Tag Archives: Rosetta Stone

PAD 1/19/2013 – Learning the Obscure

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“Describe your last attempt to learn something that did not come easily to you.”

Humorously the best option I have to answer this would be learning the Abacus. When I was a kid I learned it but then forgot it as anyone does when you don’t apply what you’ve learned to your regular life. As an adult I got curious and picked up an app and tried to play around with one seeing if I could re-learn it. I struggled a little bit until I realized that I was using it in the wrong direction. I was trying to apply the operators in right-to-left when I should have been doing it left-to-right. It wasn’t difficult, but once I figured it out it clicked and parts of my memory long ago came back along with the rediscovered skill.

The other thing, which I have training software for is to reacquire French as a fluent foreign language. Two years ago Scott gave me an entire Rosetta Stone course in French. I’ve been plugging away at it off and on and I need to put aside some time, make the time, and dive in. That should be a mixed bag as I have a primary majority of english, some german, and a lot of french bouncing around in my head already, so at some point what I can’t remember the Rosetta Stone system will re-teach me, and then the rest will come flooding back on its own.

About the languages, something that I’ve always thought but have no proof one way or the other about is the question of whether or not people think differently when they use different languages. That thinking one way in English is not exactly the same as when you think about something in French, for example. I don’t mean to say that any language is less than any other, English proves that is not correct – when English lacks a way to convey something English speakers just start accumulating new ways to do it. They harvest words from other languages, coin new words, even create new grammars just to get over the hump and explain something in English. But I do think there are subtle differences in between languages that might lend some credence that the way one person thinks in French isn’t the exact same as when that person thinks in English. The best way to answer this curiosity of mine is to finish the Rosetta Stone course and become operationally fluent in French. I look forward to it a lot.

Rosetta Stone Francais Level 1 Unit 1 First Thoughts

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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.