This is actually a question about Rosetta Stone
I have read about a lot of people using Rosetta Stone along with this site (SpanishDict). My question is - what does the "total immersion" method mean for Rosetta Stone? I don't want to buy an extremely expensive product without understanding how I will be learning and I can't find a good answer anywhere. Can anyone help me understand what this means? Thanks!!
4 Answers
I have Rosetta Stone, and my thoughts are pretty much along the lines of mhaw. I don't have the personal discipline to sit in front a computer for the amount of time necessary. It's good for pronunciation practice, though.
One good way to get basic grammar concepts fast is the Michel Thomas courses. A little unusual technique, but I learned a lot pretty rapidly from them. They are usually available at libraries for no cost.
Of course, nothing is going to beat real conversation with native speakers. At some point, you'll have to find a way to do that.
I think it comes with some kind of online live subscription or something like that.
I dunno. I did Rosetta Stone for my initial plunge through level two (none of the total immersion stuff, just the computer program), and then took traditional teacher-led classes while I was actually immersed while living abroad.
I think whether or not Rosetta Stone is worth it depends heavily on what you ultimately hope to gain from your study.
I will say Rosetta Stone helped me get my footing pretty quickly. It left me with a lot of questions because it prioritizes raw exposure and familiarity over intellectualizing why a thing is a certain way. No doubt, familiarity is useful, and ultimately essential because true communication is based on instinct, not actively applying rules in your head. However, I don't see how Rosetta Stone could, on its own (i.e. without actual immersive exposure, the thing that Rosetta Stone tries to kind of mimic), get you to even an intermediate level without adding some formal rule-based study. After I knew a little bit through Rosetta Stone, I found the lack of formal structure or rules really frustrating. It's a lot easier just to TELL me that an accent goes over a letter when the accent is NOT over the second to last syllable then let me kind of pick that up by passively noticing it along the way. How many "lo la les" are there? Estes? Estas? Just tell me and I can stop waiting to see if there are more and concentrate on how they're used. "A" is used before any animate object even if it's not an indirect object? Ok, TELL me and I can stop being confused about seeing TO a person and not wait until I've noticed it DOESN'T happen before words like tree.
For that reason, I felt like a lot of Spanish went over my head until I had some formally taught structure under my belt, which I ultimately got by getting some course books and later taking those classes. Then, less of the ambient Spanish went over my head which, miracle of miracles, permitted me to just let more of what I was hearing and reading be absorbed and familiarized, like the initial exposure to Rosetta Stone had started out doing so well. Then I could take my new familiarity level and continue the task of structurally learning why certain things were the way they were. Now back out in to the world. You get the picture. Both input methods levered me up the ladder.
Rosetta Stone is right in that its approach is the way children learn. First, you just absorb what you're hearing, you output something similar, see what works and what doesn't, hone it naturally over time, and voila, you are a native speaker. Brains do an excellent job of recognizing and categorizing patterns of repetitions. Then later you learn the formal structure behind why you express and understand the way you do. But children are 100% immersed with no other language in their brains competing to be the way they build their language skills, and no computer program is going to give you 100% exposure anyway. As your brain works out meaning, it has to hear all of the language several times over, because while it is terrific at identifying repeats and patterns and processing them, it needs, well, repetition before it "sees" the pattern. Which means that you really are going to need several years of 100% immersion to give your brain enough raw data in the form of repetitious exposure to the language as a whole to work it all out.
Rosetta Stone can't begin to create that in any real way, so you quickly get to pidgin state and while that's great, it's of limited use.
Long story short, Rosetta Stone is a lot of money. If you are going to follow it up with formal study, it's a fast way to get some of the basics under your belt and familiar to you so that you're more quickly primed to get the most out of formal study. If you're expecting it to deliver anything more than high basic functionality on its own, you'll be disappointed. If you just like getting your feet wet in languages, or just need some quick-and-dirty pidgin familiarity with a language to get by on a limited basis for one reason or another, it'll be great.
I'd probably skip the "total immersion" part unless it's not that much more expensive, or plan on using livemocha or something.
Check out some of the resources on the page below before you part with your hard-earned cash on Rosetta Stone:
http://myspanishnotes.blogspot.com/p/learn-spanish-links.html
Just my two cents, but I think you can find better products to help you learn Spanish faster and cheaper.
I can't really help you with your actual question though.
