Version 3 of Rosetta Stone’s Personal Edition software, from Spanish (both Latin American and European Spanish) to Russian, to Tagalog and Swahili. For those who need to learn English as a second language, they’ve got that too: American and British. It’s definitely a vast variety that will make you hunger to be a multilingual maven of language.
Until I tried the software, I honestly wasn’t too keen on it at all, having always just bypassed those chipper kiosk stand workers, but that was before I realized what Rosetta Stone is all about. With Rosetta Stone, you don’t just learn vocabulary, you practice it. You don’t memorize, you use your intuition to know the vocabulary. There’s no introduction telling you perro means dog or come means eat. Instead, you’re shown images and use your innate comprehension ability to adaptively learn the meanings of things, people and places.
You can learn at your own pace, and of course you’re able to backtrack and review any material you feel you need to. With Rosetta Stone’s milestone feature, users are able to simulate “real life” situations for language practice.
You might be wondering why I’m wearing a headset in my Rosetta Stone webcam shot. Well, this software even includes speech recognition technology that helps you perfect your accent. That way, in no time at all you’ll be able to say Comment ça va, Konnichiwa and Kamusta ka na ba without butchering the respective languages.
Maybe you’re like me, you know, suffering from what the hubby affectionately refers to as “mommy brain” (yeah you know what I mean), but with my personal experience using the Level 1 Spanish software, Rosetta Stone language software won’t let even the muddle minded forgetful one’s like me down. Many of the languages are available in varying skill levels (beginner, intermediate and advanced), but some of the languages are currently only available at the beginner level.
Purchasing Rosetta Stone would truly be an investment in education and intellectual advancement, whether you’re buying it for yourself or your child, or if you’re a homeschooling mom utilizing the program to teach your child a second language. I’m not going to try to sugarcoat it: Rosetta Stone software is by no means inexpensive, but if you think of the price relative to the lifelong personal, social, and professional gains that can be got just by expanding your mind with another language, you’ll know that you can’t put a price tag on such a gift that is, in the words of MasterCard®: Priceless.
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