Rosetta Stone: Does it Work?

As a 22-year old with a French ancestry, I have always felt a responsibility to keep this language alive in my family for years to come. I took French in middle-school for two years and in high school for two. I learned that people are right in saying: "you must live there to really learn the language"...until I visited my parents one day in our Oklahoma town and heard my father spitting out French sentences from the office. He introduced me to the language program of all language programs: Rosetta Stone.

The program is too expensive for my college lifestyle but is worth the mooching off my parents. It comes with a comfortable headset (with an attached microphone) and three discs for each level: beginner, intermediate and advanced. Rosetta Stone is also equipped with a series of cds to listen to in your car.

Does it work? I just started progressing through the sublevels within the beginner disc and was delighted by all the adorable, brightly rendered photographs of the vocabulary introduced. The organization of the program is not entirely clear-just as everyday real-world learning is not. As a user of the program, you will sporadically encounter trials in which you repeat, vocally, what is said and/or match the phrase with the correct photo. Every trial and every scene includes pictures, words, and vocals-and so no native speaking voices or written words are needed (or missed for that matter).

Another nice attribute: there are many chances to pause the program, as each lesson contains small incremental trials. If I feel like exiting the program, I can count on it to save my status for next-time; Rosetta Stone is costly because it does much, if not all, of the technical and maintenance work for you. Installing it involves simply inserting the disc into your drive; no paper instruction reading is required at any point before, during or after using the program; just listen to the pleasant human voices programmed to direct you through the lessons.

Overall, the program's learning philosophy seems to be based on making semantic, visual, and auditory associations within the language being learned; this is a relief when recalling the methods used in school language courses: full-emersion courses were overwhelming and those that weren't full-emersion, only taught students to associate the new language with their native language. Rosetta Stone's method allows the learner to overcome that time-consuming cognitive translation from native to new. Think about it, children learn a language with a completely blank slate-not allowing for the comparison of one language to the next; a language is its own entity.

Rosetta Stone programs are meant to make one feel like a child who learns a language "just 'cause." The pictures and reinforcing chime sounds do give me that child-like excitement we all miss as we age. What I like the most is that, like a young-one, I don't have to struggle to concentrate on what I'm learning or remember what I learned-I'm just, well, learning.