Friday, November 7, 2008

Rosetta Stone

My children recently received 1 year free of the internet version of the Rosetta Stone foreign language program. Several years ago, I purchased the second level of Spanish for my oldest child. She enjoyed the program, so I signed up 5 of the school-aged kids. My two oldest students are learning Japanese, my younger son is learning German and my 10 and 5 year old girls are learning Spanish.

One of the things I liked about the program is that the student speaks the words and gets feedback on their pronunciation. Unfortunately, my younger girls and I are unable to get the correct Spanish accent. We are stalled out at lesson 4. We have worked on lesson 4 for the last 4 days. The program will not allow the student to progress until the assignment is completed with a certain percentage of correct answers. My older son walked in on us while we were working. He tried to get us through this lesson. Although, he did a lot better than we did, we still haven't passed.

As a floundering Spanish student, I've given up. The next time my oldest daughter returns home from college for the weekend, I'm going to have her pass the stupid lesson for us!

2 comments:

Barb the Evil Genius said...

I am physically unable to roll my r's because of my tongue. I suspect I wouldn't go far with this software although my Spanish accent is good overall.

Karen said...

I can't roll my r's either. The other problem is that I can't get my vowels to match close enough. Oh well, I'll probably never live in a Spanish-speaking country anyway!