The NEW Rosetta Stone!
 

Hey all, a buddy of mine has been working with the Rosetta Stone team on their latest product which has JUST released. He tells me it's pretty amazing. Check it out, guys:

Rosetta Stone Announces TOTALe, Language Instruction With A Social Bent

and then he says this site is for games and activities and all and it's kinda like a free demo:

Welcome to RWorld!

Apparently they've been hiring tutors like CRAZY so guys, check this out a bit. The price tag is high but hey, if you're serious about "self study", this might be what you've been looking for.

I asked him about how high it goes, and he said the activities and live tutoring scales with where you are in the program, which goes to the point that you'd be conversationally fluent (which means you can get around in whatever country it is relatively comfortably).

Good luck!

(PS this isn't spam, I swear. I have no connection wth the company apart from my buddy working there, and I won't use the software myself.)

Just activated my account there.
Not many people are online though, hopefully this will improve.

It was literally JUST released; my friend is still in sleep-deprivation mode, haha!:D

Things will pick up. The reviews are starting to come in and the software will be shipping out to the stores and mall kiosks soon, I think.

The most amazing part is the one-on-one or two-on-one tutoring they have! I asked him how that's even possible and he said "we've been hiring like crazy". Wow. @_@;

hahahahahahahahahahahahaha

999$

riiiiiiight...

I'm sure it's a great tool and all. I've found the old Rosetta Stone to be extremely useful. But that's just too much money for me. Especially with the 1,200$ to continue after the introductory period. No thanks.

Christ is that how much it is? Lordie.

I guess you're really paying for the tutoring and stuff. Not like you'll be paying much less for REAL tutors, anyway... and "self study" is only so effective.

It seems like if you are paying that much your money would be better spent taking a class or actually going to Japan.

My thoughts exactly.

I've tried the original Rosetta Stone software..which costs' about $500 for the 3 courses on Japanese..and it works very very well, in fact..I should start using it, I only fooled around with it for about 30 minutes.

Haha probably. That's most of your ticket right there.

If you only used it for 30 minutes, how do you know it works very well?

It seems like people that use nothing but Rosetta Stone rave about it, but people that have used other things and then tried Rosetta Stone have a lot of complaints when it comes to learning Japanese. My sense is (having never tried to use it) that it uses a lot of picture association, which might be nice for vocabulary, but it doesn't teach hiragana, katakana, or kanji and it doesn't teach grammar. From what I understand, sentence structure in Japanese in never explained, so you have to figure out how a sentence is structured on your own. That's a lot of work for $999.

Having studied multiple languages, I get suspicious when a program says it can use a single system to teach any language. That makes me think "oversimplification" as every language is its own system and doesn't necessarily fit into a universal teaching method unless it is just boiled down to vocabulary words.