Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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40 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great, but one major flaw., August 22, 2005
This program, simply put, is great! The concept behind it is so simple, yet it so effective. The student can never get bored because there are always new drills, new phrases, new pictures, and new exercises.
The only reason I gave this a four instead of a five was the price. (see my review on Pimsleur Portuguese). The program is good but it is far from complex. Anyone can make it; it is just a series of jpeg images and mp3 audio files put together. I seriously doubt this product's price should be this high. Many great students eager to learn the beautiful language called Portuguese may be drawn away from this great program simply because of the price. This is why I think this program should be much cheaper than advertised. After all, it's a language progam, not an engineer's development tool.
Portuguese can be a hard language at first, but this progam can help even the most linguistically challenged student achieve his or her goal of learning a foreign language. I sure did!
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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
About as good as language software can be, August 2, 2006
First, the Rosetta Stone system is a good one. It uses exercises that combine pictures, words, and audio to teach a language. You can choose whether to focus on general learning, reading, listening, speaking, or writing. The software runs well overall, though I have had some problems with slow startup and instability when doing speaking exercises ... but I'm using an Intel-based Mac and the software is running in PowerPC emulation in the current version. I believe that more stability will come soon.
Second, *nothing* can make learning a language easy. It is hard work to learn a language. Rosetta Stone can be one part of the process, but if you are serious then you need to get a good dictionary and something to teach you the rules of grammar (book or course). Then you will have to study for months and practice for years. I love it, but "easy language learning" is not possible except for a few people who have the knack.
Third, the Portuguese version seems fine. My Brazilian girlfriend complains about some of the word choices, especially the verb "por" for "putting on clothes" using "novo" to say that a person is young. But she is very particular about how to speak.
Finally, the writing and speaking parts of Rosetta Stone are weaker. The writing part requires you to construct or type a complete sentence that you hear spoken. It doesn't seem to address the real issues in writing well. It's good for spelling and the basics of writing a correct sentence, but not for higher level writing. In the speaking part, you hear a sentence and then repeat it. The program shows three types of "voiceprints" for both the program's recorded sentence and what you said. It's hard to decide whether your voiceprints really match the ones of the program. These two parts aren't useless, but they don't help as much as the listening and reading parts.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Thanks Rosetta Stone, August 13, 2005
This program is amazing! I've had it for only a couple years and although I'm only on the first couple lessons of Level I Unit 2 of Brazilian Portuguese on an on/off basis, so wonderful is this course in it's ability to reach me it doesn't matter that I'm not drilling myself constantly. I can get away from it for a while, get back to it and remember because it uses picture association which is more effective than just reading text. I've discovered to my ecastacy that I'm actually starting to think in the language exclusively. Unlike other langauge courses I've taken it's laboriously confusing to be expected to translate because of the tendency to think in your own language first, comparing, then putting things together back into the foreign language. With this course I can now look at a picture that says "the girl has black hair" and having learned all the words in Portugese, I'm not thinking in English to begin with. And perhaps someone seeing the picture of "the girl has black hair" as being impractical for every day use, but I see it as sentence structure, tense, then meaning, and the joy of seeing a person out in the world with black hair and think it in Portugese is pretty awesome just as it's awesome to be able to count from 1-10 in French, Spanish, Brazilian Portugese, German. My only problem are the 3 speakers. Two of them are very clear while the third tends to run everything together which is frustrating. But then again, one has to get used to how different people speak. When I eventually master Brazilian Portugese Levels I and II I'll get the French, German and Spanish. Thanks Rosetta Stone for making learning so enjoyable.
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