Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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259 of 277 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent approach, but needs adaptation for Chinese, June 6, 2003
I will say up front that I have not used this entire CD. I have only done the first lesson from the program, which I downloaded for free from the RosettaStone.com web site.
The learning style presented in the Rosetta Stone series really is as good as they say it is. I like the direct presentation of the Chinese and the concept, without English text explaining the grammar, usage, and so on. I also like the amount of repetition that is built into the exercises. Somehow that approach seems to place the language deeper into your brain, if that makes sense. The "game" like style is also fun.
While I was working with it, my one year old son was learning English, and it was quite clear to me that the Rosetta Stone style really is just like a child's first language acquisition. In fact, I felt that working with the program helped me to understand and help my child with his English learning process.
Although I like this learning style, I think it would be an improvement if there were an accompanying guide showing the meanings in English, Chinese characters, and pinyin. A guide would also come in handy if you wanted to work separately with a tutor. Then you could show the tutor a list of phrases and sentances you know so they could practice them with you. For what you pay for this software, it would be nice.
I do have one major complaint about the program - it is not adapted to Chinese. From looking at the free downloads of each language of Rosetta Stone, it is clear that exactly the same concepts are taught in the same order in each language. For example, The first four phrases you learn are "a girl", "a boy", "a cat", and "a dog", whether you are learning English or Swahili. The program is not adapted to the languages individually.
The concept behind the program is that only one new word or phrase is introduced at a time, and the accompanying illustration makes the meaning clear, so your mind can make the association. The problem is that in Chinese the sentance structure can be very different than the Romance languages. For example, in part six of lesson one, you see a picture of a man on a horse accompanied by the sentance "yi ge qi zai ma shang de nan ren". Up till that point the only relevent phrases you have learned are "A Man," and "A Horse". In the English Rosetta Stone program, the phrase accompanying this picture is "A man on a horse." So clearly, the intention is that you learn the new word "on". But, in Chinese the sentance is, literally translated, "A riding located horse top man." So the student is presented with three new words, "riding", "located", and "top," with no clues to figure out what they mean either individually or in that sentance.
I get the impression that they developed the template of this program to work well for the romance languages, and then just decided to make extra money by having translators translate the sentances into umpteen languages, regardless of whether the template works in those other languages.
I think it would be a mistake for a beginner to try to learn Chinese using only this program - it would be very slow and frustrating. But the program would be very helpful used in conjunction with a class or tutor. I have not seen any similar programs out there that are better designed for Chinese, so it could be that Rosetta Stone is still your best bet if you like the interactive, total-immersion learning style.
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96 of 104 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good program for memorizing and reviewing, May 27, 2004
Every program has some advantages and disadvantages, strengths and weaknesses, so I have found this program most useful for associating words with ideas - after all it does contain 8000 pictures. The complete beginner in Chinese may initially make good progress, but then get stuck because the program doesn't contain any grammatical explanations.I have found Pimsleur Chinese better for developing conversational proficiency. Ultimate Mandarin Chinese book and CDs would provide great addition to new learning because that course fills in the gap which deals with some essential grammar that takes out confusion. A little bit of understanding can greatly accelerate one's progress with Chinese. Rosetta Stone Chinese has only "pinyin", so if you wish to learn how to read and write Chinese, you'll have to get some other book. I do think that Rosetta Stone programs could be greatly improved with at least some basic grammatical explanations. For Chinese, it would also be nice, if the Chinese characters were provided. Nevertheless, in spite of all the missing elements that would be very helpful, I have still found this program very helpful for learning Chinese.
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51 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Do you want to be treated like a criminal???, November 22, 2006
Below is what I sent when returning this product to the manufacturer:
In a nutshell, as a customer it's inexcusable to treat me like a criminal after spending $300 on your products.
I have worked in both Marketing and in Engineering roles and have learned that you need to understand a customer's requirements better than they do in order to be successful. In this product's case, Marketing has failed miserably. Why would I make such a bold statement?
I am highly motivated to learn Mandarin. My wife is Chinese and speaks English better than I do, but all of her family can only speak in Mandarin. I want to ensure that my daughter can speak Mandarin too. I have seen several demonstrations of your software and was very impressed; enough to spend $300 of my own money on it. The learning experience is well designed and thought out. It's obvious the amount of effort spend creating and refining this product. But once I went to install it, I started to realize I had been deceived and it only got worse. There is no option to install the data CD to my more than ample hard drive. The demonstration kiosk did not require the salesperson to swap CDs for demonstrating each fully functional language product, why must I be forced to load a CD?
I use numerous expensive software suites in my business from Microsoft, IBM, Adobe, etc. All of these can be run directly from my hard drive without any issues. Yes, I have to activate some of the software from these vendors which is an acceptable tradeoff to combat software piracy, but the usability of the software was fully functional once activated. Can you really expect your customers to carry around with their laptop a CD worth $200 and be happy about this? The data CD is copy-protected to prevent me from making a backup, so my original is always at risk of damage, loss or theft. I would not mind the copy protection on the data CD if I could simply install the full program on my hard drive and then leave the CDs in my media safe. I do not have these issues with the other expensive suite software products I own, why must Rosetta Stone software be any different.
Then to add insult to injury, I discovered an software package (SafeDisc) was installed by Rosetta Stone that can not be uninstalled. This root kit was hidden from me and once disabled using Sysinternals autoruns.exe prevents my CDROM drive from working or even appearing in windows explorer. Which marketing dimwit had the idea that customers would not mind having root kits installed on their PCs that can't be uninstalled? They should be looking for a new job.
Having to use a CD to run the language software introduces usability problems. Learning Mandarin requires careful listening paying close attention to spoken tones. Different characters can have the same sound and be differentiated only by the spoken tone. Now try to hear and learn these tones while your CDROM drive is spinning like crazy on your laptop. Even with closed ear headphones, it's quite a challenge. Obviously nobody at Rosetta Stone attempted to learn how to speak Mandarin from your product on a laptop because this is a horrific design flaw.
A final minor issue is a pronunciation key for piyin needs to be added. Chinese piyin pronunciation is most certainly not intuitive and some basics would help with the step learning curve.
So all of this adds up to an unhappy customer who got his money back. This is really disappointing because I do believe the Rosetta Stone software is a great product and I feel I could learn from it if these terrible design flaws were fixed. Fix them and I'll gladly return as a customer.
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