The Idiot’s Guide for Idiots
Whenever learning materials parade how easy it is to learn with them, let the buyer beware. A truly valuable textbook or program or university course should only brag of the quality and quantity of learning that they can aid. When anything promises to simulate thought without actually making you think, it’d be safe to avoid it. Ease of learning comes with just one ounce of concentration, but a minute's contemplation can always save the learner hours of frustrating pain.
The Rosetta Stone series is built in a pretty much un-graduated format, which means that you can nearly pick them up and start nearly anywhere. To solve the questions askt of you in Rosetta Stone, you need only be able to distinguish the most recently taught words. What this implies is that the writers don’t actually expect you to retain much of what you learned beforehand. The Idiot’s Guides to languages, even in languages with Latin scripts, illustrate an approximate transcription of the sound of a language in dummy English, even when a full guide to the pronunciation of the native script is illustrated itself on the first pages of the book. Rosetta Stone is built in a similar manner so in each language, the user only has to learn to distinguish one or two things about it four or so sentences displayed which is typically explained immediately before. The most important quality of a language learning aid is the material it recalls and how frequently it does it.
The Idiot's Guide series may be
ostentatiously targeted to people who despise learning, but it still
does a much better job at actually explaining language than does Rosetta
Stone. One of Rosetta Stone's selling points is the fact that it
refrains from actually teaching grammar and "let's 'learners' acquire a
new language the way they learned their first." But before noting why
this is ridiculous, Rosetta Stone makes many other errors:
In the Shadows of the West
Rosetta Stone software shows a very minimal malleability to the distinct grammars of the languages it attempts to teach; nearly every language packet is simply a carbon-clone of all the others. In example, the program typically opens up on the first lesson in which the user is taught to distinguish the words for “a boy,” “a girl,” “a man,” and “a woman.” Shortly after, the user learns the distinction between “a boy” and “boys,” plurality.
This makes sense when we are dealing with a language that, well, actually has plurality, but the lesson is carried over into the Chinese program, Chinese of course, not having inflected plurality. In the first lesson, the user is overwhelmed with, instead of simple “un garçon” or “un niño” with the five character “一个男孩子,” <yígè nánháizi> which is one-(unit) male-child. The reason that yígè is introduced as a classifier in front of the noun is so it can be contrasted with the plain classifier-less nánháizi later on in the lesson, which is inferably meant to be "plural" like its presumptive European conjugates. However nánháizi is not a plural word at all, it can be used as a word generally describing boys or is simple a unclassified describer of a boy.
Better for the Chinese language would be that nánháizi be introduced as what it is, a word for the general concept of “boy.” Later on, classifiers could be added to specify if it is meant to be yígè nánháizi “one boy” zhège nánháízi “this boy,” zhèxiē nánháizi “these several boys.” This more Chinese-specific basis for teaching the language would thereby be a better introduction to measure words, and at least would be far better than simply finding word for word equivalents for a program obviously based on western languages with plurality and explicit distinction between definiteness. In fact one of the reasons that learners of Chinese incessantly winge about measure words is that they are introduced to them as translations, not seeing their native functionality.
Not only that, but there is really no reason to have 男 <nán> in front of háizi. It is a character that means male and, unless we are distinguishing males and females, not entirely necessary. Introducing nánháizi and nǚháizi as two different words implies that háizi is not used by itself. In comparison with Chinese, western languages, even the relatively neutered English, are highly gendered; there is no real reason to distinguish the two in every position a western language would do as that makes the learner overgeneralize what they know about English into Chinese or any other language they are learning.
In French and in many other romance languages, due to grammatical gender and histories of usage, one cannot refer to a sole “child,” without referring to its gender. Garçon, niño, and bambino et alii are used to refer specifically to male children, romance languages lack words that can refer to a single child without identifying gender. Often however, and in English gender is assumed to be male of all hypothetical individuals, in example, “If someone wishes to apply, he should call before noon tomorrow.” This generalization of masculine words is becoming increasingly politically incorrect and in written works there have been efforts to universalize hypothetical gender pronouns, “Nombre de niño/a” et cetera. This problem does not exist in Chinese. One can simply use háizi to refer to a child of unspecified gender; this goes for the majority of the rest of Chinese vocabulary. Introducing a distinction between male and female children is not anywhere as useful as in romance languages.
It may seem trivial but it indicates now unimportant
the specific requirements and advantages of each language are to the
creators and that they are not meticulously taken into account.
Essentially differences between languages are ignored and shoved under
the rug.
Learning Arabic with Rosetta Stone hard.
Obtaining materials for learning Arabic have always been quite difficult for me. I have never had the time to pick up a class at my university, and the books that I come in contact with never seem to be logically arranged or grammatically informed enough for an analytical mind to pull anything meaningful out of. I made the desperate leap of using Rosetta Stone software to at least put myself at exposure to the language and needless to say I was quite disappointed.
In English and most other Indo-European languages, and most languages in general, to attach a subject to a non-verbal predicate, we need a copula verb. It is not grammatical to say “I student,” we need to insert “am,” a form of the verb “be” to make the sentence grammatical. Arabic does not function precisely this way. The third issue of Rosetta Stone teaches a more classical and somewhat archaic variety of the language that, like the modern form, has no copula verb, but also distinguishes the phrase, “I a student,” from “I am a student” by nominal inflection. If you don’t know what I mean, great; you certainly wouldn’t understand if you used Rosetta Stone. Early phrases in Rosetta Stone are such as “the boy on the table;” later, they will introduce sentences like “The boy is on the table.” which in Arabic has no additional word, only a subtle change in declension that is nearly certain to go under the radar of an English speaker. At that, the distinction between a sentence and a phrase is never introduced in Rosetta Stone software in accordance to their absolute refusal to even attempt to explicitly explain grammar.
Of course it doesn’t just happen with languages without copulas; I once saw a post on a Latin forum of a Rosetta Stone user who asked what the word “est” meant. Rosetta Stone never told him that “elephanus sub aqua” was a phrase and “Elephantus sub aqua est.” is a sentence.
Our Beautiful Multiethnic Family
One of the more comical aspects of the Rosetta Stone series stems as well from its lack of specification on a language. The pictures and stories displayed in the program typically do not change at all among any of the different languages. When you are buying the French Rosetta Stone, you are really just buying the Spanish version with “un hombre” crossed out and replaced with “un homme.” When normal language textbooks or software series teach a language, they give a fairly wide cultural perspective at the same time; higher level language textbooks will typically be in the target language and the subject matter will be cultural information so the reader kills two birds with one stone, learning the language and learning culture.
This is lost in Rosetta Stone as well. Not to mention due to the non-grammatical and non-sentence based method of instruction, learning about culture or anything would be pretty impossible as the user would have to be clicking on festivals or practices in four quirky boxes. So the logical conclusion for the creators of Rosetta Stone was to package the same program with some characters and sound files switched, and so they wouldn’t have to take new pictures in every language, used an agglomeration of multiethnic and multicultural people decked in traditional garb posing in contrived-looking multiethnic photos.
The Childlike Mind
The key thing to remember is that we are no longer children. In many ways, you are dimmer now than you ever have been, at least in the area of linguistics. All children are cunning linguists; their abilities to acquire languages are unrivaled and pick up their first language flawlessly simply by being exposed to it. Without linguistic training, children know the difference between voiced and unvoiced bilabial plosives whether their know the terminology or not. The young mind is incredibly perceptive to language, and necessarily so; but after a while, humans lose the mental plasticity needed to acquire simply by listening and being corrected.
That’s where we are now. There is no way that you will ever again learn a language “the same way you learnt your own,” unless you are reading this while still 4 or 5. When Rosetta Stone or any other language learning method, or really any other educational materials in general, advertise themselves as offering to let you learn a language “naturally,” they are deceptive. It cannot be done. The door to your child-like mind is closed. After several months of living outside the womb, you lose your ability to distinguish alien sounds, your internal IPA, so to speak. You soon after cannot intuitively grasp new grammar; any other grammar you learn will be marked by your new native language and much learning must be done to undo this. This is why we have conjugation and declension tables, grammar rules, mnemonic devices; although learners cannot intuit language, when the see the patterns of a language logically arranged, they can memorize then internalize them to produce the language naturally. A little mental effort goes a long way; and more importantly in language learning, there is no other option.
Conspiracy Exposed
Commercial learning materials are a business, and Rosetta Stone software is king of the language department. I hope it is not to conspiratorial to say that the objective of Rosetta Stone is to sell their products and it’s easy enough to do with their extensive advertising campaigns and the new-found somewhat genericized name. For the vendor of learning products, the position the learner is best to be in is that of perpetual and fruitless learning. So long as the learner feels as if he is making progress, he will continue to feel good about himself in “studying” and without any end goal will be unable to produce but will “feel” as if he is learning and will be more liable to buy the higher level products and regale his friends with the imagined utility of his products.