idk
7 May 2012
Language / Rosetta Stone Polish Level 1-3 (my personal experience) [17]
IMHO, the Rosetta Stone courses are (if you really want to gain fluency in a foreign language) an extremely overpriced (if you don't download them for free off Piratebay) waste of time, heavily marketed (mainly to monolingual Americans) as the greatest ever language learning method, "using the latest technology simulating...", blah blah. As if all you had to do was put the CDs into your computer, sit through the hours and hours of repetitive lessons, and by the end be completely fluent in the language.
Having tested a few of these courses in different languages, IMHO you could probably learn more by yourself in a couple of months with a standard "teach yourself X language"-type textbook with audio, than you could by completing all three levels of the Rosetta Stone courses (= perhaps about a zillion hours of mind-numbing repetition).
The simple fact is that you can't learn a foreign language as an adult in the same way you learnt your native language as a child, which seems to be what these courses are based on. But, shock horror, the advantage of already having the command of language is, for example, you don't have to spend years and years of repetition and correction to be able to decline a word of a certain gender and number in a certain grammatical case. You can (OMG) just look up the pattern in a book and memorise it! (plus the countless exceptions if we're talking about Polish :D). You really don't need to spend hours and hours doing tedious exercises whose goal is that you'll eventually "catch on" to the way a word is declined through constant repitition of examples with images (which is probably how you'd teach a retarded monkey).
Seriously, a basic textbook (preferably with audio) and -I think this is the word lots of people want to avoid- some EFFORT (i.e. not just clicking a mouse button) is all you need to learn the basics of a language. Once you've done that (which might take several months) you can continue learning simply through reading, listening and (obviously if you have the opportunity) communicating with native speakers.
Okay, sorry for my rant, but I truly detest these courses. Don't be fooled by all those "five stars" on Amazon!
For learning for Polish from scratch, here are the titles of a few books/courses I would recommend (most of which you can find quite easily on the internet, if you know what I mean ;)):
Basic Polish & Intermediate Polish
Polish in 4 weeks
Colloquial Polish
Teach Yourself Polish
First Year Polish
Good luck.
IMHO, the Rosetta Stone courses are (if you really want to gain fluency in a foreign language) an extremely overpriced (if you don't download them for free off Piratebay) waste of time, heavily marketed (mainly to monolingual Americans) as the greatest ever language learning method, "using the latest technology simulating...", blah blah. As if all you had to do was put the CDs into your computer, sit through the hours and hours of repetitive lessons, and by the end be completely fluent in the language.
Having tested a few of these courses in different languages, IMHO you could probably learn more by yourself in a couple of months with a standard "teach yourself X language"-type textbook with audio, than you could by completing all three levels of the Rosetta Stone courses (= perhaps about a zillion hours of mind-numbing repetition).
The simple fact is that you can't learn a foreign language as an adult in the same way you learnt your native language as a child, which seems to be what these courses are based on. But, shock horror, the advantage of already having the command of language is, for example, you don't have to spend years and years of repetition and correction to be able to decline a word of a certain gender and number in a certain grammatical case. You can (OMG) just look up the pattern in a book and memorise it! (plus the countless exceptions if we're talking about Polish :D). You really don't need to spend hours and hours doing tedious exercises whose goal is that you'll eventually "catch on" to the way a word is declined through constant repitition of examples with images (which is probably how you'd teach a retarded monkey).
Seriously, a basic textbook (preferably with audio) and -I think this is the word lots of people want to avoid- some EFFORT (i.e. not just clicking a mouse button) is all you need to learn the basics of a language. Once you've done that (which might take several months) you can continue learning simply through reading, listening and (obviously if you have the opportunity) communicating with native speakers.
Okay, sorry for my rant, but I truly detest these courses. Don't be fooled by all those "five stars" on Amazon!
For learning for Polish from scratch, here are the titles of a few books/courses I would recommend (most of which you can find quite easily on the internet, if you know what I mean ;)):
Basic Polish & Intermediate Polish
Polish in 4 weeks
Colloquial Polish
Teach Yourself Polish
First Year Polish
Good luck.