Rosetta Stone Ltd., one of the many German software companies today, derived its name from the unearthed ancient relic that was vital in deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Engraved on the Rosetta Stone were different languages that paved the way to understanding early Egyptian writings. It was just natural that Allen Stoltzfus, his brother Eugene, and John Fairfield established their company Fairfield Language Technologies with the goal of providing its clientele with an easier and better way to learn the German language and other dialects, for that matter.

Rosetta Stone software requires either a Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X operating system. It is also available in four versions with a wide range of languages to learn. As of January 2011, there are 31 modern languages offered including German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Russian. The company also released software that focuses on dialects in danger of becoming extinct. There are currently five endangered languages in the company’s arsenal, namely, Navajo, Mohawk, Inupiat, Inuktitut and Chitimacha. Rosetta Stone first introduced its German software when its founder, Allen Stoltzfus, lived in Germany and learned the language through immersion. He, however, found it rather complicated learning the Russian language in the confines of a classroom.

How does the Rosetta Stone compare to other established German software today? First of all, we must determine how it actually works. How does it help enhance your knowledge of the German tongue and gain the ability to converse in it with ease?

The Rosetta Stone trains you to speak the German dialect by immersion. It is a good interactive learning tool as it provides you with various entertaining ways to study the language by using images, sounds or audio, and texts. You also get to speak to a microphone (USB headset) and compare your diction and pronunciation with that of the German speaker on the software. The Rosetta Stone helps you gain a vast vocabulary of the Native German tongue by matching the words to their respective pictures, much like a memory game using flash cards. There is also a listening comprehension lesson where you pinpoint the visual counterpart of the words that you hear.

This German software is also known for its user-friendliness. It provides the student an opportunity to view the exercises and familiarize himself to the objectives of that lesson. It provides guided tutorials for every page that will help the learner understand the lesson more. Installation is virtually hassle-free.

The knack on this German software, as compared to other language learning programs in the market, is that it does not teach you much about German grammar. It also teaches you phrases that are quite unimportant in basic, everyday conversation. For example, how many times in your life would you need to say “The boy has a ball on the head” in German? You learn a foreign language so you can converse fluently in that language. Simple phrases and sentences like, “How are you?” and “How much is that?” are not even tackled in this software which makes it probably useless to some.

Another issue with this German software is its price. As compared to the likes of Instant Immersion German, which will cost you around $40, and the $200 Tell Me More, the Rosetta Stone goes for a rather exorbitant price of $300.

To sum things up, Rosetta Stone is an effective way to learn the German vocabulary. However, if you really want to learn the language, you need other complementary sources like an English dictionary and maybe even other German software that concentrates on sentence forming and correct grammar. For the steep price of $300, the Rosetta Stone is not really worth your money.

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Category: Education
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