I’ve been doing Rosetta Stone for German. Learning a language of my ancestors has been much more engaging than learning Spanish or the other more mainstream options you get in school. Also, learning a language is a good thing to fill your time, especially if you want to do productive things that you can do indoors.
Pros:
- RS offers a pretty good lifetime deal. I think I paid $200 for a lifetime membership
- Having an app is a bit more engaging than a book. The somewhat interactive nature of it makes it sort of like a game.
- the repetition of basic syntax does help, particularly for vocabulary, which was always my problem in school.
Cons:
- It doesn’t do a good job of explaining grammar rules. Like, you’ll see a word or phrase repeated over and over, but that doesn’t necessarily help you understand the actual rule to what you are seeing.
- It’s hard to understand different situations where a particular rule would change what word you use, for example kein vs nicht.
- I would look up what languages RS offers vs competitors. For example, RS offers Swedish, but not Norwegian. Babbel offers Norwegian but not Swedish.
- Some languages in RS are only available on the web interface. So they have Latin, but you have to be on the website and not on mobile.
I would recommend having something like a 1st year language book on hand with grammar tables so that you can actually understand the why behind certain rules. I would honestly say this is necessary from my experience. There have been too many instances where just repeating something you see doesn’t mean you could actually write it out yourself.
I would also recommend having some books lined up that you’d want to practice in the native language (or movies even). For example, for Swedish, I want to read Among Gnomes and Trolls, which is a kids book with famous illustrations by John Bauer. Having stuff like that to look forward to being able to read on your own is a good motivator.
Anyway, it’s been fun and the cost wasn’t too bad. I probably will try Babbel for Norwegian at some point.
The only question is: how fucked is the board of directors