French Level 1 & 2 Win/Mac Personal Edition [Old Version]

French Level 1 & 2 Win/Mac Personal Edition [Old Version] | Learning Behind the Wheel is Better!

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French Level 1 & 2...

	French Level 1 & 2 Win/Mac Personal Edition [Old Version] Mac OS X, Windows \| Fairfield Language Technologies, 2002 average customer review:based on 41 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Rosetta Stone French Level I & II opens up a new world to you by teaching you how to communicate with a new culture! Reviews and testing features help identify weak points and work harder on them Comes with illustrated User's Guides and Curriculum Text books Ages 6 & up

Great Software

Rosetta Stone is a great vocabulary builder, but doesn't teach grammer or sentence structure. Good for beginners.

Learning Behind the Wheel is Better!

As I state in other product reviews, Rosetta Stone is clearly overrated but solid.
The problem with the overall approach is that it requires that you spend your learning time in front of a computer, which is where you do everything else. Lot's of competition.
I prefer to do my language learning during my otherwise wasted downtime while I drive. If I study a language while driving, I win because I use otherwise wasted hours. I, like most Americans, spend more time driving than ever before. When I get home, I want to do other essentials.
My favorite car French course is Behind the Wheel French 8 CD. Free up your computer and learn FrenchBehind the Wheel French (8 CD Course) (Behind the Wheel) while you drive is my recommendation

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A good start, but not much more

Rosetta Stone is decent product for learning the basics of French. It's advertising says it will allow you to learn a language the same way a child learns. That's true as far as it goes; the process introduces you to the basics to give you a familiarity with the language. I believe that someone who just uses the Rosetta Stone might be able to gain a basic proficiency. But it doesn't go beyond that.

For example, a child learning language can learn what she needs to be understood before she ever goes to school; the same applies to Rosetta Stone. However, at some point the child will to go to school to learn more. French in particular is a formal language and those who are interested will need to find some means of learning beyond the basics if they want to progress to a higher level.

The best thing about the program is the flexibility of modes - hearing, reading, seeing, speaking - which allows you to structure the process to best fit what works for you. The worst thing is it's too expensive for what you get, particularly when there is so much out there that is free.

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Good as an introduction, not much beyond that

In the first lecture of his intensive course in Russian at Harvard, Professor Horace G. Lunt used to compare different methods of language learning. His comment on the "learn a language as a child does" was, "Do you really want to spend five years of your life learning to speak like a five-year old child?" His point was that an adult has several advantages in a language learning over a child. The two most important of these advantages are: (i) the adult already knows one language, and can compare the working of the second language with that and thus master the second easier; (ii) the adult can grasp grammatical concepts (which explain the structure of the language) and thus learn the structure of a language and how to manipulate it without having to infer this from an endless repetition of instances-- the adult can learn more efficiently.

These observations apply to the Rosetta Stone series. They are very good for teaching (relatively painlessly) basic vocabulary and the elementary working of a language. They don't go much beyond that. If you want to teach yourself how to manipulate a language and to produce responses automatically, the Foreign Service Institute courses, although a bit tedious, are far superior.

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