I'm homeschooling my 18-yr-old stepson, Josh. He's in his second year of German, and we're using Rosetta Stone. I had high hopes for Rosetta Stone, since I'd heard so much good about it.

I have to say I was disappointed. It's a nice supplementary tool, but I don't think it can beat plain human conversation with a live teacher as a means of learning a language.

The basic idea of Rosetta Stone is that you look at a picture, hear a native speaker pronounce a sentence about the picture, and repeat the sentence while reading it from the screen. The program has various exercises related to the pictures and sounds and matching them together. You can also record your speech and see how it matches the native speaker's rendition, or type the text you hear. There's a workbook for written exercises, and the first installment of the course has a grammar text.

To me, it's just an updated version of the Language Lab, which was state-of-the-art in the 1960's. Maybe it works for some people; but for me, listening to a recording and repeating it is excruciatingly boring.

But then, I was spoiled. I took three years of German from some pretty good teachers in the seminary, and then attended an 8-month course at the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey, California. Our classes were six hours a day, with a couple hours of homework. At night, we memorized a short skit, and then we acted out the skit several times the next morning. We have readings and grammar and vocabulary in our text - but very little English. Most of the day, we just sat around in a circle and talked in German, and our teachers kept the discussion interesting and kept pushing up the complexity level of the conversation. We had language lab a couple of hours a week, but I think it was the least-effective aspect of my German training. What taught me the language was the total immersion in German. For six hours a day, every day, I rarely heard a word of English. I spoke far more German in Monterey than I did during my two-year assignment as a German linguist in Berlin.

Rosetta Stone is a pretty spiffy package, but I think it's a poor substitute for immersion in a language with a live teacher. It's a nice supplement to a teacher, but I don't think it would be very effective alone without a human teacher (such as myself). Or maybe I just don't want to believe that I can be replaced by a CD. We have Rosetta Stone English at the Women's Center where I volunteer, but it's not used very often. Human language teachers seem to do a far better job.

-Joe-