Any good software for learning a foreign language?

[Magic_Man]

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My girl used Rosetta Stone for a little while trying to learn Italian-- I wound up learning a bunch of words just sitting there with her. It seems like a good way to learn a bunch about a language, especially if you are an analytical type of person.

I don't know if you know how it works or whatever but they put up four pictures and a word or phrase and you have to pick the picture that corresponds. First you kind of randomly figure out that like uhh the word for chair is X through trial and error. Then it will show you maybe like a picture of a couch, a picture of a chair, a picture of two chairs, and a picture of two couches and it will say the word for "two" and the word for chair, so you now learned the word for two and so on.

It gets to be pretty complex where you get into entire sentences with tenses and what not and you have to figure the rules out as you go along. The fact you have to figure it out makes it really engaging so you can almost learn by accident.

The thing it won't do for you is make you be able to speak the langauge really well, but nothing will I think. It will give you enough to go around and talk like a caveman about what you want, which is probably enough to then go for something more complex.

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I have a full set of all the rosetta stone languages and I really like it. The "figuring it out" concept is definitely its greatest strength. They are trying to simulate an immersion environmment, and sometimes you will catch yourself thinking conceptually rather than translating; somehow, you'll just know the answer, without using the english middle-man. There are a lot of different modes that try to reinforce this sort of thing. Sometimes you will see a picture followed by hearing a phrase, or sometimes they give you the phrase, then the picture, sometimes they use subtitles, sometimes they don't, etc. The "guided tours" are definitely the best way to use it. It will definitely teach you vocabulary and give you a basic understanding of grammatical structure.

That said, the biggest problem with it is it doesn't teach you the actual formal rules. I tried to learn German with it about 6 months ago and I was bewildered by the German grammar. After I looked up some information on this internet thing, I realized that it would be almost impossible to teach those specific concepts with the Rosetta Stone method. So it seems that certain languages work better than others. Also, my other beef with it is that the course is exactly teh same for every language, so if you try learning more than a couple languages with it, you won't have to "figure things out" anymore, because you might remember from the last time you used it.

It works best in conjunction with other methods. It's a useful and fun way to learn lots of vocabulary and get a good intuitive understanding of the basic rules. Supplement that with some formal textbooks and/or real conversation and you should be set.

~MagicMan