Rosetta Stone Vietnamese Explorer

by Fairfield Language Technologies

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00002S9FX
• Date first available at Amazon.com: January 1, 2002
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #15,757 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

Now you can learn a new language with the award-winning method used by the U.S. State Department to train diplomats. Proven effective by NASA astronauts, Peace Corps volunteers, and millions of students worldwide, the Rosetta Stone Language Library teaches new languages faster and easier than ever before.

We all learn our childhood language by associating new words and phrases with the world around us. The Rosetta Stone method replicates this process by presenting vivid, real-life images to convey the meaning of each new phrase. Instead of translating, memorizing, and studying rules of grammar, you actually learn to think in the new language. Vocabulary and grammar are integrated systematically, leading to everyday proficiency. It's the natural way to learn.

The Rosetta Stone Explorer contains 22 lessons for beginning learners with nearly 900 real-life images and phrases spoken by native speakers. It develops all key language skills--listening comprehension, reading, speaking, and writing--while its systematic structure teaches vocabulary and grammar naturally, without lists and drills. Includes previews, exercises, and tests for every lesson, with automated tutorials throughout the program. (Ages 6 and older)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, fun introduction to the language, February 16, 2000

By 

Eleanor Eich (California, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rosetta Stone Vietnamese Explorer (CD-ROM)

I'm an adult who's using this software to learn basic Vietnamese without a teacher or textbook. I like it a lot! The features and methods are just as I expected from the reviews. And the price is low, so you can try out these lessons before deciding whether or not to invest in the set. (If not, at least you'll have learned how to say "the boy is under the table" and other useful phrases.)

I'd give it 5 stars if it had the option to print the new vocabulary and grammar points from each lesson, or maybe the pictures and their accompanying sentences. Then I could study them when I'm not in front of the computer. As it is, I'm going to have to start making my own vocabulary lists, since I tend to forget things between lessons.

Other than that, I'm very happy with it!

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Useful, December 22, 2002

By 

D. Burrowes (San Carlos, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rosetta Stone Vietnamese Explorer (CD-ROM)

I bought this with a bunch of other language materials so I could learn some minimal Vietnamese before going to Viet Nam.

It was both more and less than I expected.

It was "more" because the training scheme (what I would call "immersive drill and practice") was much more effective than I would have guessed. It was "less" because it makes no attempt to explain any grammar, explicitly define words used or describe things like the Vietnamese phonetic and tone system (they don't even mention which dialect they are teaching. I think it is a northern dialect). Because of this, I suspect you'll need to use this in addition to some other resource no matter what your goal is for learning the language. However, as as supplemental resource it is very good.

The scheme used by this product is pretty simple. Each lesson (there are 22 lessons in this package) involves ten drills which collectively introduce some small set of words/ideas. Each drill contains four things (e.g. drill 1 has "girl", "boy", "cat", "dog". Drill 10 of lesson 2-11 has "The girls are not going to jump. The boy is going to jump", "The girls are not jumping. The boy is jumping", "The girls have not jumped. The boy has jumped", and "The boy and the girls are jumping"), and each thing has a photo, a written form and a spoken form. Basically, you can choose which form you want to be presented with (e.g. the spoken form) and which you want to pick the answer from (e.g. a photo). For each drill in a lesson, you are presented with one of the four things and then prompted with the four possibilities to pick the answer from, then you are presented with another one of the four things and prompted to answer, and so on. This means you get asked 40 questions in each lesson. On the surface, then, this is a simple drill-and-practice package. The drills, however, are organized to build on preceding ones so that you are able to progress from "a girl" to "The girls have not jumped. The boy has jumped." in the span of 22 lessons (220 drills). This also provides all the benefits of computerized drill-and-practice (tireless presentation, easy repetition, tracking of mistaken answers, and so on). Additionally, since this has the benefit of offering written, spoken and pictorial "modalities", it really helps one learn the material. Personally, I found it tremendously useful to be able to click the "play again" button over and over again when I was trying to hear exactly how a particular word was pronounced (something which is exceedingly cumbersome, at best, to do with audiotape). For the audio portions, there are two speakers (a man and a woman) who speak different drills, so you do get a little variation in speakers.

The software also has a "listening" mode where it will play the audio phrases for you and record you saying the same thing back so you can compare your pronunciation with the audio (it also makes some attempt to offer a calculation of how close your pronunciation is, though I couldn't judge how good its automated judgment was). This seems promising, but I found it caused the program to crash on Mac OS X, and the interface was frustrating (for me) on OS 9 because I often misjudged when I was supposed to start speaking.

There are also many features which I would have expected that this didn't have. Someone else mentioned that you can't print out the pictures or the drills as flash cards (there is a PDF file which contains the written sentences for all the lessons, so you can print that out). I was surprised that there was no way to search for words or phrases (e.g. show me all the drills where "red" is used), and they do not support writing/typing (which I know I would have benefitted from). The interface is sometimes a little cryptic (for some reason the company has chosen to put almost no text in the interface, so you need to learn what various strange icons mean in order to use it). It isn't clear to me whether I'll end up buying the Level 1 package, for it's current list price of [$$$] seems a little ... to me.

For [$$$], this seems like a great supplement to a more traditional language text, and you would probably surprise yourself with how much you could learn with just this. Personally, I feel like the price/feature ratio was about right for my needs here.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars This is virtually worthless, September 13, 2004

By 

TonE (Kalifornia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rosetta Stone Vietnamese Explorer (CD-ROM)

I read a lot of good reviews on this product and I don't know what these people were thinking. I bought this to supplement my learning and it was not helpful because this cd is actually an intro cd for various languages and not just Vietnamese. Saying that, there's not much material on Vietnamese at all. I was very disappointed. This cd does not discuss gramar and has very limited vocabulary. I highly disapprove of this cd for anyone learning Vietnamese.