Saturday, November 28, 2009

Review: Rosetta Stone Korean

I finished up Rosetta Stone's third level of Korean earlier this month. I thought I'd share my thoughts about the program.

The best thing about Rosetta Stone is its emphasis on speaking. You need to pronounce something correctly for you to move on to the next exercise, and you there's a sliding "pickiness" scale you can adjust.

I think this matches Rosetta Stone's target market -- people who are going to travel to Korea, and want to be able to get adjusted. For the Army, I would assume that it's most useful to those who are going to be stationed there.

It's also very good for understanding situational usage. You may ask, "when am I going to need to know this?" At the end of each unit, there's a situational exercise where you have to react to a situation and say the right thing. It's very useful to have an immediate application.

In addition, Rosetta Stone has all kinds of drills for extra practice. There are fill in the listening, reading, writing and speaking drills in both fill in the blank, oral, and multiple choice formats. The immersion style is another plus -- it allows the program worldwide applicability, no matter what the user's first language is.

Finally, it's cheap, (free for the Army), engaging and encouraging. Completing an eight-hour unit gets you a certificate of completion, which kept me from quitting. I think it's better than anything else I've seen for language learning.

That's not to say it's perfect.

Rosetta Stone does have several drawbacks, mostly related to the fact you're not in a classroom. You can't ask someone a question if you don't get something. You have to rely on your intuition to know when something's appropriate (like when to say hello, hi, or hey). And there's no taking into account regional accents or gender-based usage (like how guys don't use the word "cute").

Yet to me the biggest flaw is that it's not compatible with the Army's language tests, which are entirely based on listening and reading skills. Rosetta Stone will get you up to a level "1" if you're decent, but there's a huge gap between levels one and two. A lot of independent study is needed to bridge the difference.

One of the drawbacks to having an immersion-based system is that there are certain concepts that may not get conveyed. For example, Korean has one word for uncooked rice (쌀) and another for cooked rice (밥). You may be able to get that in pictures, but maybe not.

Finally, Rosetta Stone doesn't teach how to use a dictionary, a pretty key skill. I think this is especially important considering the limited vocabulary it teaches, plus the fact that -- as an immersion program -- there's no exposure to how a Korean-English dictionary would be organized.

Overall, I think Rosetta Stone provides a great introduction to a language, especially non-Western ones. Though it's no substitute for a class, it would be an excellent complement to one. It could also be used as the foundation for a weekly class, where you come to class having completed one of the eight-hour units, take a test, and discuss what you learned.

To anyone who's serious about visiting a foreign country and not looking like the Ugly American, I highly recommend it despite the expense.

To those who are looking to get some FLPP cash, it's not magic ticket, but it's still an important first step. Even though I'd spent three years in Korea, I still learned a lot. Unfortunately, I still have a lot more to go...

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