Ukraine or Russian?

[roger121.livejournal.com]

Has anybody tried Rossetta Stone, wondering if it's worth it?

Comments

[archaicos.livejournal.com]

I've read and watched many reviews of it that I could find (on amazon and youtube primarily) and even tried out a demo of of it and I didn't like it.
In short, it's too limited and too expensive for what it offers. You'll never figure out cases and other peculiarities of Russian with it, which are, unfortunately, important. Sadly, most of the software that aims at teaching or helping learn a language is limited, inflexible, and user-unfriendly. And it doesn't matter if it's got several hundred megabytes of pictures, audio and video. It lacks explanations and offers very simplistic exercises.

You might be better off getting:
- a book on the Russian grammar (you'll need to understand it anyway and the earlier the better)
- a textbook or a few of Russian -- others may recommend
- a dictionary (preferably electronic) with all inflections of Russian words and all accents shown -- it's important to learn the accentuation patterns because in Russian the accented vowels/syllables aren't shown in writing just like in English and the accent can be anywhere. Failing to accentuate properly may result in some misunderstanding.
- a flash card program to create so-called flashcards (one side gives the word in one language and the other gives it's translation in the other). You should use it to memorize new words and maintain them in your memory. Very effective. There're many free flashcard programs.
- something to read in Russian besides the aforementioned educational material (there's plenty of stuff online -- news sites, famous books at www.lib.ru)

When you're reasonably good at reading, you can start trying to listen to Russian speech. And if you can't talk to someone in Russian on the regular basis, at least join some Russian-speaking forum and exchange in writing. This will help immensely to master the grammar, phrases and balance the active/passive vocabulary.

A program like RS can only be used as a supplement because it's not sufficient. And I think the cost of this supplement (RS in particular) isn't right.

HTH

[cassandraclue.livejournal.com]

+1

I would also suggest finding a tutor in your area--maybe look on craigslist? For the cost of Rosetta Stone you could probably get several tutoring sessions. Or try using skype for language practice.

[metallicstream.livejournal.com]

I tried using it before taking an actual Russian class, and learned more with the class during the first week than I had in a month with Rosetta Stone -- a month where I went at an accelerated pace and covered the first level and part of the second, not know what the heck most things meant.

[cubaki.livejournal.com]

+ 1 Everyone says you learn more after 1 class or Russian than a month of Rosetta Stone. Don't waste your time.

[david-us.livejournal.com]

I agree with what you said about cases.

For example, it will teach you the word "книга." Then they'll throw a sentence at you like "Она прочитала хорошую книгу." Huh? "У него нет книги." What the heck? "Я только что купил пять книг." And the student throws his hands up in frustration.

They (Rosetta Stone and similar audio products) have a lot of repetition and assume the student will just figure it out. But the process is accelerated tremendously if the student is given some kind of introduction to the case system. It lowers the frustration level because, at least, the student knows what's going on with all these changing nouns and adjectives.

You have to have *some* book knowledge, in my opinion.

[archaicos.livejournal.com]

Exactly, there's no explanation. It's only natural to learn without explanation from repetition, if there's a lot of it and you're a baby and your brain is able to quickly memorize that much of info and unconsciously process it. And even then it takes quite some time to get from one-two word utterances to complete and grammatically correct sentences. The claims of "natural" learning with RS are far-fetched at best.
And it's worse than that. There's a great deal of flexibility in the sentences in the presence of cases and certain word orders have special semantic implications. That's not exercised in their software. You're only given examples where you have to fill-in blanks in predefined sentences or arrange a predefined set of words into a predefined sentence. And it's often multiple-choice. This kind of implementation on one hand greatly simplifies the software, but on the other hand is very shallow as it doesn't give the learner to work on the real problem: take the words out of their memory for a sentence and compose a sentence of it w/o any help other than checking whether it's correct or not and showing what's wrong. And that's exactly what one needs to speak, that's what to train. There must be such an option, but alas, I don't see it.

[ex-roumor.livejournal.com]

i use it for japanese. its good.
you can get language basis pretty fast. some ground for you to make futher learning easie.

[aitqandai.livejournal.com]

Stuff like kanji would probably require separate study, though.