Chinese. I have tried various things, and learned a few
words, but never really found a systematic way of
learning it until I got Rosetta Stone. I bought the first 10
lessons of Simon & Schuster's Pimsleur Program to see
if it would work for me. Pimsleur works if you want to
learn to understand a spoken language, but it doesn't
give you any feedback. I wanted something that would
tell me how I was doing, so that I knew what I was really
saying. I also wanted something that could teach me
how to read after I knew how to speak.
After a long time of researching, my mom and I
decided to get Rosetta Stone parts one and two.
Needless to say, we're not disappointed. Now I am
learning how to speak Chinese and read Pinyin
(Chinese written with the English alphabet). I will also
be able to learn simplified and traditional characters
after I know the language well enough. In one mode,
Rosetta Stone can analyze your voice and then display a
meter that tells you when you can say something well,
so I can be pretty sure I know what I'm talking about.
Rosetta Stone Starts with simple nouns, and then builds
from there into complex sentence structure. You can
pick from up to 10 different ways to take a lesson, or
you can pick the guided lesson which is a combination.
They will play the sound, and then you choose the
corresponding picture or text. When you feel you have
mastered the lesson well, you can go to the voice
recognition and test your skills. A very cool thing about
Rosetta Stone is that there is no translation; you figure
out the new language as if you were born there. It
simulates a child learning to speak for the first time.
This is a cool feature that fights accents and helps you
learn those things that are not translatable into English.
Rosetta Stone comes in almost any language you could
want to learn, and even though it is expensive, it is well
worth the cost if you plan on using your language a lot
in the future. If you are just interested in learning a
language for the experience, I would recommend Simon
& Schuster's Pimsleur language program.
