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Rosetta Stone German

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I’m getting to the end of my Rosetta Stone online subscription now and I am really going to miss it.  It has been great to be able to practice my German every few days, even if it is only for 5 minutes or so and it has really helped me.  The main benefit I have found with the Rosetta Stone program is that is has helped me built my confidence with speaking.  Before, I would look at words and panic, not having a clue how to pronounce them, but Rosetta Stone has taught me to break the words down into groups I know how to pronounce.  It has been a kind of subconscious learning as there is no reading endlessly from textbooks!  The interactive nature of the program makes it a lot of fun to use and I my vocabulary has improved without me really trying that hard.

I would love to see whether the Rosetta Stone technique works when learning a language from scratch.  It has been immensely helpful in consolidating my knowledge of German and expanding my vocabulary but I’m not sure it would be quite so easy to use when you’ve never has any lessons in a language, especially one which is completely different to English such as Chinese or Japanese.  Maybe I’ll invest in a new subscription to find out……

Rosetta Stone Update

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I’ve recently found a new feature of the Rosetta Stone German course.  My pronunciation isn’t the best and I’ve realised that you can get a graph of a German person saying a phrase and then compare it to a graph of yourself saying the same thing.  Most of the time it works and helps me pronounce the word correctly but on some occasions it sounds to me as though I’m saying the exact same thing but the graphs look completely different!

I wish I’d know about it when I was taking my German class in uni a few years ago.  I only had two German classes a week and found it hard to swap from maths mode to German mode especially as once I’d finished any work I had each week for German, I just forgot about it until my next class.  Rosetta Stone would have been really helpful to use in between classes, even if it were just for 5 minutes a day.  I would recommend it to anyone in a similar situation to the one I was in!

Rosetta Stone

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A few weeks ago I started a Rosetta Stone online German course.  The Rosetta Stone courses work by immersing you in the language you are learning in the same way that we all learn our first language by immersion when we are little.

I’ve been wanting to try a Rosetta Stone course since I had to stop learning German as part of my degree due to a timetable clash.  So far I’m really enjoying the course.  There are no English instructions, you just learn by associating pictures to the words and sounds.   When you sign up for the course you get sent a headset which is used to help you with your speaking.  Everything you say into it is compared to a native speaker so you can see how good your accent is which is quite helpful.

When I did my German GCSE we spent a lot of time learning grammar.  I can’t really see how the Rosetta Stone software can teach you the grammar properly but I’m still very early on in the course so I might be surprised!

Rosetta Stone have over 30 different languages you can learn.  You can either buy each level of the language separately as you get better or you can buy them all in one go.  There is also the option to learn online with a 6 or 12 month subscription.

I’m really excited to keep learning German and I think Rosetta Stone will help me a lot.

New Year’s Resolution

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I really want to start learning German again.  I took German for GCSE and also took a class last year in uni along with my engineering modules.  It was fun to have something different to work on instead of constantly doing maths but I’m not studying German this year as I wanted to take thermodynamics instead.  Before I can teach myself anything I need to find a course.  So far, the best one I’ve found is the Rosetta Stone language course.  You get a CD which helps you learn your chosen language by recreating the way you learnt your first language – immersion in the language.  There is also voice recognition technology to help with your pronunciation which looks good as I was never really able to get the accent right!  Hopefully I’ll get round to getting the CD soon so I can start my New Year’s resolution!

Learning German

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I took German at GCSE and really enjoyed it.  I wanted to carry it on to A Level but annoyingly I wasn’t able to as the German class clashed with the Physics class which I needed to take as I was planning to do an engineering degree.  During the first year of my degree, I chose to take a German module along with all my engineering ones.  I found it quite hard to keep up as I hadn’t done an A Level so my grammar wasn’t great and I’d never written an essay longer than about 10 sentences.  Even though it was hard work, I found it fun and it was something different to all the maths and physics!  I am now just starting the second year of my engineering degree and am really disappointed as I have had to drop German again because it clashes with one of the engineering modules I especially wanted to take.  I’m hoping to carry on outside of uni but so far haven’t found a course which lets me learn German and fit it in around my lectures.  I hope I find something soon as I was looking at spending a few months in Germany or Austria at some point during my degree so it would help a lot if I could speak their language better than I do at the moment!