You wear a headset, and their immersion/adaptive recall approach requires the student to respond to pictures flashed to the screen, while you point and click at what you hear, or, the program cues you to speak back to it, testing your pronunciation. If someone recorded what we actually sound like, there would be no end to the embarrassing jokes that would ensue. Let me just say that learning Russian is impossibly hard. We have miles to go before we’ll be able to do anything productive with the language.
Russian uses a completely different alphabet – the Cyrillic alphabet, rather than our familiar Latin (Roman) alphabet. So, as you try to absorb a new vocabulary, master pronunciation and learn how to string words together, you also have to learn a new alphabet. Riiiiight.
Take a look at the Cyrillic alphabet, and you’ll see what I mean. Also challenging are the alternate spellings of basically EVERY WORD WE’VE LEARNED based on gender associations, whether you are speaking to a person about the object in question vs. speaking to multiple people about the object vs. just identifying the object. And verb variations? You don't want to know and I wouldn’t even be able to tell you because I still can’t figure it out. We have a whole new appreciation for folks attempting to learn English with all of our exceptions to our rules.
So, while Rosetta Stone is a good program for building vocabulary – such as, what is Russian for “duck” – I’m thinking we’re going to have to resort to our handy-dandy English-Russian phrasebook for the more practical words and phrases such as asking about restroom locations, directions, and ordering in restaurants. Unless, of course, duck is on the menu. :-)
Tonya
