Customer Reviews

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

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I have enjoyed using the Rosetta Stone (RS) Turkish software. So far, I have completed Level 1 and half of Level 2.

Some background about me: 56 years old, native English speaker, acquired German (moderately fluent) as a teenager, studied Spanish (minimally capable) casually, dabbled in Vietnamese, Norwegian, and Italian.

I started studying Turkish in 2007. I did the 16-lesson version of Pimsleur (very useful). I have done the Teach Yourself (TY) books & CDs (TY Beginning Turkish: good; TY Conversation CD very good; TY Turkish very good, but gets very difficult quickly.) I did the old RS "Explorer" series in Turkish (and in Vietnamese!), which was the fist two lessons from the old version of Level 1. I took Turkish 101 and 102 from my local university.

I debated over buying this software for over a year, having invested (and sometimes wasted) money on other products. Finally I decided that the cost for Levels 1, 2, & 3 was less than half of a semester's tuition for a course at a college (or of a round-trip ticket to Istanbul).

I don't think that this is the way that people learned their first language, but it is a fun and effective way to learn or review a second language. Its activities allow you to reason out the links between the spoken or written language and the details of relevant photographs. Often there are redundancies in the photos which allow you to match even incompletely understood chunks of Turkish with the pictured situations. I think this allows the other aspects of the Turkish chunks (i.e., words, phrases, sentences) to become meaningful.

Challenges: For a few pictures, I could not explain (even in English) what the picture was illustrating. I think I just memorized the correct association of language chunk to picture so that I wouldn't keep getting it incorrect when reviewed.

The speech recognition (SR) was generally accurate. Sometimes I would make pronunciation mistakes but still be scored as correct, an imprecision of the SR state-of-the-art in general. However, on my machine (Mac Intel 2.4 laptop) sometimes there would be intermittent recording cut-outs, causing my response to be scored as incorrect on items I knew well. I quit using the SR because of this.

Also, I wish that the program would allow missed items to be attempted again, perhaps as part of the same lesson activity.

Overall: I am happy with my purchase. Given my previous study, much of Level 1 was a pleasant review, but several new vocabulary terms and even a few grammar concepts were new to me. Level 2 offers more of a challenge but follows smoothly from Level 1. I wish that other languages were available from RS as less-expensive add-ons, so I could justify buying them just to dabble in.