Saturday, July 14, 2007

Rosetta Stone

I've been trying out the demo CD for the Rosetta Stone language software; the demo comes with sampel exercises for all 30 languages that Rosetta Stone covers. I'm most interested in the French and Arabic, so I've been spending some time last night and this morning running through those.

For the beaucoup bucks that they charge for this thing, I was expecting a far less clunky interface; something a bit more slick.

What is does get me is really serious and sometimes intense listening, writing, and comprehension practice. It's about the same cost as a community college class, but I could do it an hour a night at home, and it sure beats the mindlessness of flash games, which is, admittedly, something I've spent far too much time doing in the past.

I'm not nearly as wowed as they've made it all up to be (again for $300 fucking bucks I expected this thing to shit gold), but because it *is* such a comprehensive system with so many games and different *kinds* of exercises, it's something I could see myself investing in whenever I get hired on full time at the day job (that's currently being negotiated).

2 comments so far. What are your thoughts?

Anonymous said...

I was thinking of buying it myself but I am a bit put off by the price and the fact that I am rather broke at the moment.

Kameron Hurley said...

Yeah, again, for the rather clunky interface, it really doesn't seem worth $300, but to be honest, going through all of these demo exercises, it does seem to actually *work,* which is probably better than it being pretty.

Still, again: for $300? It's a tough call. As Steph said to me, it's not worth it for her cause she can't see any reason for speaking French, but for me, traveling like I do and wanting to work overseas, it would be really worth the investment.