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69 of 70 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent program with a few drawbacks, September 29, 2002
This program is a fun and fast way to start recognizing Russian words and sentences. You learn by hearing and seeing written cues along with photographs that represent various concepts. Click on the correct photograph and get a rewarding sound and move forward. It is intuitive, and you will find that you recognize a great deal very quickly.There are a few drawbacks to the program, however. Because the program teaches using photographs, it is difficult to show that "I" am doing something or "you" are doing something. Most of the sentences, therefore, are in the third person. This is a challenge when you go to speak to someone and find that most of your conversation would be in the first and second person. The other drawback is that there is no explanation of the grammar, and no translation of new vocabulary. I use this program with a Russian/English dictionary at my side. I understand that the point is that you learn the word for a concept rather than a translation, which is a better way to learn. On the other hand, it is not always clear what the photograph is trying to convey. For example, a photograph of a 1950s vintage green car has a word you have learned to be car, and an adjective. I had no idea what it was getting at until I looked up the adjective to see that it meant "old." Occasionally you might get an answer wrong because you mistook the action in the photo not because you didn't understand the grammar. It's not a major problem, but you do feel a bit cheated when it happens! Also, it would be useful to have a function that would allow you to look up a grammatical rule behind new vocabulary so that you could not only hear that a certain ending is being added, but have an explanation of why it is being added. Overall, however, I would recommend this program for its ease of use. It makes you feel that you're making progress very quickly, which helps get you past some of the discouragement you can sometimes face with a text book full of declensions. I'd recommend using it with a good Russian/English dictionary and the book Master The Basics Russian which has good grammar charts.
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45 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The boy is standing beneath the airplane, December 18, 2005
I was *very* enthusiastic about buying and using this software in the beginning, but after using it for a couple of months find this software to be terribly lacking in many respects.
I am now well into the third unit (more than 20 lessons) and still have not learned how to say "hello." They've got the right approach in terms of methodology, but the material seems to have been lazily put together and fails to take into account so many obvious essentials that I wonder if the program was even designed by a competent linguist.
Do I really need to know how to say, "violet hat," "the bananas are in the basket," "the window is round," or "the man, woman and baby are sitting on the tractor" before I've even learned to say "hello"? The program abounds with impractical and even absurd phrases you wouldn't even use in the English language. When teaching a concept, why not use everyday language and objects? When will the boys and girls ever be standing on the table in your world? Or the man and woman standing on the wall??? I've skipped ahead and haven't uncovered any conversational material at all.
All too often, they'll dive right in with complex sentences composed almost entirely of words you haven't yet learned. Or you'll answer incorrectly because it's painfully unclear what concept is being taught. Again, this is just sloppy development. A bright native English speaker won't have too much trouble figuring out words and phrases in Romance languages, and the sentence structures are similar as well. Not so with Russian.
And where's Russia? There is no culturally specific material (I am willing to bet that all language versions of this software use the exact same pictures and have simply been translated). How about getting around on the Moscow subway system? What about the dishes you'll find in a Russian restaurant? Russian regions, names, holidays and traditions?
Of particular importance is that nearly all consumers of this product must learn to use the Cyrillic script, and there is nothing in the software to specifically accommodate this. Of course you will pick it up eventually -- and imperfectly -- by time-wasting, motivation-killing trial and error by the time you have gone through several units (dozens of lessons). It would make far more sense to include a component for learning the alphabet and rules of spelling from the outset. You'd learn the language faster that way. As it stands, you merely have the option of typing the lesson's words and phrases in Cyrillic. This will prove terribly frustrating when you have yet to learn any of the letters, with the consequence that you will be much farther ahead in speaking and pronunciation than writing for many units into the course. It would be a simple matter to include an alphabet and spelling module, but they don't bother.
And the *entire* index (approx. 100 lessons) is in Russian! They didn't bother to translate "counting," "parts of the body," "colors," "past tense," etc. into English. If you want to go back to the lesson on counting, you'd better write the unit and lesson number down, otherwise it will become lost in a sea of Russian-language grammatical terms that you will certainly never learn with this very software.
The software medium lends itself to tremendous possibilities for language learning, and ideally if you're purchasing software (and paying hundreds of dollars for it) there would be no need to buy anything else but a dictionary to get you well beyond the intermediate level. It would include all sorts of maps, short dialogues, games, and interactive features. I can only use this software as an adjunct to the other materials I'm accumulating -- online Cyrillic alphabet and verb tutorials, flash cards, and additional books and CDs such as Teach Yourself Instant Russian, a crash course in just what's missing from Rosetta Stone Russian.
I was initially going to give this product a two-star rating. But the cost of this software increases the degree of dissatisfaction. I am aware of the tremendous ad campaign Rosetta Stone has undertaken, doubtless with a concomitant increase in sales. If the company was new and unknown, I'd be more forgiving of the lazy template they've used. But the company has been around awhile and is obviously successful, yet has not bothered to make improvements and tailor the software to the particular language it is supposed to teach, in its cultural context.
I'm no linguist, but I am an avid language hobbyist and experience on a daily basis the truism that if the language you're learning doesn't allow you to communicate, then it is simply worthless.
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The ONLY worthwhile language learning software!, April 7, 2004
The Rosetta Stone series of language instruction software is "Pimsleur" level of effectiveness and unfortunately, Pimsleur level cost as well.The programs work on a total immersion basis, with no English used at all. There are several types of drills, ones where you hear a word or sentence and pick it out of a group of pictures, another where you read the text of the word and pick out the pictures, etc. There are also typing drills in your language to help you spell (without having to download special fonts), pronounciation drills that allow you to hear a word, speak it to your computer and hear your voice in comparison to the native speaker played back to you. This is the first program of it's type I've found where this feature actually works! I own both German and Russian 1 and 2. There is a LOT to learn here, especially if you do all the types of drills for each lesson. You learn grammar from inference, such as word endings when the subject is "in" something rather than "on" or "under" it. You see the same endings used, compare them with the pictures and you start to recognize patterns. But one of the best things about this software is the user interface. Since it's an immersion program, there's no English used and by it's very nature needs to be intuitive. This is how it should be done. I've used other types of language software that had a klunky, confusing interface with features that didn't work, etc. None of that is the case with the Rosetta Stone software. On another note, I switched to Mac about nine months ago and Fairfield Language Technologies sent me out a new Mac OS X systems disc for free, no questions asked. At this price level you'd think this would be commonplace, but it's not. Adobe allowed me to change from PC to OS X when I upgraded from Photoshop 6 to 7, but Macromedia wouldn't and expected me to buy all new software (I didn't). So kudos to FLT for their stellar customer service! Is it too expensive? I'd say yes, but this is a serious language learning tool for serious self students, and it's a lot cheaper than classes at the U. The axiom is true with both this and the Pimsleur method tapes; you get what you pay for.
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