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.
I’m only about 6 weeks in, so very early.
I have been doing stuff like picking up pamphlets where there’s an English version and a German version so I can compare the text and figure out the sentences.
I agree with you though, the grammar I’m already recognizing pretty well and you can sort of muck your way through that for a while. The amount of vocab is really what I need to get down.
Honestly in terms of recommendations, I think I’d benefit from childrens books, it’d be cool to get antique kids books with illustrations. Or something somewhat basic like The Hobbit in German or something. If you know of any German fairy tales or German kids/teenager books I’d probably benefit from those. I also had this old tab open for Hydra Comics, which is a German comic book maker who made a story about WWII from the German’s perspective which got a lot of praise, I was going to pick up some of their comics in German too. I feel like German comics or graphic novels would be good to learn with.
Keywords are: Grimms Märchen, Bechsteins Märchen, Deutsche Sagen.
Otherwise I highly recommend the "Sonntagsmärchen" as we call it, fairy tale re-enactments that are on TV every Sunday morning: https://www.ardmediathek.de/maercheninderard?isChildContent
this is a good book too