You might recall that Michael Phelps did a stint as the spokesman for Rosetta Stone. Did you also know that Rosetta Stone and Phelps managed to uncover something about Chinese that has eluded linguists, scholars, and even the Chinese themselves for millennia?
The highlight starts at 0:53:
Interviewer: And, Michael, I understand you used [Rosetta Stone] to learn a little Mandarin to prepare yourself in Beijing. How did it go?
Phelps: Uh, it's a very tough language.
That's getting dangerously close to saying, "I didn't really learn anything so please don't ask me to say anything in Chinese." (But, then again, as Rosetta Stone is an advertiser on Fox, I suppose he didn't really need to worry about getting grilled by the interviewer.)
Phelps continues:
Phelps: Um, you know, uh, um, foreign languages have always been very tough for me to learn, but, you know, I figured I might as well, um, I'm gonna give it a shot and, uh, try it and, uh, learned a few of the simple terms and, and the masculine and feminine term, feminine terms, so…
And to think that for years everyone's been running around thinking that Chinese didn't have any grammatical genders.
Oh, right. It doesn't.
Now go to the video and watch Rosetta Stone's CEO Tom Adams' face when Phelps drops the gender thing. I'm not completely sure, but I get the feeling based on the way his expression changed that he realized right then and there what was wrong with what had just come out of his spokesman's mouth.
So how did Michael Phelps come to learn about Chinese's non-existant grammatical genders?
Read more...Off the top of my head, I can think of a few possibilities.
Rosetta Stone is so messed up that it's trying to teach grammatical gender in a language that has no grammatical gender. If Rosetta Stone is still merely translating the existing content from one language to another, rather than customizing the content for each language (as they've been criticized for in the past), that could very well be the issue.
Phelps used but did not actually learn from his use of Rosetta Stone's products.
Phelps did not actually use Rosetta Stone's products.
Phelps needed too much "extra help" to get through the Rosetta Stone software.
My money is on something like the following. Rosetta Stone strikes an endorsement agreement with Phelps. In the agreement, Phelps makes some kind of vague promise to use the software. Phelps tries the software while being filmed, and maybe even uses it a little bit on his own. Language learning isn't really much of a priority for Phelps in the lead-up to the Olympics, so he doesn't really use Rosetta Stone much, and the few times he does he finds that he's just not that into it. End result: he learns pretty much no Chinese but takes home a nice paycheck from Rosetta Stone. Then, when he's put on the spot by the report, Phelps—genuinely wanting to do good for his sponsor—tries to think of something good to say. His high school Spanish memories rear their ugly head, and you get grammatical genders in China.
He seems to have fared a bit better in other, more scripted promotional pieces:
While mildly humorous in a cornball sort of way, notice you don't actually hear Phelps speaking any Chinese.
You've gotta go to this one to hear him actually speak:
My Chinese-speaking daughter, who was sitting next to me as I watched the above video, said, "What's that guy saying? I know what the computer says but not what that guy says."
That doesn't seem to stop Rosetta Stone's software from telling him he's saying it right. Indeed, I've heard of native Japanese speakers being unable to get the software to recognize their Japanese, but when the American store clerk used his American store clerk accent on the Japanese, the software got it. Could it be that making people feel good about using their software is a better business strategy than making them comprehensible to native speakers?
The fact that Phelps was best understood by Rosetta Stone's software is probably why he didn't use a lick of Chinese when Mazda made him apologize to the Chinese people for the bong-smoking incident.
Not even a measly nǐ hǎo, even though a little effort in Chinese would have probably gone over pretty well.
I suppose we can't draw any firm conclusions about Rosetta Stone from this little case study, but things do seem to point in one direction.
The New York Times last week ran an article by Eric Taub entitled "The Web Way to Learn a Language". For the most part, the article is an uncontroversial list of some of the better known language-learning resources on the web, followed by a grab bag of a few lesser-known, language-specific resources plus a few iPhone apps.
That the article is an incomplete list of the numerous resources available on the internet is probably the nature of the medium, but it also to some extent reveals Eric's prejudices about language learning: that some kind of structured "class" is needed, along the lines of those found in the offerings of Rosetta Stone, TellMeMore, Livemocha (see my review of it here), Babbel, and BBC Language. Some things that are not really part of a course fall into his grab bag at the end, but he completely misses out on great resources like iTalki, Lang-8, or LingQ, which respectively can be used, among other things, to let language learners freely tackle whatever content they like in speaking, writing, and reading and listening.
However, the article is shockingly misleading in how it characterizes the results of one language learner's experience.
The young woman … was born in Iran and spoke only Farsi until her arrival [in the U.S.] two years ago. What classes, we wondered, had she attended to learn the language so well?
There's that assumption that a "class" is needed, plain as day.
"I didn't," she said. "I used RosettaStone."
And that's where the article leaves it. And what are you left thinking after that? Naturally you end up thinking that Rosetta Stone is the only thing you need to sound just like a native speaker. But let's rewind and repeat for a second…
…spoke only Farsi until her arrival [in the U.S.] two years ago.
Uh… say again? She's been living in a place where she's getting tons of exposure to her target language for TWO YEARS?
For those of you who are wondering, living in the place where your target language is spoken will generally do wonders for your language abilities. Let's assume she speaks Farsi at home. I would still wager that she's been going to a U.S. school, has native-speaker friends, watches U.S. television, reads U.S. websites, has an English-language Facebook account, etc. To slavishly suggest what the marketers are hoping would be suggested—glory be to the software!—without checking to see what other exposure she might have been getting to her target language is practically negligent.
Indeed, the sole fact that she's been living in the U.S. for two years could be more than enough to explain her native-sounding English. A friend of mine from Belarus moved to the U.S. when she was 15. I met her when she was 18, by which time she was completely indistinguishable from a native-English speaker. After spending about two years in the U.S., my wife began getting asked if she was a native-English speaker. After just a year in Japan, even I was able to briefly fool people on the phone into thinking I was a native-Japanese speaker. And none of us had used any software, while all of us had spent has spent significant time in places where our target language was spoken.
If the article's young woman had just arrived in the airport from Iran speaking native English and said the only exposure she had to English was Rosetta Stone, then I would be very impressed indeed. But to uncritically suggest that exposure to English via Rosetta Stone's software somehow played a more prominent role in her language learning than other avenues of exposure—especially for someone who in all likelihood was getting a lot of exposure to her target language—is doing readers a disservice.
Reason 1: Livemocha offers hundreds of hours of free courses in over 30 languages.
Reason 2: Livemocha lessons include revision of speaking and writing exercises by native speakers.
Reason 3: Livemocha has a community of over 4 million members to connect, socialize and practice with.
Here's what I think Kirsten (but not Livemocha) glossed over: price! Livemocha lets you do lots of stuff for free—most notably, in my opinion, getting in touch with lots of people in Livemocha's language-learning community (see my full review of Livemocha here)—whereas Rosetta Stone lets you do very little for free, and charges you out the wazoo for whatever they do let you do. When Livemocha does charge you, their prices are much more reasonable.
And we all know that this blog loves a little bit of snark, so I can't help but appreciate these gems from Livemocha's post:
Rosetta Stone gives you CD-ROMs. Remember those? From the 1980s?
…
If you pay Rosetta Stone $999 (yes, that’s one dollar short of 1,000), you can get into one of those clunky group tutoring sessions. Ahem.
That's the title of an article by David Behling, a professor at Waldorf College, cunningly designed to pull in people like me looking to shoot down a ridiculous argument. Unfortunately Professor Behling is pulling a fast one on us, because he comes down firmly on the side of learning languages.
I of course agree with that sentiment, but there's a few places where I can't quite agree with what he's saying.
In American schools, we wait until the brain has turned off the ability to easily learn language and then we start drilling our kids and young adults in a new grammar and vocabulary. It’s no wonder so many of them think it is such a drag.
I've argued before that it's more about the method used than the age, but there seems to be some support beyond my little hypothesis as well. I'm also happy proffer myself up as an example; I learned all my languages after the age of 18, and I didn't find it particularly hard. And go ask Steve Kaufmann at what age exactly he decided to pick up Russian.
He then goes on:
Opportunities to study language in school — instead of through private lessons or expensive software like Rosetta Stone — will not appear unless something else changes first.
He then goes on to say that Americans need a change in the way they think about foreign languages. That probably wouldn't hurt, but I'd start with the teaching method: painfully boring classes mean low demand means few students means few classes. And I'd say he should also check out Exhibit A: Drake University.
And I would be remiss to not point out that there are tons of ways to learn languages without school, private lessons, or expensive software. Browsing this blog, the blog roll, or a few quick Google searches should get you plenty of examples.
Google Ventures, Google's venture capital arm, has invested an "undisclosed amount" of its $100 million in EnglishCentral, Inc., an English-language learning website where learners can watch popular videos (such as a clip from Forest Gump or a Red Bull ad) and then get graded on how well they pronounce the words spoken in the videos via EnglishCentral's "unique speech recognition platform".
This investment represents nothing more than Google dipping its toe in the water of the language-learning world. Let them get in up to their ankle or knees, and we'll all think back to the quaint days when we thought Rosetta Stone was a big player in the language-learning world.
And this here marks Street-Smart Language Learning's 100th post.
A few factoids about this blog, and the addition of a co-author to the book, after the jump.
Read more...With 100 posts over nine months, this blog's running at about 11 posts a month. However, if you discount the three months from April to July when I was AWOL thanks to the move to Japan, it's closer to 17 posts a month.
The favorite post month after month has been this review of Livemocha—apparently because, as far as I can tell, all the other reviews of Livemocha lack detail or had a bit too much influence from Livemocha's PR machine.
"Street language" has been a common keyword search that's led people to the site, although I'm not even really sure what that's supposed to mean. (Perhaps I should do a post on that alone sometime.)
Finally, I'd like to announce the inclusion of my wife—Akiko Pace—as a co-author on the book. With enough languages under her own belt to be able to take me to task on just about any language-learning point (when she sees fit to do so), her contributions to the book have gradually become so great that calling her anything but a co-author would be misleading. We're still not sure what the ETA is on the book, but we hope to have it finalized soon, while I continue to hopefully not bore you too much in the meantime with this blog.
Rosetta Stone's ubiquitous marketing coverage seems to have gotten it caught up in the ongoing controversy over Fox New's Glenn Beck.
The video that started the controversy and how Rosetta's mixed up in it all, after the jump.
Read more...The controversy started when Beck said that President Obama "has a deep-seated hatred for white people" (at 0:33 in the video below) (which presumably would include Obama's own mother), which Beck then followed up with "I'm saying he has a problem. This guy [meaning Obama], I believe, is a racist" (at 2:03 in the video below).
Among the advertisers to pull spots from the popular cable talk show are Geico, owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway …; Procter & Gamble …; Sargento Cheese; and Progressive Insurance…
[W]e do not want to be associated with hateful speech used by either liberal or conservative television hosts.
Supporters of the boycott are sending around lists of Beck's advertisers, and who advertised on Friday's show? None other than Rosetta Stone.
So is Rosetta Stone supporting hateful speech by advertising on Beck's show? I'd hazard a guess that their all-over-the-place advertising was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that they'll duck the controversy by pulling their ads from the show as soon as the bureaucratic gears crank through. They weren't among Saturday's advertisers, so perhaps they've already made the necessary call to Fox.
It just dawned on me today that there's a good handful of language-learning tools out there where clicking on pictures is an important part of the learning method. For example:
(And if you know of any others, drop a line in the comments below.)
This seems to be a pretty common method. Is everyone just playing follow-the-leader (i.e., following Rosetta Stone), or is there actually some science to back up all this fervent picture clicking?
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.
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?
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.
I've mentionedbefore how RosettaStone's PR people seem to be everywhere, and competitor Rocket Languages doesn't appear to be taking it sitting down. In fact, they appear to be doing a full-court press, including what appears to be a pretty blatant astroturfing campaign.
formal political, advertising, or public relations campaigns seeking to create the impression of being spontaneous "grassroots" behavior, hence the reference to the artificial grass, AstroTurf.
Why do I think Rocket might be astroturfing? The blatant evidence, after the jump.
Read more...My suspicions were peaked after I noticed a pattern among sites that seem to recognize Rocket Languages' software as top of the line.
Here's what the M.O. appears to be. Someone buys domain names that sound like independent, third-party review sites. The domain names have the feel of phishing or other web scams because they're just not quite right; the grammar is weird, they use an odd hyphen or two, etc. And, according to whois searches on Internic.net, the websites appear to have been registered by Enom, Inc. (the older ones) or GoDaddy.com (the newer ones). This suggests that a limited number of people are behind these sites, rather than them being small, independent sites.
On each of these domains they build the website of a "reviewer". Each website is slightly different, but the look tends to be pretty similar, as if designed by the same person or group. And how do you think these reviewers feel about Rocket's products? Why, they're always the best, of course! If they don't get ranked first in a best-of list, then they get five stars or some other stellar ranking.
Some pages also contain reviews of, say, RosettaStone as well. These competitor software products get decent reviews, but of course they don't beat out Rocket's stuff! This seems like a tricky way to get up there in Google's rankings; stick the name of a few highly Googled competitors' names in there, and bingo, links from Google.
However, the websites do go to some trouble to look legit. They include links to other language learning materials. They'll even say one or two negative things about Rocket's products, but still give their backing to Rocket.
All in all, it's a pretty clever scheme, if only a bit too obvious. The list below contains a few examples, but you can easily dredge up more through a few quick Google searches using keywords like RosettaStone, Rocket, review, software, language, or any of the languages offered by Rocket.
ProductsConsumerReview.com: These guys sound like they might be a competitor of Consumer Reports, don't they? Not so fast. The only products reviewed are Rocket's products. And guess what? They're all five-star!
ChineseReviews.com: This one I've seen linked to from Google ads on other sites. Here Rocket beats out RosettaStone and Pimsleur.
RocketSpanishReviewed.com: Seriously? Some independent third party is going to make a site solely to review Rocket Spanish? Seriously?
What's above is clearly enough to raise a few eyebrows, but I found indisputable evidence on the Warrior Forum, which bills itself as "the #1 internet marketing site since 1997". This thread tells you how you can get involved in Rocket's astroturfing campaign, at least part of which is being handled by Don Davis, who has designed some of the sites:
Rocket Language Review Sites! What a great opportunity to add an entire city block of new review sites to your Virtual Real Estate empire.
(For more on virtual real estate, see here. Click ahead to around 4:16 to get to the heart of it.) If you click through the link in that forum, you get this:
What I have to offer in this [Warrior Forum Special Offer] is an opportunity to put a little stable of sites to work in your online business. I have put together 6 review sites for the Rocket Language products.
These products have all been on Clickbank for quite some time, and the company boasts a customer base of over 180,000. These products are all priced right at a hundred bucks and pay between 69 and 75% commissions. The products are of a high quality which means you are more likely to keep the sales you make.
You may purchase one site individually, or you can buy them all in a package. I have also built a seventh site which reviews the Rocket American Sign Language product. This site is not being marketed in this WSO, but you can pick it up as a free bonus if you elect to purchase the full set of sites featured in this offer.
You can see how Rocket's been working with Clickbank here. Basically, Rocket has set up an affiliate system whereby anyone who builds up a website that can generate hits to Rocket's site and sales can make money off of it. Even if they are not directly behind each website, they're certainly enabling the M.O. described above.
What's more, if you did any of the Google searches I mentioned above, you might have come across some Rocket reviews on EZineArticles.com. Guess what? More astroturfing. From the Warrior Forum thread mentioned above:
I had one article on [EZineArticles.com] in a twelve hour period that had only 25 views and 6 click thoughs. I got one sale already of $34 in that period! It must be down to my amazing article writing skills (lol) and definately also down to Don's great site design skills - thanks man.
While RosettaStone is largely flat, Rocket is gradually catching up. RosettaStone's mass coverage seems to be meeting its match with Rocket's sly campaign. Still, the whole thing makes you wonder... are either of these actually any good, or is it all just slick marketing?
Different language learning methods serve various needs: Does RosettaStone have the best PR people ever, or is it just me? In an article noting how great immersion is, Rosetta Stone gets a nice blurb but no one notes how far it is from immersion. And don't even get me started on what Mark Frobose, author and founder of Macmillan Audio's foreign language audio line, says: audio CDs or downloads are "the single best way to learn a language". Seriously? So next time you have a choice between immersing yourself in a foreign country and listening to some CDs, go with the CDs! Riiiight.
Early Launch for Language: Money quote: "Children learn inductively, by example and by interacting with the environment around them, and adults tend to learn analytically and deductively." They treat this as a conclusion, but it's really just an observation. Ponder.
Voters head to polls today to decide 'English First' proposal: Nashville's "English First" proposal would "prevent city government from translating written materials into other languages or using interpreters for people who don't speak English well". Great, just what we need: less foreign-language use in the U.S.
Column: 'Tell me' program opens world of languages: If you belong to the Marathon County Public Library in Wassau, Wisconsin, you can get access to TellMeMore.com for free. And those of you outside of the U.S. thought we were lucky to have free access to all those expensive language-learning recordings.
A Classical Language Requirement: Meet Jake Miller. Watch Jake get a whole lot about learning languages wrong. It's too much work to even try to correct everything this guy's getting wrong, so I'll leave it to someone else to tilt at this windmill.
It's all Greek to me: Omniglot gives us the low-down on how to say "It's all Greek to me" in a ton of languages.
This article on Unlimited Potential, an Arizonan group that helps immigrants to the US (presumably mostly Spanish speakers) learn English, funded primarily by grants, describes how they are making a difference in their community through language education. As a lawyer, I'm used to the idea of spending a certain portion of my time working pro bono providing legal services to those who otherwise could not afford them and it is interesting to see how the concept is implemented in other industries, and the language-learning industry in particular.
With resources available online, it seems to me that it would be trivially easy to enhance language education to groups such as those targeted by Unlimited Potential simply by providing them to access to computers with an internet connection and a webcam. You could easily get them on websites like Livemocha.com where they can learn for free with the help of native speakers. Public libraries seem like an obvious resource for this, with the only problem being the silence typically demanded by libraries. At my local library, for instance, computers are sitting in a sort of main area where you wouldn't be able to practice pronunciation or anything like that out loud.
A more interesting question, I think, is how can those companies whose core resources are not free - websites like LingQ or one of the big boys like RosettaStone - use what they have to help the disadvantaged. Could LingQ find some way to reasonably manage a pro bono tutoring service? The trick would be making sure the students actually deserve pro bono service. Could RosettaStone provide their software to disadvantaged groups? The trick there would be to make sure their donated or discounted software didn't end up back on the market.
Poking around a few websites and a few rudimentary Google searches don't seem to what, if anything, such companies are doing in this regard, so if any one has any examples I'd love to hear about them.
Google Ventures, Google's venture capital arm, has invested an "undisclosed amount" of its $100 million in 
Subscribe to