In a bid to stave off competitors like Livemocha (reviewed here) and Busuu, TechCrunch is "reporting" (I use the term loosely) that Rosetta Stone has finally taken their first major step into using social networking for language learning: Their new system, called TOTALe, adds two interactive ingredients to the mix. The first is the Rosetta Studio, a live lesson area where you and two other students at your skill level work one-on-one with a live, native speaker. Sounds like they're taking a cue from the Michel Thomas method here. The second ingredient is Rosetta World, a matching service that connects a native speaker of one language with a learner of the other and, in some cases, vice versa. And let's not forget the juicy price. TOTALe will be available on [July 28, 2009,] and will cost $999 for a twelve month subscription. This includes Studio sessions and you can repeat sessions as necessary. After the introductory period it will cost $1,200. And that's no typo. So that's the crux of the news story. Unlike Time, however, John Biggs at TechCrunch found himself utterly unable to not gush over Rosetta Stone. However, you might be able to forgive him since Rosetta Stone sponsored the post. The cringe-inducing gushing, after the jump. Read more... After a truly fawning "review" (the only thing mentioned as a downside was the price tag, and, really, how could you even think of maintaining any modicum of objectivity and not hold that out as a minus?), this is where I really got my cringe on:Rosetta Stone has been an effective teaching tool for over two decades. So who exactly is calling this effective? Let me guess: Rosetta Stone. Moreover, even if we assume that's true, as they like to say in investment literature, past performance is no guarantee of future results.The quality of the lessons is extremely high and the chance to work with a native speaker is unrivaled except in face-to-face schools. Oh jeez... It sure sounds like someone was writing copy from a press kit. Extremely high compared to what? Rosetta Stone is only "unrivaled" in "the chance to work with a native speaker" if you forget about going to where the language is actually spoken! And even then I'm pretty sure it's rivaled by Livemocha and the other websites John himself sites (more on that below), but doesn't appear to have researched very well. (And we'll assume that by "face-to-face schools" John means language schools, because we sure know there aren't that many native speakers in the average school.)This social, human aspect really brings the lessons home and adds an amazing amount of value to the program. "Amazing!" Just oozing with objectivity.
John continues:This idea isn't new. Well at least he admits that.Sites like Livemocha, Babalah, Palabea, Busuu, and Learn10 are all trying to create similar solutions. However, Rosetta Stone has a bit more budget and experience behind their TOTALe system. Budget, probably, but experience? I'm not sure you've got the right experience when your primary product has long been mail-order software on CDs, highly advertised on late-night TV.
Finally, if you managed to read through to the very last paragraph, you learn that TechCrunch isn't exactly a neutral third party in this:Incidentally, if you made it this far into the post you’re eligible to win one of ten year-long subscriptions courtesy of Rosetta Stone. Comment below using your real email address in the correct field and I’ll pick ten comments at random on Wednesday. Luckily, I think one of the commenters on TechCrunch nails it on the head:i’ve used rosetta stone before (the old program without the new social features) and i’ve used livemocha. livemocha was almost the same exact program as rosetta stone except with social features. So i don’t know what kind of an idiot would pay $999 for something they could get for free. rosetta stone might be a *little* bit better, but $999 worth? And that, my friends, is the rub.
P.S. Here's an actual Rosetta Stone press release, just for comparison's sake.Labels: Babalah, Busuu, Learn10, Livemocha, Michel Thomas, Palabea, RosettaStone
One of the things I missed while overwhelmed by my move to Japan was the article Rosetta Stone: Speaking Wall Street's Language in Time magazine. I've mentioned before how Rosetta Stone's marketing people seem to do a great job of producing favorable coverage: lots of Rosetta Stone rahrah, but little of the skepticism that I and other language bloggers have of their method. Time, however, avoids joining the cheerleading squad. Read more... Time begins with Rosetta Stone's impressive IPO performance: On the evening of April 15, the company was able to price its IPO at $18 per share, above the estimated range of $15-17. It was the first IPO to price above its range in nearly a year. The next day, shares shot up 40%, the best one-day IPO rise in the last year (on April 23, the stock closed at $25.60 per share, 42% above the IPO price). As of today, the stock last closed at $27.84, 55% above the IPO price. In fact, the lowest to date was $22.10, still 23% above the IPO price. Clearly the market has picked Rosetta Stone as a winner, and Time goes on to show the strong financials and other factors ("relentless marketing") behind this undeniably outstanding performance in a down economy.
They then go on to echo the doubts expressed by many language bloggers: The most crucial question facing the company, however, is quite basic: does Rosetta Stone actually work? They then explain Rosetta Stone's inductive learning system, and highlight Rosetta Stone's claim that their system lets you "learn like a child" (an earlier post of mine sheds some light on some ways that that description doesn't really fit). Then even roll out Tim Ferriss for some comments.
The article cites data resulting from a study commissioned by Rosetta Stone: 55 hours of Rosetta Stone Spanish instruction should enable a student to pass the first semester course of a six-semester college Spanish program. Let's pause on that one for a moment. A typical three-credit college Spanish course is three hours per week for the fifteen weeks of a typical semester. I'm not sure I'd be bragging that 55 hours of Rosetta Stone will let you pass a 45-hour class. "After 55 hours of study with Rosetta Stone students will significantly improve their Spanish language skills," writes Roumen Vesselinov, a statistical economist at Queens College. Yeah... you could say the same after 55 hours of just about any method. According to Rosetta Stone, a February 2009 survey showed that 92% of respondents expressed satisfaction with the product. That's a suspiciously high statistic. I'd bet that their respondents weren't exactly an average pool of users, included a self-selection bias, etc. Without more info on the study, this stat is pretty worthless.
So I commend Time for producing a more balanced article on Rosetta Stone, but questions remain unanswered. I'd still love to hear about any data comparing the effectiveness of Rosetta Stone to other methods in a study not funded by Rosetta Stone.
And is there any language blogger out there who's a die-hard fan of Rosetta Stone? If you know of or are one, drop a line in the comments below. Given that I can't think of any among the language blogs I'm most familiar with, I'm beginning to worry that I might be dealing with my own self-selection bias.Labels: RosettaStone
I recently got an iPhone with one of my main reasons for doing so being to productively fill the time I have on the Tokyo subways when I can't grab a seat and break out my laptop. One of the things I intend to do with that time is using a spaced-repetition system ("SRS") to help expand my Japanese vocabulary. So I'd like to see if anyone out there has any recommendations for such a system. There are a few features in particular that I'm looking for. Read more... The most important is the ability to sync between, on the one hand, a desktop SRS app, such as Anki, Mnemosyne, or SuperMemo and, on the other, whatever I use on the iPhone. The idea here is that if I use the desktop app for a minute while on hold on a call at the office and then study on the iPhone on the way home from work, when I get home and sync with my desktop app I'll have my most up-to-date learning data. Accordingly, simply importing from a desktop app is insufficient for my needs.
The second feature I need is that I have to be able to use it on the iPhone while not connected to the internet. Part of my commute to work is underground (and it's also the part of my commute where I'm most likely to not get a seat), so needing an internet connection will not work. Accordingly, I can't simply use one of the SRS websites out there.
Finally, it's gotta be easy to enter the things I want to learn. And that means that I won't have to do it on my iPhone.
So... any recommendations?
I've so far only scratched the surface in my own research (and I'll of course report back when I have more), but I've been considering using Anki's iPhone system, which isn't an App Store app but somehow works nonetheless. I've also been trying out StudyArcade (and considering its $4.99 pro version), but I've yet to fully explore how it syncs up with Anki.Labels: Anki, Mnemosyne, spaced repetition, StudyArcade, SuperMemo
Some scientists seem to think that that's what new research shows (hat tip: Steve Kaufmann at The Linguist on Language), but I'm not fully convinced because I don't think the scientists have ruled out that the cause of young children's language-learning ability is the kind of exposure they are getting rather than some innate age-linked ability. Just to scratch the surface, let me point out some of the advantages of small children's learning methods. Read more... Little kids get to learn solely or primarily through real-life exposure. Complete immersion in a language is not needed, but lots of exposure is. I can take my own four-year-old daughter as a case in point. She speaks English, Japanese, and Chinese, which we've pulled off mainly by me speaking only English with her, my Japanese wife speaking only Japanese with her, and hiring only Chinese-speaking caregivers who of course only speak Chinese with her. This exposure has gotten her to a point where she has been able to swing classes with native-speaking peers in all three languages. Could you imagine sitting down kids seven or under and going through a textbook with them and getting the same result? Ain't gonna happen, so kids are stuck (actually, I should probably say blessed) with learning through exposure.
The second thing is that the exposure is meaningful to them; if they want some juice, they'd better learn to ask for it. The same is not true of most of the textbook-based teaching methods that schools use. A lesson on buying shoes in Paris in a French textbook probably won't have any immediate applicability for you. Actual exposure will stick in your brain much better than constructed exposure, and actual exposure is all that kids under seven will typically get.
The new research also points to another benefit seems to be pretty clearly a method differentiation that benefits young kids:Recall that Japanese "L" and "R" difficulty? Kuhl and scientists at Tokyo Denki University and the University of Minnesota helped develop a computer language program that pictures people speaking in "motherese," the slow exaggeration of sounds that parents use with babies.
Japanese college students who'd had little exposure to spoken English underwent 12 sessions listening to exaggerated "Ls" and "Rs" while watching the computerized instructor's face pronounce English words. Brain scans — a hair dryer-looking device called MEG, for magnetoencephalography — that measure millisecond-by-millisecond activity showed the students could better distinguish between those alien English sounds. And they pronounced them better, too, the team reported in the journal NeuroImage. So someone saying a word slowly and clearly to you numerous times helps you get the pronunciation down. Shocking!
And the list goes on. Kids often get corrected by the adults around them, something that can only be done on a much more limited basis in a classroom setting. Kids aren't doing much else beyond learning languages, so they're not limited to 45 minutes a day of classroom exposure to the language. Etc., etc.
Now take people eight years old and up. How do they typically learn? The old-school classroom method. Actual exposure trumps textbook/lecture exposure any day, so it's hardly surprising that little kids are at such an advantage.
So, while there are certainly some biological aspects to small children's language-learning ability (small infants' ability to distinguish sounds, lost by the time they're one year old, comes to mind), I'd be reluctant to conclude that a large percentage of children's language-learning ability comes from some biological advantage when their learning methods' advantages seem so obvious.Labels: age, children's language learning
Language Fixation makes the following observation: What I feel with Chinese (and I think this applies to other languages too) is that there are two levels to [learning grammar]. There are sentences that are technically “grammatically correct” according to someone’s made-up grammar rules that seem to fit all situations, and then there are sentences that actual people say and that actual native speakers consider to be correct. Language Fixation is touching on two things here. The first is word usage, which I already addressed here, and the second is informal grammar rules. Native speakers often seem to use the language in ways that seem to break the grammar rules included in most grammars. These may break the rules found in the book, but are they really breaking the rules of grammar of the language as they exist in the wild? You can probably guess that my answer is going to be no. Read more... Let me start with an example. One day my wife and I were talking about how she and other drivers sometimes don't bother to pass slow cars, and I said to her, "Bunch of wusses, you all." What a grammatical mess, right? There's no verb, the subject is at the end despite English being SVO, and the subject pronoun "you all" is, according to Wikipedia, used "primarily in the southern United States and African-American vernacular English", even though I am neither from the South nor African-American.
The fact of the matter is that, even in situations such as these, grammatical rules are being followed, even though they may be informal rules that the authors of grammars don't always see fit to include. In the case above, this is a standard kind of interjection, which takes a standard SVO declarative sentence, such as "You all are a bunch of wusses", and makes it into an interjection: "Idiots, these guys!" "Disgraceful, today's kids!" "Geniuses, those people." And so on. We could go into more detail about how that construction works, but suffice it to say that these are following grammatical rules, even if some sticklers might consider a sentence like that ungrammatical. ("You all" is more of a word usage issue, so I'll refer you back to my earlier post on that one.)
Let's turn to Chinese for another example in the same kind of SVO reordering. "Nàge mǐfàn, wǒ chī" 那个米饭，我吃. You cold translate it as "I'll eat that rice". This would sound perfectly normal when spoken in Chinese, but most grammar books would probably tell you to write it like this: "Wǒ chī nàge mǐfàn" 我吃那个米饭.
The thing about informal grammar is that it's still grammar, even if those who write grammars don't see fit to put it in their books. So I'd agree; barring that you find a grammar with this level of detail, you'll need to get this from context.
A grammar stickler, as the authors of grammars tend to be, might wave this sort of thing off, calling it grammatically incorrect. I'd say that's the totally wrong approach. Grammar is not a box that a language is to be crammed into; it's a series of observations about how the language is used in practice. It's not about how it should be, it's about how it is. Or, to phrase it another way, it's descriptive rather than prescriptive.
And the "how it is" part includes both the rules that grammarians tend to include in grammars and the rules governing informal usages that are rarely included in grammars. Thus, in terms of rules, the gap between what a grammar teaches you and how native speakers actually speak is because of one simple thing; the grammars are incomplete.
So when people criticize grammars, saying that they don't tell you how native speakers actually speak, they have a point, and such grammar is surely better learnt through exposure; if authors aren't generally including it in grammars, then you'll likely have few other alternatives. That said, that doesn't mean you shouldn't learn what can be learned from grammars, even if you need exposure to cover these kinds of grammatical patterns. And, of course, if you can find a grammar that covers such rules for you, all the better.
So make use of grammars, but remember that you're almost undoubtedly going to find "ungrammatical" grammatical rules that were not covered in your (or, perhaps, any) grammar.Labels: grammar
One argument made against actively trying to learn grammar is that, even if you get the grammar rules down pat, you still don't sound like a native speaker. Assuming you've really learned to correctly use the grammatical rules from your target language, then there are two possibilities as to why you don't sound like a native speaker. One is that something other than grammar is the problem. The second is that, assuming that everything in your grammar is correct, it is not complete. I'll come back to how your grammar is likely to be incomplete in a subsequent post, but for now let's focus on what else might be a problem. Here's a problem described by Geoff of Confessions in the comments of an earlier post of mine on grammar: After I found myself in a French-speaking environment, my latent knowledge was activated and my French took off. But before that, I had a nasty habit of creating sentences that fit the rules but that no native speaker would actually say. And here's Language Fixation on a similar note: [W]e can all surely think of examples we have heard where someone says something in our native language but it doesn’t seem quite right. Maybe it’s technically correct, but nobody really says it that way.
Quite commonly, there are many “grammatically correct” ways to express ideas, but only a few of them are the ones that native speakers actually use. This is really what it means to speak a language… you say what other people say, because you’re used to how it works. I myself run into this problem all the time in. Take Japanese as an example. I'll say something, completely grammatically correct, only to be informed by my wife that that's not how a native speaker would phrase it. She then tells me how it should be and, little by little, through lots of these short exchanges, I get to sound more and more like a native speaker. In all of these cases, we're talking about grammatically correct speech. If the speech is truly grammatically correct, why doesn't it sound like native speech? Leaving pronunciation issues aside, that leaves only one obvious culprit: word usage. Read more...What do I mean by word usage? I mean saying it how a native speaker would say it. There are always going to be numerous ways to make yourself understood, but only a fraction of them will actually sound native. Just take a real basic example in English. A native speaker might say, "I'm going to wake up at 7AM tomorrow morning." A non-native speaker might say, "I'm going to arise at 7AM tomorrow morning." Both are grammatically correct. Both convey the same meaning. But the second sounds weird and the first does not. Why? Word usage.
Getting the right word usage down is best done through exposure, both via input and output. Input will let you know how native speakers do it, and output can help as well if someone tells you when you screw up. Just outputting based on what you've learned could, as Geoff describes, result in your own personal pidgin. And that's where the native speaker correcting you becomes extremely useful. You ask them, "Is that how a Japanese person would say it?", and they tell you what you need to do to fix it. A dictionary alone might get you as far as our non-native speaker in the example above, but exposure should be able to eventually take you closer to our native speaker.
Predictably, this is exactly what happened when Geoff got to France.
Picking the right word is, of course, not a grammatical issue at all. So the conclusion that grammar is best learned only through exposure because learning how to pick the right word is best learned only through exposure is a non sequitur.Labels: grammar
If you're an American who's studied languages, you've probably come across this joke, or some variant of it, before: Q: What do you call a person who speaks three languages? A: Trilingual. Q: What do you call a person who speaks two languages? A: Bilingual. Q: What do you call a person who speaks one language? A: American. I've heard this joke applied to Brits as well. In any case, I hope some Americans (and Brits) out there will join me in defeating this stereotype.
In case you've been wondering where I've been for the past three months, I've moved to Japan! If you've never done it before, moving to pretty much the other side of the world can be something of a complicated process, so I ran out of blogging time with all the things on the to-do list. I'm still neck-deep in a to-do list of unpacking and whatnot, but one way or another it'll be finished pretty soon, so hopefully I can get back to plenty of language-learning goodness. I arrived here on May 31 and I'm working at Nagashima Ohno and Tsunematsu, one of Japan's "Big 4" law firms. While I was hired of course to work primarily in English, everything around me is in Japanese and I get lots of exposure to it, which is creating a great language-learning environment (which, unsurprisingly, is heavy in legalese). I'm also living with my in-laws, so the percentage of time that I'm only using Japanese is pretty high, although I'm not quite at complete immersion because of the legal work I need to do in English and the English I speak with my kids. I've set myself a little goal for the next year: I want to get my Japanese to sound indistinguishable from a native speaker almost all the time. We'll see how that goes. I've also got a whole bunch of half-baked posts from the past few months, including a lot more on my Getting to Grammar series, that I hope to push out the door over the next several weeks. So keep your eyes open! Although I'm not quite out of the woods yet in terms of things that are keeping me from blogging, the posts'll be here soon! Labels: Japanese
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