Rosetta Stone V3: German, Level 1, 2 & 3

List Price: $499.00 Discount Price: $449.10

Features:

• Rosetta Stone helps you understand everyday language through our proficiency-based listening and reading activities
• You will pronounce words correctly after practicing with our proprietary speech recognition and analysis tools
• In no time you will speak without a script, Rosetta Stone's Contextual Formation™ makes sure you have the confidence and the cues you need to get the words out on the spot
• With Rosetta Stone Milestone activities you quickly gain confidence to engage in real-life conversations
• Track your progress to reinforce your strengths and revisit needs with our Adaptive Recall™ Language feature

Customer Reviews:

Rosetta Stone German [Posted on 2008-01-27]
Very useful and easy to use. I have a background in German but don't get to use it unless we go to German speaking countries during the summer - which we do quite often. It is still extremely helpful for extending my knowledge.

Immersive learning, but don't try the repetition mode [Posted on 2008-02-01]
Rosetta Stone promises learning a language by natural immersion. This is achieved by showing 4 pictures, while a speaker says a word or sentence relating to the pictures. The learner has to pick the correct picture out of the four by clicking on it with the mouse.

While this is the most basic way of using Rosetta Stone, other modes of learning are offered as well. Such as picking a picture without the text being displayed (focus on listening skill), or typing the text into an input (focus on writing skill).

It also offers a mode in which the user has to repeat the text spoken by the program. The wave modulation of the repeated text is compared by the computer which then shows a red, yellow, or green signal depending on how similar the two voices were.

This latter mode is a complete joke, however. I am am a native German speaker myself and bought this program for my girlfriend. The quality of the voice in the repetition mode is for some reason much worse than the voices in the other modes. It is high pitch, sounds computer generated, and probably was just made on the cheap. Unfortunately this also affects the recognition and I was most successful by adopting a high pitch nasal sound. While this creates some genuine fun for native speakers, it renders the mode useless for learning.

Fortunately, just listening to the speakers in the other modes and trying to repeat works well enough to learn pronunciation.

The program does what is promises. It gives you a new language from start by total immersion. While this method is less dry and more fun than grammar books and dictionaries it also suffers from some inherent problems.

While the meaning of most of the words are well introduced by pictures, more subtle concepts that are not easily described with pictures remain vague, and the exact meaning may remain hidden.

It is also not as simple to create grammatical generalizations and rules. Creating a grammatical rule set by trial and error is just a lot easier for a toddler who can spend a decade on it than for a thirty year old with limited time on his hands.

That being said, Rosetta stone is still tremendously helpful because it makes learning colorful. Used in conjunction with other books it is a powerful, quick, and fun way to learn a language.

An Amazingly Fun and Easy Way to Learn a New Language [Posted on 2008-02-23]
The Rosetta Stone system for learning a new language make it really fun and easy. After about two weeks of lessons, I was able to somewhat understand and speak basic German like counting, greetings, etc.

Rosetta Stone also helps with pronunciation (it makes you read works into the mic provided) which is great!

i heart rosetta stone [Posted on 2008-03-04]
This is the best way to learn a new language. The microphone/pronunciation feature is my favorite aspect.

Do not waste your money [Posted on 2008-05-05]
I bought this product after reading the great reviews in Amazon and I can say that it was the worst buy of my entire adult life. The software is booooring and repetitive. It was hard to stay awake during the study. Some of the sentences were useless (The boy is under the airplane). This pattern continued for the duration of the course up to the advanced levels. It is impossible to understand the German grammar from these silly exercises.
I have checked other softwares to learn German. They all require a lot of motivation and discipline, but Tell me more and Instant Immersion are much much better than Rosetta and at a better price. Check the demos for yourself and read reviews on language softwares and you see that Rosetta is never rated as the best (Tell me more usually is).

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