Language Learning

 In my quest to learn new languages I have run across many different programs that claim to be the best thing since sliced bread for language acquisition, but are far from it. The only way to find this out half the time though, is the waste vast amounts of money on things you will never use again.

A good example for this situation is Rosetta Stone, it claims that you will learn the language without having to do useless drills, but this program does just what it claims not to do.  You are paying up to $300 or more for a program to keep repeating a word at you, I have tried Rosetta Stone in these three languages: Korean, Hindi, and Japanese ...and it was all epic failure and I was very pleased that I hadn't wasted my money on it, but saddened that my friend had. Slowly you are memorizing phrases that really don't make sense like "The plane is on the boy" ...I really would like to find a situation where I would need that phrase, but at the same time never hope I need it. Overall I find it a waste of money when there is a free online program that is literally the EXACT SAME THING, but with more. The program I'm talking about is livemocha.com, where for the small favor of helping other people learn your native language, you can learn 40+ languages for free, and unlike Rosetta Stone you can learn multiple languages at once. It does run into the same issue as Rosetta Stone where you aren't really learning how to write in the target language and are not getting grammar explained to you, but hey  it is free and you can chat with native speakers if you have questions.

Overall opinion: If you want Rosetta stone, please try the alternative version of livemocha.com because you will get a really good idea of what Rosetta stone was going to try and teach you, and this will be for free.


The main language series I use for outside of classroom language learning is the Living Language series, it covers a vast amount of languages and if relatively cheap, most basic sets are around the $30 mark. I thought this series was awesome after I had bought the Hindi and the Korean sets and they are in fact a very good language learning supplement for these two languages. HOWEVER, much to my dismay many of their other language learning sets are not as stellar, the other language learning sets I have run across that involve different alphabets ended up being a huge flop because they went through the entire course using only romanized letters. Yes at one point you did learn the alphabet, but then it is forgotten in the lessons and you only deal with how to spell these words in English. This is not very good when you are learning Japanese, Chinese, or Arabic because you will rarely run into a sign that is in that language, but written in the romanized pronunciation of the word. On the other hand for the two languages I have encountered that this program works for, it does a good job. It has little sections in the chapter that explain culture points, grammar, and just other little factoids that gives you insight into the language you are trying to learn and has CDs that go along with almost everything in the book.

Overall opinion: Unless you are thinking about learning Hindi and Korean, buy these sets with caution because it is a hit and miss. While you may learn the language you are not learning the alphabet so if you just want to be able to speak a language this might be the set for you, but if you want to be able to read, write, AND speak you may want to skip this series unless you are trying to learn one of the two languages states above