Customer Reviews

Rosetta Stone V2: Chinese Level 1-2 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I will say up front that I have not used this entire CD. I have only done the first lesson from the program, which I downloaded for free from the RosettaStone.com web site.

The learning style presented in the Rosetta Stone series really is as good as they say it is. I like the direct presentation of the Chinese and the concept, without English text explaining the grammar, usage, and so on. I also like the amount of repetition that is built into the exercises. Somehow that approach seems to place the language deeper into your brain, if that makes sense. The "game" like style is also fun.

While I was working with it, my one year old son was learning English, and it was quite clear to me that the Rosetta Stone style really is just like a child's first language acquisition. In fact, I felt that working with the program helped me to understand and help my child with his English learning process.

Although I like this learning style, I think it would be an improvement if there were an accompanying guide showing the meanings in English, Chinese characters, and pinyin. A guide would also come in handy if you wanted to work separately with a tutor. Then you could show the tutor a list of phrases and sentances you know so they could practice them with you. For what you pay for this software, it would be nice.

I do have one major complaint about the program - it is not adapted to Chinese. From looking at the free downloads of each language of Rosetta Stone, it is clear that exactly the same concepts are taught in the same order in each language. For example, The first four phrases you learn are "a girl", "a boy", "a cat", and "a dog", whether you are learning English or Swahili. The program is not adapted to the languages individually.

The concept behind the program is that only one new word or phrase is introduced at a time, and the accompanying illustration makes the meaning clear, so your mind can make the association. The problem is that in Chinese the sentance structure can be very different than the Romance languages. For example, in part six of lesson one, you see a picture of a man on a horse accompanied by the sentance "yi ge qi zai ma shang de nan ren". Up till that point the only relevent phrases you have learned are "A Man," and "A Horse". In the English Rosetta Stone program, the phrase accompanying this picture is "A man on a horse." So clearly, the intention is that you learn the new word "on". But, in Chinese the sentance is, literally translated, "A riding located horse top man." So the student is presented with three new words, "riding", "located", and "top," with no clues to figure out what they mean either individually or in that sentance.

I get the impression that they developed the template of this program to work well for the romance languages, and then just decided to make extra money by having translators translate the sentances into umpteen languages, regardless of whether the template works in those other languages.

I think it would be a mistake for a beginner to try to learn Chinese using only this program - it would be very slow and frustrating. But the program would be very helpful used in conjunction with a class or tutor. I have not seen any similar programs out there that are better designed for Chinese, so it could be that Rosetta Stone is still your best bet if you like the interactive, total-immersion learning style.

Every program has some advantages and disadvantages, strengths and weaknesses, so I have found this program most useful for associating words with ideas - after all it does contain 8000 pictures. The complete beginner in Chinese may initially make good progress, but then get stuck because the program doesn't contain any grammatical explanations.

I have found Pimsleur Chinese better for developing conversational proficiency. Ultimate Mandarin Chinese book and CDs would provide great addition to new learning because that course fills in the gap which deals with some essential grammar that takes out confusion. A little bit of understanding can greatly accelerate one's progress with Chinese.

Rosetta Stone Chinese has only "pinyin", so if you wish to learn how to read and write Chinese, you'll have to get some other book.

I do think that Rosetta Stone programs could be greatly improved with at least some basic grammatical explanations. For Chinese, it would also be nice, if the Chinese characters were provided. Nevertheless, in spite of all the missing elements that would be very helpful, I have still found this program very helpful for learning Chinese.

As others have noted, this is an excellent way to learn spoken Chinese. However, there are many errors in the written sections that will end up teaching Chinese students the wrong things if they don't have other resources to fall back on, and endlessly frustrate those students who do know the proper usage.

Some reviewers have criticized the lack of translations. However, this is an immersion program, and so that is something that should be expected. It can be daunting to approach the first lessons, but there are enough clues in the pictures and variations on usage that you soon figure things out. More importantly, because you are forced to figure things out it is easier to remember what you've learned. This is a big point in Rosetta Stone's favor for those students who are seriously interested in actually remembering what they learn.

The spoken part is quite good. While the speakers use a Beijing style accent, it is not a heavy one. The student should pick up a more universal speaking style than other programs which use a heavy Beijing accent which can make one hard to understand in other parts of the Chinese speaking world. The speech is very clearly spoken, and is slow enough to be easily understood but not so slow as to be unrealistic.

At first the written portion looks very encouraging. Rosetta Stone offers the options of using Hanyu Pinyin with tone marks, simplified Chinese (used in China and Singapore), or traditional Chinese (used in Hong Kong and Taiwan). However, there are numerous mistakes which, if the student is unaware of them, will lead to learning incorrect information.

First with the traditional Chinese, many words in the traditional Chinese option are written using simplified Characters instead. In Unit 1 alone you have feiji (airplane) written in both traditional and simplified characters in different places, and mianbao (bread), pingguo (apple), huluobo (carrot) and gan (doing) are consistently presented in simplified characters. If someone is considering using Rosetta Stone to learn traditional Chinese characters, there are enough mistakes that you probably should take a pass.

Normally if you've selected the simplified or traditional character options, you'd never see the pinyin characters at all. However, in the written test portion, only pinyin is tested for. This may seem like a drawback but it is also a good way to test you on which tones are used. It would be nice if they allowed entering actual Chinese characters in the written portion though.

When learning spoken Chinese getting the correct tones is extremely important. Of course, good listeners can pick up the tones just from listening, but most Chinese language students need additional help and reinforcement on the proper usage of tones. Using pinyin with tones in the written test portion would be a good way to do this.

Again, though, we run into mistakes and inconsistencies. As a very basic example, ge (counting word) is used quite frequently in the pinyin as fourth tone. However, most of the time the proper usage is to use the neutral tone (it can also be used in fourth tone in some cases, but not in the cases they use it). To further confuse things, sometimes they properly use ge in neutral tone in exactly the same usage where a few screens before they used it incorrectly in fourth tone!

There is an additional problem in inconsistent placement of the tone mark. The tone mark is placed above a vowel in the word. If there are more than one vowel, such as the word zai (at), there are various rules for where to put the tone mark. However, it is usually considered unimportant for the student to remember exactly which vowel to place the tone mark on. It's much more important just to know which tone should be used.

The written test portion uses a unique method for entering pinyin with tone marks. A more common system would be to place the number of the tone at the end of each syllable, for example zai4 to indicate zai in the fourth tone, and either using 5 or omitting the number for neutral zone. Instead, Rosetta Stone uses a system where the -, [, = and ] keys act as shift keys for tones 1-4 respectively. In additiona for the special umlauted "u" letter in pinyin, the common method in other input systems is to use "v" to represent this character, however Rosetta Stone uses "h" instead. These quirks are not too hard to get the hang of but it is regrettable that a more common input system wasn't used.

Getting back to the mistakes, this system also means that the student must place the tone mark above the correct vowel when there is more than one. Again, that's a rather nit-picking detail that will not add much to the student's knowledge of Chinese.

But even worse, consistency problems again crop up. Again in the example of zai in the fourth tone, most teaching materials place the tone mark over the "a". Rosetta Stone starts out in Unit 1 with the tone mark over the "i" instead, but in later units it switches to placing the tone mark over the "a".

Rosetta Stone by default uses 'strict' mode in the written test where tone marks need to appear exactly where they expect. This increases the difficultly greatly for little learning benefit, and then frustrates the student by not following a consistent method of doing so. Alternatively one can turn off strict mode, but then tone marks are not considered at all. If the student wants to learn tones, he or she will need to put up with the frustration of also learning where to put the tone marks depending on which lesson you are on.

These are just some examples of incorrect or inconsistent usage in units one and two alone. The number of such mistakes are present throughout the lessons.

I'm not familiar enough with simplified Chinese to comment on the quality and consistency there.

It is frustrating and disappointing that such mistakes, problems and inconsistencies which should have been caught by the publisher have resulted in a mediocre product that could otherwise have been great. With these problems it makes it very difficult and frustrating for the student to learn proper tones or traditional Chinese characters.

Because about half of the features are badly broken, and because the problems are not apparent to the beginning student, this product only gets 1/2 the possible score from this reviewer.

I read several article on Rosetta Stone Chinese language software before I purchased it. My feeling was, you get what you pay for. Bases on this I paid for the expensive Rosetta Stone thinking that it would be better. I was wrong. It has no translations and no explanations of the text. The pinyin spelling has several errors and inconsistencies throughout. It does not even use a standard pinyin typing setup on the keyboard.
If preferred, you can view the Chinese charaters. Again, no explanations, just pictures. Chinese charaters are not too difficult to understand if you learn the basic 214 Chinese Radicals.
Personally, I learned more, quicker, from a free online course.
Jerry Gelineau

Below is what I sent when returning this product to the manufacturer:

In a nutshell, as a customer it's inexcusable to treat me like a criminal after spending $300 on your products.

I have worked in both Marketing and in Engineering roles and have learned that you need to understand a customer's requirements better than they do in order to be successful. In this product's case, Marketing has failed miserably. Why would I make such a bold statement?

I am highly motivated to learn Mandarin. My wife is Chinese and speaks English better than I do, but all of her family can only speak in Mandarin. I want to ensure that my daughter can speak Mandarin too. I have seen several demonstrations of your software and was very impressed; enough to spend $300 of my own money on it. The learning experience is well designed and thought out. It's obvious the amount of effort spend creating and refining this product. But once I went to install it, I started to realize I had been deceived and it only got worse. There is no option to install the data CD to my more than ample hard drive. The demonstration kiosk did not require the salesperson to swap CDs for demonstrating each fully functional language product, why must I be forced to load a CD?

I use numerous expensive software suites in my business from Microsoft, IBM, Adobe, etc. All of these can be run directly from my hard drive without any issues. Yes, I have to activate some of the software from these vendors which is an acceptable tradeoff to combat software piracy, but the usability of the software was fully functional once activated. Can you really expect your customers to carry around with their laptop a CD worth $200 and be happy about this? The data CD is copy-protected to prevent me from making a backup, so my original is always at risk of damage, loss or theft. I would not mind the copy protection on the data CD if I could simply install the full program on my hard drive and then leave the CDs in my media safe. I do not have these issues with the other expensive suite software products I own, why must Rosetta Stone software be any different.

Then to add insult to injury, I discovered an software package (SafeDisc) was installed by Rosetta Stone that can not be uninstalled. This root kit was hidden from me and once disabled using Sysinternals autoruns.exe prevents my CDROM drive from working or even appearing in windows explorer. Which marketing dimwit had the idea that customers would not mind having root kits installed on their PCs that can't be uninstalled? They should be looking for a new job.

Having to use a CD to run the language software introduces usability problems. Learning Mandarin requires careful listening paying close attention to spoken tones. Different characters can have the same sound and be differentiated only by the spoken tone. Now try to hear and learn these tones while your CDROM drive is spinning like crazy on your laptop. Even with closed ear headphones, it's quite a challenge. Obviously nobody at Rosetta Stone attempted to learn how to speak Mandarin from your product on a laptop because this is a horrific design flaw.

A final minor issue is a pronunciation key for piyin needs to be added. Chinese piyin pronunciation is most certainly not intuitive and some basics would help with the step learning curve.

So all of this adds up to an unhappy customer who got his money back. This is really disappointing because I do believe the Rosetta Stone software is a great product and I feel I could learn from it if these terrible design flaws were fixed. Fix them and I'll gladly return as a customer.

Before I review the excellent Rosetta Stone software, I should make a general disclaimer about the Chinese Language: it is not a language you should try to learn independent from a class. The pronunciation and writing system are such that you are likely to fossilize a lot of errors at the very beginning if you do not have real instruction to help you along. Furthermore, the writing system is best learned in a class. So, this program is best used in conjunction with a class or after already having taken some. Otherwise you are likely to be quickly overloaded & lost by this program.

Languages are divided into four skills, as is the Rosetta Stone, which I'll treat individually:

Listening- Excellent

One of the real strengths of the Rosetta Stone program is that it relies on using a combination of pictures and contexts in order to lead the student to guess the meaning of the words being presented. Students who go along with this will find that they learn words much more effectively, because the process by which the word was figured out is remembered along with its meaning. This methodology is the best available; when I was at the Middlebury Chinese Language School, many teachers there tried to use this method on much vaguer clues than Rosetta, often with ridiculous hand gestures. Sometimes it didn't work, and they'd give the English meaning afterwards. But I remember the process by which we were taught the words, which reinforced the meanings such that I never had to actually study them.

If, during the initial listening comprehension sections you don't know the meaning of the word, then you should look it up. I generally make an educated guess about what's going on, then look it up to be certain. But the problem solving method is superior and is really rather unique to Rosetta Stone.

Speaking- Excellent

The speaking section of this program is important because, in Mandarin, pronunciation is extremely hard. The Rosetta Stone measures your voice and compares your pronunciation to a native speaker, and checks to see how accurate you are. This is the only way I have found to reliably practice sentence-level intonation of Mandarin at the beginning levels. A student who uses this program and tests their speaking as "good" will not only memorize the words and expressions being used, but come out with great pronunciation.

Reading- Satisfactory

All of the reading material in the Rosetta Stone is the same as the listening and speaking sections, which makes it rather useless because your mind can become accustomed to 'filling in the blanks' with the characters you don't know. It does have marginal use, though, but the program's saving grace is its ability to switch between traditional and simplified characters, allowing you to get exposure to both.

Writing - Useless and Broken

This is the great failing point of the program. There is absolutely no way to input a Chinese Character into this program, at such insane levels that it appears that the programmers intentionally blocked characters from the writing section. You cannot copy and paste, use handwriting recognition, or use a pinyin input system such as NJStar Communicator to put characters into this program. All of my attempts have either resulted in inputting "/" or "v" instead of a real character, despire that any other programs will accept it. All you can input is pinyin, which is NOT chinese writing. It is the phonetic system.

If the Rosetta Stone software were to truly build writing skills, it would be compatible with handwriting recognition software, or at least pinyin input. Since it's not, the program is worthless for writing. The program does have a 'tile matching' program which actually builds reading comprehension and grammar instead.

-----

Bottom Line:
The Rosetta Stone software is excellent and a worthwhile buy, though in its current state can only stand as a supplement to a real Chinese class.

I was initially using this program through Rosetta Stone's online service (off and on for about a year). I went through the entire program several times, but have decided that I like it enough and have finally purchased it.

The program does not contain a single word in English and you'll get nowhere fast relying only on the intuitive method. OK, the beginning lessons that teach you just how to say simple words may be fine, but then enter the "measure words" (if you don't know anything about measure words, you'll feel lost because it will make no sense to you), and then enters a word order which is simple, but somewhat different in Chinese.

You'll get out of all that confusion by using some basic grammar book and a good pinyin dictionary. It will help you tremendously to move through Rosetta Stone's program.

Now, that I've purchased this program, I was delighted that the two books which are included contain pinyin as well as Chinese characters (both simplified and long form). Even these characters will seem too much, unless you have gone through some other books and programs learning how to write them (I recommend Easy Chinese Tutor CD to begin with).

Now, that you're armed with all the additional tools, progressing through this program will be a piece of cake. The first time I attempted to work with Rosetta Stone, I got nowhere fast. So, I put it aside for a while and went through the Pimsleur Program first - that helped tremendously.

That being said, this program is not geared toward absolute beginners - you'll find it much more enjoyable after you have some basic Chinese under your belt.

The program will expand your vocabulary and help you to memorize lots of words, after you already understand basic sentence structure and some essential grammar in Chinese.

I have been using it in the same way I'd use watching movies in a foreign language to enhance comprehension, learn more words and the use of those words in different contexts. For beginner to intermediate student of Chinese, working with Rosetta Stone program is simply much easier than the comprehension you'll get from watching Chinese movies.

As most of the reviewers have mentioned, this course is not for the beginner, even though Rosetta Stone advertises it differently. It can be very useful to you under the following conditions:

1) You already have an understanding of Chinese grammar, so that the sometimes very complex sentences even in early lessons won't overwhelm you. In turn you will profit immensely from the amount of vocabulary you can learn in a short time.
2) You don't expect to get conversational proficiency. Rosetta Stone teaches you to describe pictures, something which is done in many real-life language courses I have visited. One could say it is just a concentrated form of this particular exercise. That said, it will enhance your ability to describe and to link words to objects and anchor that link in your brain. For me that method works much better than vocab lists, even in a flash card form.
Especially, I don't know a better way to learn modifiers, an essential part of Chinese grammar.
3) You always have a dictionary at hand to look up words because the programm does not give you any translations.
4) You don't expect it to teach you how to write Chinese characters. This is always something you have to do on your own, a computer cannot really help you. By changing between Pinyin and character script (traditional and simplified) in Rosetta you can learn how to recognize characters, but I think of it more of a vocabulary builder. Also, if much text is displayed, characters tend to get too small in order to be recognized.
5)You see it as one more tool in your collection of Chinese learning materials. In my opinion for Westerners Chinese can only be learned this way, you can't rely on a single book to provide everything.

It gets 4 stars because of the price which I find outrageous. Given the fact that the Chinese version is merely an adaptation of the general Rosetta Stone system, it should go for no more than $150 both levels. So try to get it used and resell it when you've finished it.

This course is a nice, gentle introduction to Chinese and it is fun. You see four pictures on the screen and hear an accompanying word or phrase. Each section has ten of these four-picture sets. There is no explanation or translation in English. You have to figure out from the picture what they new word or phrase means. Sometimes it takes a while to figure out what it means, but with a little patience, you do figure it out and it sticks with you. Some of the pictures are a bit unclear, but in general they are good. The audio is also good and the course is user friendly. Once you think you have learned a section you can take a quiz.
On the whole, however, I think there are better courses out there. This one is very expensive and doesn't really take you very far. While it does teach a lot of vocabulary and things like comparatives and location, you don't really learn to say anything you would want to when visiting China. You learn to say "The taxi is red" or "The taxi has two windows" which are good things to learn. But you don't learn to say "Where can I find a taxi?" or "How long does it take to get to X?"
If you want a slow and easy introduction to listening and speaking, the Pimsleur introductory course is much cheaper (although the full Pimsleur courses are quite expensive.)Once you have finished the Pimsleur introduction, something like Ultimate Mandarin Basic course works well.
Rosetta Stone is good for learning Chinese characters. It doesn't actually teach them, but an accompanying booklet has the script for everything on the CDs (no pinyin or English, just the Chinese). It's a bit of a struggle, but you really can learn to recognize the characters using this program.

If you do not have a mediocre-level understanding of Chinese, stay away from this product. Rosetta Stone has a very unique approach that might work for children under the age of seven (the critical language learning years), but for every other beginner in the language the software is almost impossible to use. The object of the "game" is to match a Mandarin phrase (said aloud and written in pinyin) to a poor, pixellated photo. For example, in the first section of the first lesson, you are shown a ball, an airplane, an elephant and a horse. A phrase will be read and you have to match it with the correct photo. It gets much too complicated after that. Basically, it's a pure guessing game for most of the time. I gave this product a serious evaluation even after reading the plethora of poor reviews. I thought the unique style was interesting enough to give a chance, but I feel as though I wasted hours and hours. I can remember only two or three words from the entire experience. Although I have spent fewer hours on Pimsleur's Mandarin audio lessons, I am able to recall many, many more words and phrases. Although Pimsleur's isn't perfect, it's definitely the best choice for a beginner (along with a solid Chinese-English dictionary).

If you do not know well the basics of Mandarin, this software is completely useless. Buy Pimsleur's instead.