Customer Reviews

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

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I have been involved with languages all my life. I am a translator, I teach languages at a school that teaches languages, I have taught languages at an Ivy League university. I speak a number of languages extremely well from being self-taught. I am not saying this to blow my own horn but to illustrate that I am a living example of learning and teaching foreign languages.

If your goal is to learn the language, function in the country, perform in everyday situations, this course does not do it. If you want to pick up just some vocabulary, I guess it would be ok, but there are other ways at a much cheaper price.

Here are the major flaws of the approach:
1) Lack of real life situations
You start out as you should, you see images, you learn through repetition, you don't worry about grammer. But then as you progress, you begin to wonder where you will be taught about practical situations. How do I say "Hello", "Thank you"? How do I order in a restaurant? How do I make a phone call? How do I buy a new shirt? Yes, on the surface, it makes you feel like you are covering these topics - but all you get is WORDS. As far as I can tell, you never learn how to even say, "YOU" to someone else, never learn to express abstract concepts like "important" or express opinions. You have repetitions of key words..like an obsession of what people are wearing or whether the boy or the man or the women are running..But how do I pay for a hotel or even say HELLO to the person at the front desk? None of this is covered. Just sentences like, "The girl is not wearing yellow"

2) The no-grammar approach does not work. Well, it works if you live in the country and are exposed to the same patterns thousands of times. NOT if you are learning on your own. Take the past tense. In Greek, it can be very complicated. Thus, we have the girl running, trekhi and then she "ran" - etrepsa - So how can you ever learn how to get the right verb stem for a verb? You are given just a few examples of this. Other topics are brought up quickly but give the learner no basis to ADAPT the knowledge.
What if I want to say, "I sang" instead of she "ran" - there is no basis to apply the knowledge.

3) Complete and utter lack of any cultural context. Let's just translate univerally translatable phrases into all of the languages we do. This could take place in any country. I absolutely do not have a problem with the fact that the people shown are not Greek but a diverse, multi-ethnic community but what I do mind is that there is nothing about Greek life, nothing about Athens or Greek culture, none of the realia of Greek life. The French course can be exactly like the Greek course, except for the translation.

4) Feeling of detatchment. You feel that you are describing a world on a screen. The women are eating! The hat is yellow! But you never learn how to feel a part of what you are doing, that you are the language too. You never get a view of what Greek people think, never have a way to express your own emotions, never feel invited to step in and create your own sentences in a real-life dialogue.

5) Dealing with foreign characters. I knew some Greek before I started, so I was able to read. But, um , what if this is completly new. How do you get help learning how to read a different alphabet?

All in all, disappointing.

The Rosetta Stone Greek Level 1 & II is an excellent second course if you want to increase your vocabulary and develop the kind of feel for the language that a native speaker develops as a child. The course is entirely in Greek, with no instruction in English and no explanation of Greek grammar.

If you want to learn conversational Greek for travel, then I recommend that you start with the Pimsleur Greek I course. Unfortunately, there is no Pimsleur Greek II course, so I recommend the Rosetta Stone course for your second course. You may also want to buy a dictionary for the occasional word that you will not be able to understand just from the pictures in the Rosetta Stone course. You may also want to purchase a book on Greek verbs to supplement the Rosetta Stone course.

One advantage of the Rosetta Stone course is that it will help you to increase your fluency at reading the Greek alphabet.

This program is okay and it does teach some important concepts and will greatly enhance your reading and listening skills. However as another review mentioned for faster and more applicable Greek start with Pimsleur 1 and then use Rosetta Stone.

The two compliment each other very well, and after doing just half of each program I was able to jump directly into a second year university Greek course with very little trouble even though I had missed the entire first year. Although neither will teach you complete fluency, if you do both courses you should be able to hold a conversation.

My boyfriend is Greek and got me the Rosetta Stone Greek Level 1 and 2. I've learned a lot from the program, although I admit I have him at hand to help me with any confusion that a lot of people here complain about.

Some of the disadvantages include too many references about horses and animals and waiting until the end of level 1 to teach you "first person" so if you plan to go to Greece and show off, you must finish both levels first unless you want to walk around saying "The horse will jump" or "The boy is on the table" and as silly and useless as these little expressions may sound, they are important things to start with and eventually, at the end it all comes together.

I once sat at a table and said "Ti trophi enai afti?" asking what kind of food I was eating and my boyfriend looked at me with two heads saying "Ummm...I know what you mean but you're speaking way too proper as if you were a scientist. You just asked me what kind of edible substance is this" So yes, some of the language is outdated and more related to ancient Greek but if you plan to make use of this language to communicate to modern Greeks they'll correct you as you go. People in various regions of a country speak the same language differently so software tools such as this must somehow find a common ground.

To defend this product from the bad reviews, this is still a great way to learn Greek if you are "patient" enough to just stick through both levels. Once you're finished, you'll need a few extra months of practice/use before you can speak it as quickly as the natives do. My boyfriend chose this program because a friend of his married a Greek man and moved to Greece. She completed both levels and eventually became a lawyer...a Greek speaking lawyer. Pretty impressive..

As for lack of culture differences between Rosetta Languages, that's something we just have to deal with unless we want to pay much more $$$$$ for its development :)

Again, if you stick with it you'll become fluent. If you become frustrated and quit, you'll feel like you wasted your time. Yes some lessons may be boring but that is just a matter of learning anything...

I'm one of those third generation Greek-Americans who does not actually sit down to learn Greek until late in her forties. I had tried another language method which presented vocabulary in a random fashion and found it useless. Once I'd gotten a grant to go to Greece by myself this past July, I thought I'd try the Rosetta Stone method, which I'd seen advertised in "The New Yorker Magazine."

I love this immersion method. Sitting down to work on my interactive Greek I language studies is like playing a computer game which yields a lasting memory of how to speak a language. It is fun; it is aesthetically pleasing (the photographs are beautiful); is is easy to deduce what words mean. And listening to the language tapes in my car on the way to the supermarket helps reinforce the language skills. Writing Greek was the hardest part of the package for me, but when I got to Greece, I was sufficiently able to do so that I could write a letter to my second cousin. Granted, it probably wasn't the most idiomatic Greek, but he got the gist of what I was saying and said that my note was "very precious" to him.

My one quibble is with the way the Unit 4 conversation is introduced on the Greek Language Level 1 audiotape. The conversation (about a woman trying to buy some lightweight plates for an upcoming family picnic) involves some very long sentences. You have to break these down further than you do. Some of the sentences are so long that it's a struggle just remembering them, much less reproducing them in a few seconds. I get very frustrated and angry (scaring my dog) when trying to repeat these sentences.

Otherwise, I am a very satisfied and grateful consumer and looking forward to expanding into higher levels of Greek, so that some day, when my kids are out of college, I can return to Greece and speak like a native. Efhoreesto poulyee!