Rosetta

I've been using Rosetta Stone for about two days now.

On installation, and in some documentation, they say that they strive to eliminate the mental step of translation to/from English. For example, if they show the phrase La fille mange, with four pictures, one of which is a girl eating, you're supposed to click that picture. For me, that means that I think 'La fille mange', that means 'the girl eats', and then I look for a girl eating. If I can't quite get one of the words when they say it (as you progress, they move from showing you the phrase to saying it without display), I guess, based on what I do hear - in that example, if I got the 'mange' part, I'd look for a picture of someone eating. Initially, there would only be one, but as they progress, they would move to multiple people eating, or instead of La Fille they will use the 'L'enfant ' -- and you get to figure it out. So as I'm going through this, in the back of my mind, I'm thinking will I really be able to hear La fille mange and just look immediately for the girl eating, without doing the translation? I get a little bit of encouragement from the fact that every so often -- not often, but occasionally -- I do make that leap. I hear 'pommes', for example, and I look for apples. I don't think about it, I just do it. So I'm hoping.

I don't think that RS is perfect. My initial impressions are that it works hard to make things obvious. It usually, but not always, succeeds. Because it's entirely in French, sometimes they leave you to figure out what they're asking you to do. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes not. You can always just skip the one you don't get, but, of course, that kind of blows the idea of what it was supposed to teach you. They do come back to material -- the picture of the smiling little boy, garçon, I must have seen fifty times today alone - so I do believe that they're tracking competency in areas. I don't know what happens if there's something that you just can't get. For example, I was listening to one of their say-and-repeats, and they used the phrase L'herbe est verte. I could not manage the glottal stop they have in the middle of herbe. Just could not. So perhaps that'll just be a word that I never use.

Overall, I'm pleased so far. Give me a month, and we'll see.