Recently I had the opportunity to try out Rosetta Stone Spanish on a friend’s computer. After that experience, I can better understand why some people like this program a lot. Someone else I know, who is very visual, commented that she likes the way it is set up with pictures and words. But I must admit that it isn’t my cup of tea. I got impatient with it… but I’m getting ahead of the story…
The computer had Latin American Spanish, Level 3. She hadn’t started using it, and hadn’t even set up the microphone. I opened the program, and chose Unit 1, Lesson 1, which was pronunciation. Immediately, Rosetta Stone Spanish guided me through setting up my friend’s headset microphone. It went very smoothly. I liked that I had a choice of whether to use the speech recognition software or not, and then that I had a choice of what level of difficulty to select. I chose the highest level.
The first lesson in Unit 1 consisted of a series of pictures with sentences above them. “Es fácil arreglar esta bicicleta” was the first one, and a man’s voice pronounced it. (Both men and women spoke during the lesson.) Then I said it, and as I spoke the words appeared. The sentence was pronounced again by the program, and we were on to the next one, “Es difícil arreglar esta computadora.”
So I decided to play around a bit. I said nothing for a long time, and a message came up asking me if I needed help with the microphone. I clicked on no, and we continued. But instead of saying that second sentence correctly, I said, “Es fácil…” and immediately noticed that the program couldn’t be tricked like that. In the line where my words were appearing, I only saw “Es.” The program had recognized that I said the wrong word. Pretty cool.
Next I tried saying a sentence very slowly, with a lot of pauses between the words. Again, the program wouldn’t accept that, though maybe it would have if I had indicated a lower level of speaking skill when I set up the program. It’s easy to change those settings if you need to. I behaved myself for a while and continued saying the sentences.
The next part of Lesson 1 was a vocabulary unit. Now somebody who had already done earlier levels of Rosetta Stone Spanish would have known what to do, but I couldn’t figure it out! There were two pictures of fences and one picture that just looked gray on the screen. Above all three it said “una cerca,” which means (obviously) a fence. Each picture had an icon for a speaker, so I clicked them in order. A woman said “una cerca,” so I did too. But the program didn’t care what I said at this point.
Aha! when I got to the third picture, where it also said “una cerca” above it but was grayed out, I noticed three little pictures above, of a fence, a garden, and a swimming pool. So I clicked on the picture of the fence and a large green check mark appeared over my large picture.
Next it was the same drill but with sentences and pictures. I had to choose pictures: in which one was a man was throwing a ball and in which one was a boy was jumping off a table? The sentences were in Spanish. And so it went, and then there were some where I had to choose the right words to go with a picture. Got some wrong by not really paying close enough attention. Hmm, just like school.
All this was pretty interesting and useful. On to the last bit of Lesson I, grammar. Here there would be a sentence like “La nina se sube __ la mesa,” and I would choose betwen a, de, or en. I thought this was a good drill. I did get a bit impatient when I clicked the right answer sooner than I was evidently supposed to and had to re-click to be recognized. I also noticed that by this stage of Rosetta Stone Spanish, some of the questions were reasonably advanced — subjunctive instead of present tense, or different reflexive pronouns.
My Review of Rosetta Stone Spanish
You never get any information in English, which I found rather irritating. It’s handy for the company, as they can sell the same program to people all over the world without having to have different versions for English-speakers, French-speakers, etc.
You could learn Spanish from Rosetta Stone, I am more sure after this little exercise. But it does not seem to be geared for travelers, and it is quite expensive. As I mentioned on my page about Rosetta Stone Spanish on my website, it states that it teaches you by immersion, the way a child would learn. I have read quite a bit on current research into how adults learn languages, and we do not learn like children. Explanation in our own languages helps us. So for several reasons, I suggest you skip on Rosetta Stone and take a look at my comparison chart of Spanish language programs to see what would appeal to you.
But we are all different and maybe you’d like to give Rosetta Stone a try. If you’re still curious, here is a link to the first level of the program at Amazon.com.
