A Bit More About Rosetta Stone Dutch
Mar. 4th, 2013 12:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutI've been moving faster through the Units as I go along; I have a spare Milestone that I am saving for tomorrow morning and then two units and I'm done with the three levels. I'm getting through a Unit a day (which makes sense -- it's about 6 hours of material, which is what you'd get if you were taking an intensive, and you can get through it faster than the estimate).
Because my memories of the earlier version of Rosetta Stone are limited, and my recollection of what was actually in Dutch in 3 Months even more so, it's hard to know just how much vocabulary I've picked up. It sure _seems_ like there are words in this thing that I learned while in country -- that is, I didn't know them from the Hugo Course; I'm sure the flip is true as well (that lots of words were covered in Hugo's course that aren't in Rosetta).
I think the best part of this process for me has been re-learning the grammar in a completely different way. I'm familiar with German grammar and Dutch grammar in the way that you learn it in a textbook-driven course where the grammar is explained in the native language and the examples given in the target language. Rosetta Stone, however, buries the grammar in the examples -- there's no discussion of well, exactly _when_ do you use die vs. dat or al vs. gelegd or any of a large number of other things. Some of the forms I got purely by "ear" at first and then worked out the rule from the examples (I _still_ haven't had to break out a grammar to puzzle anything out, which I find astonishing, and grammar has NOT been the problem I have with the newspaper, either, which continues to be a combination of vocabulary and unfamiliarity with governmental institutions). But most of the forms caused the old grammar rule or trick or whatever to surface very quickly.
I have no idea what it would be like to use Rosetta Stone to learn a language that one had no (real) familiarity with. But I'm increasingly curious. Maybe in July, I'll pick a different language and try Rosetta on that.
Because my memories of the earlier version of Rosetta Stone are limited, and my recollection of what was actually in Dutch in 3 Months even more so, it's hard to know just how much vocabulary I've picked up. It sure _seems_ like there are words in this thing that I learned while in country -- that is, I didn't know them from the Hugo Course; I'm sure the flip is true as well (that lots of words were covered in Hugo's course that aren't in Rosetta).
I think the best part of this process for me has been re-learning the grammar in a completely different way. I'm familiar with German grammar and Dutch grammar in the way that you learn it in a textbook-driven course where the grammar is explained in the native language and the examples given in the target language. Rosetta Stone, however, buries the grammar in the examples -- there's no discussion of well, exactly _when_ do you use die vs. dat or al vs. gelegd or any of a large number of other things. Some of the forms I got purely by "ear" at first and then worked out the rule from the examples (I _still_ haven't had to break out a grammar to puzzle anything out, which I find astonishing, and grammar has NOT been the problem I have with the newspaper, either, which continues to be a combination of vocabulary and unfamiliarity with governmental institutions). But most of the forms caused the old grammar rule or trick or whatever to surface very quickly.
I have no idea what it would be like to use Rosetta Stone to learn a language that one had no (real) familiarity with. But I'm increasingly curious. Maybe in July, I'll pick a different language and try Rosetta on that.