Rosetta Stone: Is It Any Good For Learning Italian?
- Thread starter Julian02
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So, is Duolingo a program or a website? The one I downloaded was an app. The program we need to create ourselves, manage ourselves, motivate ourselves and get along with others ourselves. It's fun for inexperienced language learners. Highlight on fun.
A lot of the times, though, interacting on unsupervised language learning websites could discourage you, because some "learners" like to point out what's wrong and what's right. In my opinion, if you have your own language learning program and goals, it does matter a lot how you get there.
I tend to get confused when I learn unsupervised, so I would quickly design something, like a program or something to help me with the learning. Here in this Forbes story, the founders of Duolingo are featured. Duolingo was just starting out in 2013. Hint: Rosetta Stone gets a mention.
Now I'm very interested about Duolingo. I'd heard quite a lot praises in the last... two years or so, but somehow I'd never checked it out. I like the idea of a "persnalised" language learning device. That's not the approach to language learning people usually take - you learn the things someone else had valued as "improtant", "relevant" or "key" to understanding a certain language. If you could decide what you wanted to learn, you could really get motivated. But your point about getting discouraged is also valid.
I would recommend trying some of the suggestions others have mentioned on here as a first step. Exhaust all of your free resources before investing in Rosetta Stone. Duolingo helped me a ton! It's great how it saves your progress so you can log in from any device and continue where you left off. I even bought some cheap workbooks to force myself to do homework. I would recommend listening to some music, watching some films, and trying to find natives to converse with on a language exchange site.
This is actually a very good piece of advice: learn whatever you can for free, get the basics and then invest in a good program to continue learning. That sure seems like a good idea. Multimedia is also a great tool - use whatever you can: music, films, books, TV series... the list is so very long. Anything can be helpful. Sometimes dictionaries don't help - you must see how the word functions in a sentence or two to be able to use it properly, just like knowing the tenses doesn't help much if you know only five or six verbs. I'd also found that listening to the radio can be very helpful if you find the right station. You can learn so much without even realising it as you pick up the words subconsciously. If nothing else, you listen to the natives speak the language you wish to learn.
I haven't tried Rosetta Stone yet, which is a surprise. It's on my "to-do" list as well as Duolingo, but I am definitely more interested in trying it out than I was before.
I don't know for Italian but I use Rosetta Stone to learn French it has helped me a lot with learning and hearing how a native French speaker sounds. And you can listen to how they speak a world and you get to repeat it. In my opinion it is the best language learning software.
I am using this software to learn Russian. It is very good but you should know a little bit the language you want to learn before using this program. It is very good to learn more grammar.