Hi

I’m going to be moving to Spain when I retire (a good 2 or 3 years yet…) and I’m looking to learn the language before that time comes. A friend has recommended Rosetta Stone to me - they do online language learning - however I’m not entirely sure that an online service will work for me.

Has anyone used them in the past? Is the service effective?

I recommend you try out Rosetta Stone’s free demo to see if you like the program and whether or not you’d use it before making the investment.

I bought the French program and I was learning a lot with that for a while, but as with any independent study tool, it only works if you’re motivated enough to make yourself use it. Funny how that works. But I do like the Rosetta Stone method. For a while I was using Rosetta Stone for active learning and the Pimsleur tapes for passive learning and I thought the combination was working pretty well.

Also check out: http://www.spainexpat.com/spain/information/the_best_way_to_learn_spanish/. 

Good luck!

Great, thanks for all the help guys. The Rosetta Stone demo sounds like a good idea, it’ll give me an idea of whether I like the system or not.

Can you give me a quick overview of how it works, i.e. what techniques are used to test you and how you develop your skills over time?

freddyb45 - 15 July 2008 02:25 PM

Hi

I’m going to be moving to Spain when I retire (a good 2 or 3 years yet…) and I’m looking to learn the language before that time comes. A friend has recommended Rosetta Stone to me - they do online language learning - however I’m not entirely sure that an online service will work for me.

Has anyone used them in the past? Is the service effective?

Have a go with http://www.studyspanish.com/ first.  I found it pretty good and the majority of the useful parts of it are free.  If you decide that you can work with on-line learning from your experience with this, then you can spend the money on Rosetta.  Best thing for me is short sessions every day, even say ten minutes three times a day, and on-line can be good for this.  I found though that evening classes taught by a native speaker at my local university were a huge help; most places in the UK will have something like this. Personally I enjoy on-line language learning but you’ve got to work at it just as hard as any other method. It just adds up to hours and hours and hours of work; reading, listening, talking, writing and parrot-learning too - you just have to face it and try to enjoy it.

I really like the Rosetta Stone programme and I am getting on well with it.  You can get a good idea of how it works from the online demos - it tries to make you learn my immersion and interpolation, NO English or any other language is used in the teaching.  You get images and words, eg a new noun is presented with a picture, twice, then the third time you have to pick one of 3 pictures that fits the word - so your brain associates ‘those green or red fruit’ with ‘las mazanas’, without your other language getting in the way.  It’s supposed to be how babies assimilate their first language.

It has been criticised, because adult and baby brains are obviously very different, and adults can learn in a multitude of ways.  The one thing it can’t give you is rules, and if you want more structure you need to buy a decent grammar book as well, there are plenty of those around of course.  I am still on level one, and looking forward to see how Rosetta is going to cope with, say, differentiating the imperfect and preterite tenses!  But for general vocab, adjectives and examples, I think its very effective.  One really significant advantage over other self-study methods is that it teaches spoken spanish as well - you have to repeat phrases and it compares the audio trace against a recording of a native speaker, it WONT pass you on to the next one unless you get it significantly matched!  But I know that has helped my accent a lot.

You can buy it as an online system you can log into from anywhere, or an application you can use in one place offline.  Either way it is horrendously expensive.  You can buy it cheaper - have a good look round eBay - for one thing my copy will be listed there shortly as I have no further use for the disks other than as back ups,

Anyway I am trying to do one exercise a day after work - its about 10-15 minutes - and so far its working well.

Mx