Customer Reviews

Rosetta Stone V3: Hebrew Level 1-3 Set with Audio Companion [OLD VERSION]

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

 

 

I was born in Israel and speak Hebrew at home. I took Arabic in college, and found it to be far more difficult than I expected, so I tried out my friend's copy of Rosetta Stone, which helped tremendously. Therefore, when my girlfriend said she's interested in learning Hebrew, I figured I'd get Rosetta Stone: Hebrew for her as a gift...

I didn't believe the gimmicks and hype of Rosetta Stone, but I really think it's a much better way to learn a language than the way I was taught in high school and college. In school, it was always about flashcards and memorization and writing lines of the same thing over and over. I have a good memory, so I'd remember vocabulary, but when it came time to conjugate verbs, or create my own sentences, I'd always be intimidated. Rosetta Stone was a much more natural way of learning the language since you match pictures with words, audio with text, and so on and so forth. My favorite part is that if you have a microphone (or webcam) the program can evaluate your pronunciation of words. THIS HELPS TREMENDOUSLY! I was shocked to hear how Israeli my American girlfriend sounded

I am not saying that if you buy Rosetta Stone you'll become fluent in another language immediately. What I am saying is that if you try your best and really commit several hours a week to learning a new language, there is no reason why you can't. The way the lessons are organized at first seem scattered and all over the place, but you end up learning a LOT at the end. The fact this program listens to your pronunciation (if you have a microphone), combined with its picture-matching approach to learning a language really helps immerse you in Hebrew. You'll sound like a sabra in no time :-)

Despite serious flaws, this course is an efficient way to learn most of what I need to know. With the inductive method which Rosetta Stone calls Dynamic Immersion, all content is in Hebrew, forcing the student to think in Hebrew and allowing the formation of hypotheses, which are refined as more material is presented. I found this process of discovery both effective and fun.

Rosetta Stone courses are almost completely devoid of cultural content. The same photographs and the same words and sentences (translated, of course) are used for all languages. Aside from not teaching the student important cultural details, this approach ignores the fact that language affects how people think, and vice versa. Compare this to the French in Action course of Pierre Capretz, in which friends are sitting around an outdoor table and the first person to leave faces each of the others individually to say "au revoir," or to Modern Spanish (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960), in which a boss tells his secretary that he never goes to communion and she replies that she always does, and we thus learn something about unspoken communication and the dynamics of power and sex in the Spanish-speaking world.

I reluctantly accept this lack of cultural information and the business model which makes it unlikely that we will ever see it in Rosetta Stone courses. Self-study cannot fully substitute for taking a class from a native speaker.

It seems to me that this course is not sufficiently "active." Most of the exercises are multiple-choice, in which Hebrew text and spoken word must be matched with pictures. I am not really forced to retrieve the word or phrase from my memory. I can work around this limitation a little bit, by spending some time repeating the phrases before advancing to the next screen, or by looking at a picture and figuring out the text before I look at it, but the course does not force me to do those things.

Rosetta Stone ads disparage flash cards, unfairly, I think. Flash cards are a great example of adaptive learning, in that I can decide how long to look at a card and where to replace it in the deck, based on whether I got the right answer and how much difficulty I had. The only way this course uses adaptive learning is in deciding when (immediately or on some future date) an entire lesson will be repeated. This approach really falls short in the writing (spelling) lessons. They consist of 6 screens, in each of which I must type 1 to 4 complete sentences. If I make a mistake, the first incorrect letter is highlighted. Eventually, I get that letter right, and then the next incorrect one is highlighted. When I finally get everything right, the software immediately erases what I just wrote and moves me onto the next sentence, destroying most of what little recollection I had of my correct answer. Absent inconvenient work-arounds, I often do not get to practice what I have just learned, until the next time I do the same or a different writing exercise.

It would not have been difficult for Rosetta Stone to make the writing lessons much more effective: if something takes me more than one try, leave my final, correct, answer on the screen until I push an OK button. Then give me that sentence again. When I get it right twice in a row, give me another sentence to spell, but then repeat the one that gave me problems. Continue the repetition, increasingly infrequently, as I reinforce my mastery.

The pronunciation exercises are a useful opportunity to practice speaking but are not very effective in detecting good or bad pronunciation. With the same setting of how strict the voice recognition should be, I sometimes have to repeat good pronunciation several times before it is accepted, and then, a few frames later, I badly flub my line and it is accepted.

I did not find the optional Audio Companion, CDs that you can listen to in your car, very useful. Dynamic immersion with no visual information does not work well for me, and I need not to be distracted while I am driving.

The course has an option to choose whether letters are displayed with or without vowel points and dageshes, the little marks that are below, above, or inside some letters to help with pronunciation. That is useful: pointed text is essential for students at my level of competence, but most Hebrew writing is unpointed. I wish there were another option, to change to a script (handwriting) font, pointed or unpointed. Script letters look different from printed ones, and it is important to learn them.

Initially (in 2008), I had numerous problems with the software. The Rosetta Stone technical support people were quite helpful, though I sometimes wished the development folks would release their bug-fixes more quickly. Version 3 seems to have been brought to market before it was quite ready. For the most part, everything is now fixed. I would recommend that anyone buying a Rosetta Stone course make sure that all available updates are applied, which is automatic if you check a box and have an Internet connection.

Despite its flaws, this course is working well for me. When I decide to study another language, I will probably buy a Rosetta Stone course for it.

As a native English speaker, I'm trying to learn Hebrew from Rosetta Stone and I'm missing so much of the meanings it's not even funny. There are NO translations, so if you can't guess what the picture means (an old car? a blue car? one car?) or guess at grammar, forget it. I would not recommend this product, and it is way overpriced. Nice concept, but it simply doesn't work for this adult.

I've heard great things about Rosetta Stone, but the actual product is far better than I ever expected, instead of the usual back and forth between english and hebrew, they take the point that you origonaly learned your first language by seeing, hearing and repeating words for visual cues. Good review of previous work thrown in also.

Such a great product! I own one and when I speak to my Israeli friends, they say I sound like a sabra. I alrady have the basis of the accent from my sephardic side, all was left was learning Hebrew.

A few things:

1) If you already know how to write hebrew or some hebrew, the mac version will help you unlearn it quick. This can be useful if you want to write codes to yourself no native hebrew speaker could possibly understand. I truly hope they fix this and rethink what they are trying to teach. You will learn the alphabet about 10 times faster and correctly instead of incorrectly if you buy a cheap book and ignore most of what the program asks you to write.

2) Try to find a working microphone - (one that has noise reduction not one that enhances it), the one provided picks up static and cuts off prematurely (about 1/2 the time). Even when you pronounce words correctly, periodically it will randomly cut off up to half of the sentence. You can see that its doing this when it fails to understand you and you 'click' on the little sound icon during a speaking exercise. It seems more effort was put into making graphics of the waveforms of what you say than making it possible for you to say it. It starts recording you when it feels like it and stops when it wants to not when you are done speaking. I found that when it becomes too frustrating to use, just stick the microphone in your mouth, and mumble stuff loudly and sometimes it will give you a pass on the exercise.

3) The pictures approach did teach words very quickly and does improve recall, however its needs a lot of rethinking when it comes to subtler parts of speech. It has not helped me remember which nouns are basically feminine, masculine etc those sorts of things I think you'll need a book for since the 'lessons' lack any follow up telling you which is which.


4) Finally the adaptive review is a good idea, but probably will need to wait for version 4 before it becomes useful. If you make a mistake on an exercise and it wants you to repeat the exercise it needs to vary the follow up more intelligently. If say you didn't know this was a grandma in one case, and a mother in another, don't use the same picture and context in the repeat - use a variation.

5) Also the lesson plan itself sometimes seems broken - I noticed that sometimes after I finish an exercise it doesn't check the box but lets me move on anyway - I don'
t know if this means I did poorly and should repeat it , or if its scheduling it for review or what......


All that negative stuff said, I do think overall it would make a nice adjunct to a classroom based language class - given the cost of such classes however the software should be much cheaper than it is.....

I've so far gotten through one and a half units and really love it. Its amazing how much I have already learned and I love that you keep getting quizzed on items you've already learned. This is especially helpful since sometimes I need to be introduced to a concept again and again to not have to think about employing it.

Also, I love that there is no English. It truly is an intuitive way of learning the language. I'm impressed I can already recognize letters of the hebrew aleph bet and it helps me when trying to sound out a word.

My boyfriend gets really excited whenever I use new words I've learned. I can't quite make sentences that would be useful to use with him, but he is impressed with what I have learned so far. His family speaks Hebrew in the household and my goal is to learn as much as possible before I meet them when I visit Australia. Wish me luck!