Ukraine or Russian?

[roger121.livejournal.com]

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

Comments

[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.