Rosetta Stone language learning software

A common New Year’s resolution is to learn a new language, but few of us can up sticks and move to a new country to surround ourselves in the target language. Fortunately we can throw technology at the problem.

Rosetta Stone uses technology to replicate the way we all learnt our first language as children, with a systematic sequence of language and images in context – but no translation.

I’ve spent a lot of time in language schools in my time – and the tedium of drilling grammar is very, very familiar. Whilst unquestionably effective (I can still conjugate Latin verbs like a badass) the ability to do so in later life, when not formally bound to a school class system and with life repeatedly getting in the way.

Rosetta Stone, whilst still rigorous, bypasses at lot of the conventional language learning and instead is a little more … insidious. The picture matching system teaches you grammar, and can be incredibly demanding when it comes to pronunciation as your sentences are graded against a native speaker’s and you don’t progress to the next level until you nail it. But it never feels as tedious as doing lines in a text book. It’s not … fun… but it is much less of a chore than conventional language learning. You have time based chunks of language skills which you can practice – which is pretty neat as you can do a 5 or ten minute burst of listening, or a full comprehensive hour of language practice.

The Rosetta Stone also comes with a set of audio companion packs that enable your learning to continue away from the desktop. Annoyingly this is as far as the mobile learning experience goes (although to be fair you can log into their website from most desktops) but in an ideal world I’ve love to be able to log into the Rosetta Stone experience from my smartphone or tablet and work through some sessions on the go. The team assure me something is being hatched as we speak.

The languages available in Version 3 are: Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), Dutch, English (British), English (American), Filipino (Tagalog), French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Persian (Farsi), Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish (Latin America), Spanish (Spain), Swedish, Turkish and Vietnamese.

For further information, visit www.RosettaStone.co.uk, or call 0800 2800 927.