no results from Rosetta Stone

by Aleksei Kremenchugsky
(Washington DC)

I am a native Russian speaker. I have a friend, who wished to study Russian. He is so driven and goal oriented that he worked on his Rosetta Stone like a maniac. After finishing the course, he tested his Russian on me - and believe me, what I heard was dishartening.


After working on it for months, he still can't understand a thing a say in Russian. His own speech is a gibberish - I have to ask him to repeat several times before I can make any sense out it. Besides, only sentences he can say are those from the Rosetta Stone software - "A woman on a horse... The car is red..." I got him children's books - a greatly dumbed-down Russian equivalent of Dr. Seuss - he can't read a sentence and make sense out of it. Apparently, Rosetta Stone does not even teach the Cyrillic alphabet.

He paid like 300 bucks or something for this Rosetta Stone baloney, wasted several months studying it to get to the point of having nothing to show for?!!

Comments for no results from Rosetta Stone

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Less expensive is better!
by: Anonymous

I too have disheartening results with Rosetta Stone Spanish. Level One. Sometimes there is no correct choice. Sometimes the choice is a boy or a girl - nino or nina, and I don't know how to put the curly thing over the second "n".

For about $20-30 you can get "Living Language" with 60 lessons, and a follow up with as much for the same price. (Not exact) I find it better.

Anonymous
It may be his fault
by: Anonymous

It may just seem to be that he worked at it with fervor. Also, geuss what, when you first learn a language you have a very heavy, hard to understand accent. Finally, he's got to put it together himself! it's easy to learn a phrase, so he probably didnt try to seperate out the words from it.
RE: It may be his fault
by: Anonymous

First off, as far as the accent goes, Rosetta Stone has accent building activities built into the program, but they are far from effective. In the Russian version at least, I purposely spoke in as bad of an accent as possible and my answer was still excepted, and when I spoke quickly the program couldn't keep up, and would not register my answer.

Also, how is the guy supposed to just "put phrases together"? Have you ever tried to learn Russian? It's not like English or Spanish in terms of just translating the grammar and syntax one would already know--Russian has a completely different, and quite complex, grammatical structure. It would be nearly impossible for him to pick all of that up in just a few hours since the program really doesn't teach grammar. Had he tried to do so, it likely would have just confused his native friend even more.
I completely agree with ...
by: Anonymous

... the last anonymous comment before me. Rosetta Stone cannot keep up with you if you speak too quickly!

I currently have the Spanish (Latin America). Being a partial Spanish speaker already, obviously Level One is a standard of the language I am already familiar with and I'm inclined to speak faster. This just confuses it!!

The speech recognition is simply rubbish - I also have Mandarin of which I am verbally conversational (my second language, looking to improve pronunciation and sentence structure) and I can sit there for ages repeating the same thing over and over again and it will keep cutting me off or giving me an error.

Thank God I didn't pay for this haha! Very frustrating program.
Are you sure he used all levels
by: Anonymous

I am currently studying Russian with RS and have only just finished unit 1 of level 1. And everything you mentioned he could say were from unit 1 level 1. I have been using it diligently for a few weeks, going over the lessons a few times to make sure my grammar (yes it teaches this) and vocab are spot on (again as much as I can get for how much I have stuudied). I live with a native speaker and was speaking the phrases I learned and was able to put together with my native speaker and she said it sounded perfect. She has also gone ahead to the 3rd installment out of curiosity and she said that it was set up very well for me to learn Russian as to hold conversations with native speakers. It won't teach everything you want to know, but it will teach what you need to know. Your friend should move on from unit 1 level 1 so as to gain a larger understanding.
Duh?
by: Anonymous

Wow. In regards to the last comment, don't you think that LIVING WITH A NATIVE SPEAKER might help you out just a bit? I swear, people will say anything to defend their favorite brand name--no matter what the facts are.

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