Rosetta Stone-Is it strong enough alone to be considered a course

[ciyates]

DS is in HS and we are behind in FL. We are considering the Rosetta stone homeschool version of Spanish Levels 1-3. Would that be tough enough for 3 years of spanish?

 

Thanks!

[Tress]

If you post this on the High School sub-forum, you will get more responses.

 

In the Netherlands Rosetta Stone alone would not be enough, but I hesitate to give advice to Americans about this, because it depends so much on your goals after high school.

 

HTH,

[Lily_Grace]

Unless you are supplementing heavily, I'd say every 2 levels is a year of instruction. Each level is not enough for 1 year's worth on its own.

 

ETA: we do one section a month in our house, so it works out about the same - four sections to a level, eight sections to a year.

[Amira]

I don't think so. RS is strong in some areas, like building vocabulary, but very weak in others. I consider it to be part of a language learning program, but not enough on its own.

 

Personally, we have used it in the past, but I wasn't impressed with it and we have not used it again. It's also very expensive for what you get. I went through level one of Farsi and definitely did not feel I'd gotten a year's worth of the language. I've studied quite a few languages, both on a high school and university level and also without formal education. While RS can be useful, I don't think it's all it's cracked up to be.

[SailorMom]

I know Rosetta Stone now has supplementary materials. I think if you use the program with those materials it is considered a course in many places.

[Heather in Neverland]

My ds is doing level 1 Spanish and he is learning a lot of phrases but is NOT picking up on the grammar at all. He needs a more direct approach for that.

[KungFuPanda]

If you are good at picking up grammatical patterns, I think RS 1-2 would count as a year of high school language. After that you may have to seek elsewhere for instruction and use RS 3 as a supplement.

[cheryl h]

I was told by the folks at MFW, that if you use their curriculum guide(has additional activities and projects) with the software, levels 1-2 would be equivalent to 2 years high school Spanish and that level 3 and above would only be necessary if you are planning to study Spanish at the college level. Their homeschool package includes the software and the currriculum guide at a pretty reasonable price for what I've seen others selling Rosetta. Their package does not include the workbooks, and there is an explaination in the curric. guide stating that they don't feel like they are helpful and tend to cause frustration.

 

We started dd13 on it 2 weeks ago and she loves it. However, she has also mentioned that it is easy and that she wishes she had an actual book to go along with it. She is doing well with the vocab and I feel confident she is getting her pronunciation correct, but she does often have questions about verbs(conjugation), and how they work. This might be the weak area, but like I said, we're only 2 weeks in. I would love to hear ideas on how to supplement Rosetta Stone Spanish. I took 2 yrs. of French in high school so I am really not much help so what ever we do it needs to be very student lead. All in all, if you are looking for a FL program that is NOT teacher intensive, very student independant, this is a great option...but I might find a Spanish book to refer to on occation.

[Sputterduck]

No.

 

They have sections labelled "grammar" and you have to pick the right answers like "gato blanco" vs "gato blancos" but they never ever tell you *why*. You can't talk intelligently about what you know because you don't gain the verbiage to do so nor the understanding of why you are doing what you are doing. And when you come across an exception to a rule, it can be very confusing because all of your rules are just guesses based on what you've done so far since it never gives you any rules whatsoever. You don't know if you guessed a rule incorrectly or if it is an exception. Never mind that it took much time to see enough patterns to guess a rule in the first place when just being told the rule would have taken 5 seconds.

 

It is a good supplement to any thorough language program.

[abbeyej]

No. It's like the "lab" portion of a standard course. Great at building vocabulary, listening, and perhaps even conversational skills. But you need a separate grammar component (and some type of literature/reading component after the early levels).

[gardenmom5]

My library system used to have it free online. I used it then. I had three years of German previously, and that was the main RS language I used.

 

I would never buy the software - it's not that good. At least as far as I went, it never got into formal german grammar, cases/tenses/etc, and if I hadn't had a previous background in german or my trusty german dictionary handy at times, I wouldn't have known what they were trying to do.

[Sputterduck]

My library system used to have it free online. I used it then. I had three years of German previously, and that was the main RS language I used.

 

I would never buy the software - it's not that good. At least as far as I went, it never got into formal german grammar, cases/tenses/etc, and if I hadn't had a previous background in german or my trusty german dictionary handy at times, I wouldn't have known what they were trying to do.

 

Yes. It's helpful for me in Spanish because I live in Mexico and know some Spanish. I tried it years ago in Korean and it was not a good experience. When they would show a picture I sometimes wouldn't have the slightest idea of what they were getting at. I felt like if they would just tell me what vocabulary point they were trying to make, then I would understand. It ends up in lots of guessing and trial and error.