Last Friday, I received my recently purchased copy of Rosetta Stone v3 Russian Levels 1-3. (Cheaper at Amazon.) I’ve gone through about half of Level 1 in the last four days.
Version Three is new and much fancier than Version Two, which I’d used at the library in Newton, Massachusetts a dozen times over the last year. Version Two is a one-trick pony. It shows you four pictures and a word, phrase, or sentence, and you pick which of the pictures match. It gives you three more, and you match them to the other three. There are different modes – with or without sound, or where it listens to your pronunciation, but the same basic idea. Let me say that Version Two is still very good, and probably available cheaper now, and when I’m done with Version Three I still might go back and buy Version Two. I can hardly put a price tag on easy, fun ways to pick up more Russian.
Version Three has a wide variety of activities, still centered around the same basic concept. It can show from 1-8 pictures on any given screen, for different purposes. I am very impressed that the different activities really do help you with different goals such as reading, writing (spelling/typing really), speaking, and listening. The variety also makes it more interesting.
I’m surprised by how fast it moves along. I’ve been studying Russian in my free time for about two years, and I can get along but only with difficulty. In the first of four units in Level One, I probably learned ten new words. In the second unit, I’ve probably learned 30, as well as some new uses of prepositions and correction of some things I’ve been saying wrong. It’s introduced probably four of six grammatical cases already, but it does it all without a word of English, so a beginner wouldn’t realize it, or have any clue how to apply the knowledge of word endings to other situations than the ones specifically practiced.
Much like Pimsleur, this basically works off the principle that your mind is able to generalize based on lots of specific examples, a bottom-up approach to learning. The opposite is learning grammar from a textbook, and then trying to apply it to real sentences. I find that the bottom-up approach is much more enjoyable, and works better for me. I suspect that there are some things that are much faster to learn top-down, so I think a combination of the two is a great thing. Once you have memorized some specific sentences with a grammatical construct, when you learn the rule that’s being obeyed, you have something much more concrete in mind to help you apply it in the future. If you have a question, you can think back to that one sentence you know. Pimsleur very much provided me with this same sort of arsenal of memorized sentences.
Essentially, my philosophy in learning a language is to do whatever you’re able to motivate yourself to do, and when it gets boring try to find something else. I will be very interested to see how far Rosetta Stone goes in these three levels. I loved the Pimsleur audio program, but after all three levels I wanted more. There was a lot left to the language that it hadn’t covered, and it’s such an easy way to pick up more vocabulary that I wish there was just an endless series of CDs.
Pimsleur’s main theory is that everything should be a test, to keep your brain active and awake, in its best learning mode. Rosetta Stone has the same feature. Pimsleur’s second big theory is to review each piece of knowledge at increasing intervals. (I think of it as exponential backoff like Ethernet. I thought I’d throw one out there for my fellow geeks.) Rosetta Stone does this as well, although probably not as deliberately – I will know more in a few weeks. A minor Pimsleur innovation is learning big new words starting with the last syllable and working backward. That way by the time you get to the beginning, the end is well-rehearsed and automatic. Brilliant. There’s another minor one I’ve noticed, which I forget at the moment.
A very important difference between Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone is that Rosetta Stone operates with “no translation”, thanks to the visual medium. You learn everything using photos, so you associate the words directly with the real-world object or action you’re looking at. There’s no English, except in the menus. The same program ought to work for a French speaker, or anyone else, to learn Russian.
Both Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone can thus claim to teach you “the way you learned when you were a kid”. Rosetta Stone’s case would seem to be even stronger, but in practice you may be looking at the text and not the pictures, and thus it’s up to you how much you really force yourself to learn by visual or aural association. Pimsleur, being voice only, can’t do all that, but it does force you to rely completely on your ear, rather than traditional studying techniques that may slow down your learning. So I’d say the advantage goes just slightly to Rosetta Stone on this point.
But who cares which one is better? They’re both fantastic, and there’s nothing saying you can’t do both! I’m so glad that both of these products are available, after having tried so many lousy $10 language programs from Staples that are about worthless.
I’m very interested to have my mom try learning some Russian with Rosetta Stone, since she’s a blank slate. I want to see how well it works when you don’t already know 95% of the words and grammatical constructs. I expect you won’t fly through it with 99% success rate like I have so far. But I also expect that it will work, and with more review and retries it will be very effective. Maybe I’ll find that I should have started with this two years ago. It won’t be disappointing news, because there are so many languages yet to learn!