I just finished Level 1 Unit 1 in my new Rosetta Stone Francais course. The approach is something I’ve never experienced before. The interface is so simple that I found myself overthinking it several times. It’s helpful in that it tells you “Nothing here is click and drag” instead everything is clickable, talkable, or writable.

What did the first unit cover? It didn’t approach the language as I thought it would. There was no demonstration of rules, no tables for Je, Tu, Vous, Nous, Ils, and so on and so forth. There weren’t any verb conjugation drills and I found myself not translating after a little bit of time. Of course, a little knowledge is a very bad thing, and in this case I have the tattered remains of my grade school and high school french floating around in my head while I’m going through the basics again, and oddly enough, for the very first time.

It was extremely pleasant and I found myself picking up a kind of natural approach immediately. I think what bothers me the most about Rosetta Stone isn’t the actual product, it’s very polished and professional, but what gets me is that I would probably be better off starting French with this program than if I had skipped a foreign language completely in grade school and high school altogether! I can’t imagine what a Rosetta Stone course would cost a grade/high school and I’m sure it would “break the bank” as it were.

One thing that’s really quite awesome about the Rosetta Stone courses is that I can do all my work on my laptop and practice on my iPhone almost as well. The entire course structure is synchronized in the cloud at Rosetta Stone itself so as you follow along in the program on a computer the mobile app knows where you are and makes the programs available to you over wifi or 3G to keep on practicing.

During this unit the things you learn are boy and girl, singular and many, gender, and certain verbs such as swimming, drinking, eating, running, reading and writing.

One thing I can tell immediately is that this is going to be incredibly fun to use and at the end I should have basic fluency in French. That will be a wonderful feeling.

Something else that I’ve been thinking about is the need for translation. All throughout school it was a translation matrix, memorizing language rules and then establishing mental lines drawing from English to French. Imposing a germanic language onto a romance language can only work so far before you run into conflicts. That’s what’s always upset me about the standard way other languages are taught in the United States, it’s always English-wearing-another-language. I have a faith, as I don’t know outright and for sure, but I suspect that the shape of thinking in English is different than the shape of thinking in French. We think in words, we think in our language. We can imagine without language, but when we want to share what we think we have to drag what exists in our minds as honest thoughts through the bog of our language so we can communicate our thoughts. I have it on good authority that while people think in different languages there is no reason to think that the quality of those thoughts of the efficiency of communication is any different from language to language, it’s not a matter of good and bad, it’s just different.

I think that’s the thing that draws me to the Rosetta Stone courses the most. That excitement I feel when my thoughts can dip their little toes in another language-bog altogether. Instead of thinking in English and communicating in English, I could possibly (with enough hard work) start to think in French. That’s what drives me, that curiosity of what it feels like to think in another language. Not so much to do more things that have a direct application with it, although that would also be nice, but to sit back and feel the difference between expressing a thought in English and then expressing it in French.

Only time can tell if Rosetta Stone is successful in coaxing my 36 year old brain to re-accept a new language. This is where kids born today are the luckiest kids ever. A young 4 to 6 year old brain, in the channel of language acquisition can soak up all of these new thoughts and even more before they settle into a primary language and an “other” language. If only Rosetta Stone was available in 1983, I could have mastery over French, English, and German for example. Maybe I still have the ability, despite it laying dormant for so very long.