More Rosetta Stone Thoughts

Rosetta Stone has "Listening", "Reading", and "Listening and Reading" activities. In Listening, you hear a phrase read out loud, and match it to its picture. In Reading, you see a phrase written down, and match it to its picture. In Listening and Reading, you see a phrase written down and it is read aloud, and match it to its picture. This is just so redundant! Especially since "Listening" and "Reading" can come before "Listening and Reading" in the activity order, and have many identical slides. I know, I know, repetition is the key to learning, yada yada yada. Why do they do this to me? I don't think I am a fast study and above some repetition, but I do get bored of this sort of stuff quite easily. Yes, they often include activities from the previous lesson, but I was sick of it a couple of days ago... Why don't they throw in stuff from a few lessons ago? Why not from previous units? I know the lessons build on each other in a pretty logical way, but it wouldn't hurt to have far throwbacks, just to make sure the very basics were firmly implanted, would it?

Rosetta Stone is Heating Up!

The exercises are actually getting better in content here in Unit 3. I just did the "Pronunciation" exercise for the first lesson, and that's totally changed! No longer is it just single words broken into syllables, or short phrases. This is instead sentences. You listen to a short sentence, the repeat it, and the software shows you where you did a good job and bad job. Yes! Much more interesting!

Again, these exercises are focusing on working and eating, particularly when you do these things. Like, I eat breakfast before work Faccio colazione prima di lavorare. They use different constructions for "work" in slightly different phrases. For some reason, they give dopo il lavoro for "after work" while they give prima di lavorare for "before work". Prepositions are hard!

Rosetta Stone Italian 1 Unit 3

I finally move on to a new Unit! I am not actually behind... Each language course is supposed to be 16 weeks, I think...

The new unit is on "Work and School", which is a good topic for me. I just finished the first lesson's introductory section, where you get a taste of all the things to be covered in the lesson. This lesson seems to be a lot about where and when. So far, the "when" quando part of it is pretty vague. We aren't talking about hours and times yet, just times of day. Mattina is the morning, pomeriggio is the afternoon, sera is the evening, and notte is the night. It seems as long as it's not getting dark yet, you can say buon giorno, when work is ending it's buona sera, and when it's close to sleepy time is buona notte. I think we are also getting some more prepositions. So far so good!

Rosetta Stone Italian 1 Unit 2

I finally finished Unit 2! It was really dragging for me there at the end. They want you to be well prepared for the "Speaking" part, where you have to come up with sentences on your own (though they are ones you've seen before), so there really is too much time spent repeating the same stuff again and again. I know they say repetition is the key to learning, but what good is repetition if I mentally check out at? In general, I try to "play ahead" during the buildup parts. If there's a four picture matching exercise, I try to say the phrases for the last match before they're given for me. The speaking is really the hard part, not the matching the pictures...

The capstone exercise was about meeting strangers on the bus and introducing yourself. Not bad. I found it slightly easier than the last unit's capstone exercise in terms of guessing what I was expected to say. I think I will repeat it again tomorrow morning, since some of the phrases should have come a little faster!

Rosetta Stone Italian 1 Unit 2 Lesson 4

So this whole unit is supposed to be on Greetings and Introductions, and while we have been building up to it, this is the lesson where we put everything together into an introduction. Like Questa e mia sorella. Lei la chiama Violetta. Lei e in piedi nella cucina. "This is my sister. Her name is Violetta. She's standing in the kitchen." Etc. I practiced giving an introduction in Italian with my officemates on Friday!

Rosetta Stone Writing Activity

The "Writing" activity is on the whole pretty good. It has one of the same slide types as the "Reading" activity, where you hear syllables read out loud, and then match them up to the written syllable. (By the way, I hate hate that they move the options around between choices on the slides. Like, if a slide has four syllables arranged as cards in a square, after you match the first one to the spoken part, all the choices switch around in that square before you get to match up the second. I've clicked on the wrong one several times because they've moved...) The rest of the slides are either build up to the writing, or slides where you actually type the words and phrases you hear. I guess for me the more accurate title of this segment would be "Spelling", since there are lots of words I understand and can pronounce that are hard to spell. Like poliziotto "police officer". I find this exercise pretty helpful on the whole.

Rosetta Stone Speaking Activity

This is probably my favorite activity in Rosetta Stone. There are a few slide variations, but in all of them, you are asked to speak. Some slides show you several squares of dialog, and each one is read to you, and you read it back. In some cases, they show you the written words as well as have you listen, in some cases you just hear it read. There are also slides with, say, four lines of dialog, where most will be read to you, but you will have to fill in one from scratch, based on the other squares. You do not use the mouse at all in this activity, just speak to the screen. Overall, I find this activity very useful. Actually saying the words out loud really cements the pronunciation and the construction of the sentence. The parts where you have to come up with what to say are very useful, and as close to a real conversation as Rosetta Stone gets. Yes, you have seen these slides before in other activities by the time Speaking comes around, but you get put on the spot to know stuff during the activity. I would actually like "Speaking" to come earlier in the sequence, perhaps have it come around twice. Maybe even replace the "Pronunciation" activity...

Rosetta Stone Reading Activity

As I mentioned before, Rosetta Stone breaks down each lesson into multiple activities. Each lesson has one activity of each type, with a selection of different activities from previous lessons added in. So, you may be doing "Lesson 3 Reading" and "Lesson 2 Reading" in Lesson 3.

The Reading activity is alright. It's focused on sets of slides distinguishing between two similar syllable sounds. In some cases, this makes more sense, for example "ale" vs "alle". In others, "Noi" vs "Voi", they are pretty distinguishable already. I like the part where you get to speak phrases that include these syllables. I think the part where you hear the syllable and select which printed syllable matches the sound makes sense, but includes too many repetitions of the syllables. The parts where you hear a sentence and select the correct written syllable to fill in the blanks is also alright. The part where they read all the syllables and you have to match to the written syllable is excessive to me. Overall, I think "Reading" is a decent activity. Slightly less repetition within the slides themselves would be good.

Rosetta Stone Pronunciation Activity

So Rosetta Stone has several activity types, one of which is "Pronunciation". To me, the pace of this activity always seems behind the rest. For example, the Pronunciation activity for Italian 1 Unit 2 Lesson 3 includes several words we had to use in Unit 1, including number pronunciation, and the pronoun "we" noi. These sections are on the shorter side. I would suggest increasing their length, but I can see how they wouldn't want to tire out or frustrate people with these sections. I think they should instead have two pronunciation sections for each lesson.

Also, it drives me a little crazy how they break down the syllables all the way for each word. That made sense in the beginning, or it would make sense if you have trouble, but reading each syllable individually for arrivederci before you read it in whole, when we have been using that word continually from the beginning, is really dragging the exercise out. I also don't like the syllable breakdown sometimes, particularly for double letters. After going to the trouble of illustrating the difference between "alle" and "ale", why break them down to "a" "lle" and "a" "le", respectively? They have you try to lengthen the double ll sound in "lle" but I think it misses the sound they emphasize in the pronunciation of "alle". Can't be perfect, I guess.

Rosetta Stone Italian 1 Unit 2 Lesson 2 and 3

Rosetta Stone continues to add vocab. This unit seems to include a lot about families, as mentioned before, and homes. The names of rooms, like sala de pranza, the dining room, things you find in a home, tavoli tables, lavandini sinks, that sort of thing. And generic "places", like "city" citta, "street" strada, etc. What is starting to sink in for me is that there are several word choice options for any of this vocabulary. "Street" could be strada, or via, or maybe even a special word like viale "avenue". Gotta look out for that, and not tie myself to a single Italian word!

Oliviero Toscani and more Rosetta Stone

Last night I went to see a talk given by Oliviero Toscani. He told stories about individual photos, including the two I have included below, and expounded a bit on his thoughts on what it means to be an artist. While he certainly photographs a lot of different stuff, his focus is really on people and portraiture. Most of his best known work has been in ads. He does a lot of fashion and design work.

Some of his best known and most controversial work has been done for United Colors of Benetton. The photo below was apparently highly contested in some countries, but won a "Photo of the Year" award in another. This is far from his most controversial work for them. He did a lot of ads for Benetton that were direct commentaries on current events. His explanation of this was interesting. He pointed out that the ads in newspapers and magazines don't go with the articles, in terms of content or style. He wanted his ads to address real issues.

Anyway, it was an interesting talk, and I am glad I went!

Rosetta Stone Italian 1 Unit 2 Lesson 2: So far so good. I should really time myself to see how long these Rosetta Stone lessons take. They feel like an eternity. More work with pronouns in this lesson, and then, prepositions! To me, prepositions are a core vocab thing. There aren't that many that people use commonly, but they are used a lot. Things are "on" or "in" a lot. With the pronouns, they are using family relationships as the nouns. As in Questi sono i miei fratelli "these are my brothers." I quite importantly learned the word for sister, sorella.

Rosetta Stone Italian 1 Unit 2

Unit 2 is "Greetings and Introductions" at least in theory. I just started the first lesson within the unit, and so far it seems to be about possessive pronouns and the informal second person. Starting to catch up to Pimsleur in the numbers, up to 12 here, diciannove in Pimsleur.

I'm liking getting into the informal second person, and I am also liking getting to hear words read aloud clearly and slowly. Something that I didn't pick up in Pimsleur is that double consonants are given more emphasis in pronunciation. Basically, you include the consonant in both the preceding and following syllables. For example, sette is pronounced "seht-teh", not "seh-teh". It seems like if it's a single consonant, it will be pronounced as leading the second syllable. So I'd give that as a point in Rosetta Stone's favor.

Rosetta Stone Italian 1 Unit 1

I finished Unit 1 of Italian 1. That took a long time. I am not enamored of Rosetta Stone. I think the charges generally leveled against it, that it's a vocab exercise that doesn't develop conversational skills and good grammar, are a little harsh.

At the end of the unit, they give a "capstone" exercise which I found both helpful and frustrating. Basically you have to speak dialog for a scene. The problem was, the main character was often asking the questions, so it was easy to come up with something that worked but wasn't right. When I was responding to questions, I was pretty competent at answering them.

All in all, Rosetta Stone is a big time sink, but I think I will continue on with it.

In Wine Country

Well, today I am off for California, for my cousin's wedding in Napa. I won't have a lot of internet access while I am there. I will set up a few posts to publish this week but they will be just random Italy stuff...

I got an old microphone from Ross's parents that I am using for Rosetta Stone. While the speaking component isn't as exciting as I hoped it would be, it's definitely an improvement for a few segments. I realized that part of the reason the Rosetta Stone lessons feel long is that they are really long! I was looking at the times quoted at the start of each unit, 30 minutes, which is actually the time for the first core activity. That core activity is followed by eight or ten shorter activities, which are quoted at 5 or usually 10 minutes each. So adding this up, each lesson is supposed to be around two hours long. No wonder they feel long! I got the impression that I was supposed to be doing a lesson at a go, but now I don't feel bad breaking it down into smaller sittings!

Rosetta Stone Italian 1 Unit 1 Lesson 3

The pace is picking up a little. This set of vocab includes adjectives, which is fun. Though, one thing that is killing me, "egg" uovo is masculine in the singular, but "eggs" uova the plural is feminine. This really threw me off with the pronouns and the adjectives. The adjectives this lesson were all colors, which was a pretty good idea since it includes adjectives that have singular forms that end in "e" and ones that can end in "a" or "o". I have gotten to the point where I skip through some of the activities, since they are just too repetitive. I feel like the immersive stuff is working for me in terms of improving my understanding, but I think my conversational speaking is not quite going at the same pace.

Oh, and the only microphone I have, my cell phone hands-free, does not work with Ross's desktop, so I guess I won't be finding out about that part anytime soon!

Rosetta Stone Italian 1 Unit 1 Lesson 2

In Rosetta Stone, each course is broken into units, each with several lessons. I'm on Unit 1, the language basics unit. Later units in the course are on pretty standard topics, greetings, introductions, shopping, etc. I just wrapped up lesson two of the first unit. Ugh, the going is slow. There is so much repetition that I get lazy by the end. There are a bunch of activities within the lesson. Some of them are listening based, where you hear a phrase, and match it to the picture. Some have you typing in the spelling of the words, some just have you matching words to pictures, and some have you selecting words from drop-down boxes to complete the phrase as you hear it. There are a few more variations. The issue is that you go through each of these activities with the same set of words and phrases within a lesson. And on top of that there's repetition within each activity. Like, one page you might be matching "the man runs" (l'uomo corre), "the woman runs", "the girl runs", "the boy runs", and on the next page you match "the girl runs", "the girl walks", etc. So, needless to say, the repetition is high. And, in this second lesson, in addition to the new material presented, you redo some activities from lesson 1. There will be some more variety as there is more back-material to draw on, but as it is, I can barely stand to do a whole half-hour lesson in a sitting. I'm going to stick with it a little more, in the hopes that it picks up the pace.

At this point, I feel like this is in essence a vocab and grammar building exercise. I need to try the next lesson using a microphone, since there is apparently some cool voice recognition and matching stuff that Rosetta Stone has to offer. You know, improve my pronunciation. Maybe it will be really cool and it will have you answer questions by speaking...

Rosetta Stone, Italian 1

So, I tried my first Rosetta Stone lesson. Apparently, I need to get a microphone! These are interactive, picture-based lessons. The first unit of the first lesson focuses on distinguishing between single and plural, masculine and feminine. There's some basic vocab included, but basically as a support of the concepts. This is pretty much a no-explanation immersion learning style, as opposed to the explained, constructed style of Pimsleur. There is lots of repetition. Too much, in my opinion. Maybe that's just the first lesson? It will be very complementary to the style of the Pimsleur stuff, I think.