Porthos
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Rosetta Stone Language learning softwareI recently ordered a demo cd from them. Should I purchase one of their language programs? Are they actually effective? Can one learn to be fluent with this program?
Once again, I can't take a foreign language course at school. So I'm looking for other alternatives.
I did the first couple of lessons of Dutch, German, French, Portuguese, and Italian, and they were all really easy. I did Welsh and Russian and I found them to be mighty difficult, lol.
I don't think I'll ever try learning a non- Germanic or Latin language. The other groups are simply to alien for my tastes. And it seems impossible to memorize vocabulary outside of Germanic and Latin languages.
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Loic
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I think you should keep an open and flexible outlook, Porthos. Never say never, for a start. You'd be spurring many potentially lucrative opportunities in future because of your aversion towards languages outside the Romance and West Germanic family trees.
Say, your company wants you to work in the booming gulf states of Abu Dhabai or maybe a resurgent Russia sometime in the foreseeable future. Would you flatly reject such an offer because of the perceived difficulty of the host language?
A true linguist is one who is comfortable with a myriad of languages from a diverse spectrum. There is not much of a challenge in learning a relatively close language, isn't it?
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Porthos
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The only language I would consider learning outside of the Indo-European family is Japanese. It's by far my favorite Asian language, and the pronounciation is a piece of cake. I already know a few phrases and words, but not much.
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Deborah
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Re: Rosetta Stone Language learning software | Porthos wrote: | | And it seems impossible to memorize vocabulary outside of Germanic and Latin languages. |
It's probably not impossible for you, but learning completely unfamiliar vocabulary requires a lot more repetition than you're probably used to. The same holds true for learning a completely unfamiliar alphabet. By the time I started studying Arabic, it had been about 15 years since the last time I'd started studying a foreign language (which was Russian) and I'd forgotten how much time I'd have to spend just repeating a small number of new words over and over and over until they stuck, plus having to do the same thing with the alphabet.
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