Rosetta Stone is an online course in foreign languages. They offer a large variety of languages: Arabic, Chinese, Dari, Dutch, English (either British or American), Filipino, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Pashto, Persian (Farsi), Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish (either Latin American or Spanish), Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Urdu and Vietnamese. I am currently taking Latin American Spanish, so that is the course that I will be talking about.
The course (under the My Learning tab) is split into units: Unit 1 is Language Basics, Unit 2 is Greeting and Introductions, Unit 3 is Work and School, etc. Each unit has five Core Lessons (Rosetta Stone includes time estimates, which place a Core Lesson at about thirty minutes). After each Core Lesson, there will be a series of breakdown lessons.
Not every breakdown type is used for each lesson, and some are used multiple times within one lesson. The breakdowns are Pronunciation, Vocabulary, Grammar, Reading, Writing, Listening, Speaking, and the occasional Review for a previous lesson.
Some of these may sound like they’re the same thing, but I assure you, each breakdown is unique. For instance, Speaking and Pronunciation. Speaking has you using sentences, whereas pronunciation has you sound out syllables and differentiate between similar sounds.
To practice conversation skills, you can click on the Phrasebook tab. Here you choose what type of conversation (e.g. Shopping) to practice. It will provide a picture and audio for you. You can choose to record yourself saying those terms, which the program will grade for accuracy.
When you’re tired of the hardcore practice, you could always click over to Extended Learning. This is one of my favorite places to go. There are three sections of Extended Learning: Play, Talk, and Read.
For Play, there are five games to play. Each of these can be played either Solo or Duo. If you choose to play Duo, it will connect you to another student, which may take awhile. Each game practices a different skill.
BuzzBingo has a story in the language you are learning, and a bingo board with words on them. When you hear the word in the story, click on the word on the board. Once you get a Bingo it will show you any words you may have missed.
Picari has a pile of pictures. Instead of a story, it merely says a sentence, and you double-click on the picture that matches it. You can click and drag an image to move it out of the way.
Super Bubble Mania is a game that I haven’t played that much. It’s sort of like Candy Crush: you are trying to match colors, but unlike Candy Crush, you aren’t moving the bubbles. Each color has a sound assigned to it. When you hear the particular syllable for a sound, you click on a group of bubbles that belong to that color. The larger the group, the more points.
MemGo is, yup, you guessed it, a memory game. There are pictures and sentences; you are trying to match the picture to the sentence, but just like a standard Memory game, you can only flip two tiles over at a time.
The final game is Prospero. In Prospero, you are searching for treasure. You click on a square in the grid and say the sentence that goes with both pictures (i.e. two girls; eight fish would be “Ellas tienen ocho peces,” which translates to, “They have eight fish.”) Once you say the sentence correctly, the square will be dug up. Some have treasure, some do not.
To be honest, I haven’t really used the Talk function yet. I don’t seem to be online at the correct times to coincide with other users who are looking to play those games. There are two ways to play the Talk games: Duo or Simbio. Duo works the same way for Talk as it does for Play: it matches you up with a student who is learning the same language as you are. Simbio is, in my opinion, more interesting: they pair you up with someone who is learning your native language, and have you play one round in each. This way, you learn from them and they learn from you.
Read is another fun one. They provide short stories that you can listen to, read, or even record yourself reading. The stories are grouped by Unit, so if you’ve finished Unit 1, the Unit 1 stories should be entirely comprehensible. If you haven’t encountered a term in a lesson before, it will be underlined. You can hover your cursor over these words to receive an image of whatever the word represents.
This is one of the quirks that I found in Rosetta Stone, and I’m not entirely sure whether I like it or not, it’s certainly interesting: they don’t ever actually give you the English translation for the Spanish word. You get pictures and figure out what it means progressively. This can be frustrating, but also trains you so that when talking to someone from, say, Guatemala, when you see an apple, you don’t think of the English word (apple) and then translate the word (manzana), you just see the apple and recognize it’s Spanish term (manzana).
