I went to New York City for a holiday, and it was an amazing city full of life and things to do and see. I stayed at a hostel for the duration of my stay, and met some incredible people there – strangely, so many of them were Germans. It kinda re-sparked an interest in the German language that I originally had tried learning nearly a decade ago, but didn’t master.
So I decided to pick up German again, but I didn’t want to commit myself to a full-time language class because of my schedule and work. As a result, I figured that it would be better to go through a self-learning course. Of all the German language courses available, Rosetta Stone (German)
seemed to have the best reviews because of it’s natural and immersive language learning, so I tried it out. I had lost a lot of my vocabulary and could no longer construct sentences in German, but since I’ve gotten Rosetta Stone (German), I’ve now completed one set of lessons and felt that the way that it taught the German language was much more fun and efficient than how I used to learn it back in school.
When you first start the program, it seems difficult to use because all you get is a screen split into 4, with German phrases above them. In Rosetta Stone (German), it doesn’t present you with traditional vocabulary lists, or even translations that you might expect. So you essentially are just totally immersed into the German language. Just like a child, you learn vocabulary by associating pictures with words, and learn sentence construction from examples.
In the German level 1 course, the entire course is grouped into 4 major groups. Each group is split into 4-6 lessons, with each lesson further split into 10-45 segments. The learning is progressive, and every lesson that you take builds upon the previous ones. Lessons in Rosetta Stone are grouped into vocabulary, reading, writing, speaking. For instance, you might be playing a matching game in which you match a picture with the correct German word. Or you might be asked to complete sentences, or asked to pronounce words or entire sentences. This speech recognition is done through software that is built into Rosetta Stone (German), and it will compare your speech against that of a native German speaker. However, it is a feature that I do not use, as I do not find that as useful. What I usually do is to say out the words as I go through any lessons, which I find helps in my pronunciation.
Your learning curriculm is defined for you by Rosetta Stone (German), but you can return to and retry any lesson at any point of time. Rosetta Stone will give you your score at the end of every lesson that you complete, and you can judge how well you fared, and redo lessons that you feel weaker in.
All in all, Rosetta Stone (German) is a useful language learning software, but not perfect. First of all, it’s expensive. Secondly, there are minor annoyances as well, like how it does not start where you left off becaues it apparently does not keep track of which lesson you are on. However, it really does deliver on what it promises, which is to teach German fast, and in the most natural manner. I find myself learning, so Rosetta Stone (German) definitely does what it’s supposed to do.
I compared the cost of a German language class and the cost of Rosetta Stone (German), and felt that it was a worthwhile investment. If the price is affordable to you, and if you are able to use Rosetta Stone (German) regularly to learn a language, then Rosetta Stone (German) will likely work for you.
Sounds interesting? Check out the Rosetta Stone (German) details page here.
