With the sudden departure of my Mandarin teacher I turned to Rosetta Stone, a computerized language teacher. I'd heard good things about the product but after using it for a week I'm really impressed. I've learned more in a week than I learned in five sessions with my teacher. It works pretty simply - it forces you to learn the language using context. It never translates anything into English. In this screen, the correct answer is the one on the upper right "The eggs are blue." I'm learning to understand, read characters and even speak. It comes with a headphone and mic that you talk into and if you mis-pronounce you get a loud NO buzz. Obviously, I have a personal NO buzz - the Pingles herself.
I'm halfway through lesson one. So far I've learned simple things like "The girls are drinking water" and "The men are swimming." Slowly but surely they add in more and more, building you up over time. I know it's working - today we ate at Chez Xu and I followed Pingles asking for sweet "doh hua" and the lady telling her they were out of it. Simple things - but it feels good to be making some progress.
3 comments:
i have to say Josh is making great progress... I was impressed with the improvement he was making before he let out on the secret of Rosetta Stone. Gonna try out this program on my Japanese.
Hang on, does that mean that once you found out I was using Rosetta Stone, you weren't as impressed with my improvement?
What you saying, doh-moh?
Can you say, "The pen of my aunt is on the desk" yet?
So Jean is back in Paris now? Oh, cool.
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