Customer Reviews

Rosetta Stone V3: Korean Level 1 with Audio Companion [OLD VERSION]

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During my tour in the Army I spent a year in Korea. I learned a little Korean and was impressed by how easy the language was.
I wanted to learn another language but didn't want to do it the conventional way or go back to school to do it. Then I saw the Rosetta Stone program and tried their demo out. I was impressed at how easily their process worked.

Don't get me wrong, this still involves work, you can't learn it a couple of times thru but the way it's presented with pictures, spoken word and your interaction with voice print recognition makes it a really fun way to work. I enjoy every session I have with it and find myself saying words at work or around the house and to the dog. He seems to think I'm nuts! Anyway, I also realized how badly I was mispronouncing the words. The pronunciation lab (at least that's what I call it) shows voice prints and inflections. Once you can master the voice print and inflection you are saying the words the way they should be pronounced. They have even made this part of it fun. The Korean ideograms are also show atop the pictures and with all the lessons.

I just bought the first level to see if I liked the program. I do so I'll get the rest of the programs as I need them.

I believe you really can learn any language this way. It sure beats any other process in schools that I've used.

Dave P

I have used a number of language learning programs / books for various languages including, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese. Rosetta Stone to me really drops the ball. Their idea to teach you the words without translation and just using pictures is a good idea; however, there are many issues.

1) They show you many pictures and say a word and type the word above it and often it is very unclear what exactly in the picture they are referring to. A lot of the time you end up guessing what exactly they are trying to convey.

2) They never teach the alphabet. They constantly show you words and you are just supposed to memorize them with no concept of what the letters are. It is like trying to learn every word as if it were a Chinese character for an alphabetical language....

3) There is never any mention of any grammar.

It is a novel approach to try and teach people how we learn as children a second language, but it falls short. It ends up basically making you into a parrot. You can repeat things, and guess at what it means, but you have no real comprehension of the language and do not forget, are illiterate.