Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Rosetta Stone

My kids are taking Spanish 2 this year. Gwen was supposed to be in Spanish 2 honors, but they don't offer that here. I think this is a good thing. You see she is behind what they expected her to know coming in. Gwen did REALLY well in Spanish last year. Right now she has a low C. Everyday is a struggle. I am also beginning to think her teacher isn't very good. I have tried to help her. My Spanish is super rusty, but I am better than nothing. I have shown her web sites that will help. I have offered to tape vocab all over the house for her. Right now the main problem is vocab and verb tenses. So, I bought Rosetta Stone. I bought versions 1-5 off of Craig's list. Brand new and for a great price. I messed around with it the first day. It seemed pretty good. I did have one complaint. Within the lessons is a section where you practice pronunciation. I can speak Spanish well. I have had native speakers compliment my accent. Rosetta Stone doesn't like it. This is VERY frustrating to me, and I know how to say the word. It is SUPER frustrating to my kids. Clarece is really the only one using it, and she has never taken Spanish. So far she has picked up a few words. I am impressed. Gwen hasn't even touched it. She has been busy though. Maybe this weekend.

Today I think I figured out how to make the pronunciation part work. You need to speak pretty slow for the computer to pick up the words and sometimes need to break the words into syllables. This is pretty hard for me to do as I don't speak Spanish slow like that. I do have a friend that ask me on facebook last night if we had problems with this part as her daughter did with her French one and hasn't touched it since. This brings me to a few questions. Has anyone else tried Rosetta Stone? What do you think of it? What problems/concerns did you have? TTFN

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