Customer Reviews

Rosetta Stone V2: Swedish, Level 1

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Rosetta Stone is a nice little "stone" in the building materials and tools of learning a language, but that's all it is, a rough stone at that. More like a glorified giant-sized Sesame Street language program for kids, but to say that is berating Sesame Street a bit, which does a much better job. You still very much need to use grammar books and dictionaries, lesson books, etc. if learning a language from "scratch" and while you are using Rosetta Stone. There are no language-specific built-in appendices, no dictionary, no language translation guides of any kind, no footnotes pointing out grammatical anomalies etc. (of which there are many in every language.) Nothing. Zilch.

There are just phrases in text accompanied by the audio (if you select audio accompaniment) in Swedish, to fit the pictures, and you have to guess, either, or, depending on your choice lesson. But none of these many preferences is more than just a quiz game. THERE ARE NO OTHER LEARNING TOOLS.

It seems the creators/programmers of Rosetta Stone made the same basic program template of photo pictures for all language suites they sell, and they just changed the voice and text for the different languages. What a money-maker! And what a rip-off! I would bet they spent more on marketing this product than creating it.

The best use of this product is to develop pronuciation and brushing up, if you already know the language from studying it in books, which are not that great at teaching pronunciation. This program does not translate anything, but there are words in this program (probably verb forms) I cannot find in the dictionary.

Rosetta stone is more like a "test" than a learning tool. It takes forever to load.

This product is a very elaborate product in one way. It offers pictures with text and audio and gives you a number of ways to guess which way the text and/or audio audio goes with a multiple choice of pictures or vice versa. There is no "answer" section or appendix to tell you exactly what is said/written.

You still need a dictionary to look up the words. Nice to get the right answer but you often don't know what words mean or even how the grammar works. This program does not help that way at all.

Apparently Rosetta Stone was designed to use the same picture and program structure for every language it offers - it is pretty obvious all the software dsevelopers had to do to go from one language to another, was change the text and audio for the given language, but use the same pictures and everything else for every language. What a boon. They must have made a bundle on this product, with little work past the basic program design.

The end user does all literal translation work and grammar deciphering. There are no links or help references for what each word/sentence might mean or how the grammatical sentence structure works. Nothing at all like that. In my Swedish, for the audio, there were two voices, one male, one female. The male one of them talks too fast and is a very annoying voice. He is not always clear and it is sometimes better to look in the book to see how it is pronounced.

For proprietary reasons, I guess, the creators of this software decided to run it off the CD. (The CD will not copy to a blank CD) It does not install much on the hard drive. This means it takes forever to load. I put this program in my startup folder and it adds about 3 or 4 minutes to the boot time.

Buying the Swedish version just means you get Swedish words and text that, when using it, need to be connected to Rosetta Stone's "generic" pictures. Nothing Swedish about the pictures. The "previous" button never works. You don't get the previous picture. The program just displays random pictures if you press it. After pressing many times, I always fail to find the previous picture. The pronunciation tester really blows too. For this you need a speakerphone. It never gives you a good score or a true assessment of your pronunciation, no matter how you say it. So as a corrective device, that is useless, just another bell and whistle for promotional purposes, in my opinion.

A fair price for this software is about $50, and if these had more competition doing something like this, it probably would be $50, and this company would still be making a bundle, for what they give you.

If you want to REALLY learn a language..this is the software. Like having your own personal tutor and learning like you did when you were young. Highly recommended. "Det ar jatta bra"

I found the Swedish modules lacking vocabulary for everyday use. I used Hugo Language books and tapes many years ago, and tested myself against the much touted Rosetta Stone. I was surprised how easy Rosetta is to use and there is an immediate feeling of accomplishment, but the Swedish modules need to be revisited. (Perhaps, Rosetta shines for the more popular languages.) For the price, I don't expect to see errors, which were more obvious in Volume 3. No one will ever confuse your intent, but a few extra vocabulary words are recommended. Overall, it's a great way to begin learning Swedish.

it is easy to learn it if do little a day plus it help me learn quicker

I enjoyed learning vocabulary and basic grammar with this program, but found that it had significant limitations. Many computers, especially the compact laptops that have become popular recently, lack CD drives. You MUST have the CD to use this. Not only is this ineffective as copy protection, but it tethers my otherwise portable computer to a USB CD drive. I can't use this as the airport or the coffee shop like I can use other software. The lame copy protection also prevents it from being installed in Windows emulation on Linux. Oh, and you can't sell it or return it if you decide it's not for you thanks to their legally-dubious licensing agreement.

Now I'm editing this after over a year in Sweden :) I loved living there and while I was happy to recognize some words from Rosetta, overall I don't think this contributed much to my linguistic success there. I had to enroll in a beginning Swedish class and I also did some immersion work with people I met at a local coffee shop.