Did rosetta stone work for any of you? How long did it take to make you comfortable "experimenting" in public? Did you learn German? Any experience trying to learn two languages at once.... too much info to take?

Using it, It's a better way to learn for me than listen and repeat. I'm a bit oral dyslexic, so can not listen and repeat. It doesn't like it when you use Swiss German though.
Only problem I have is that when you go onto the website here, even if you type co.uk, it automatically transfers to the German speaking site, which makes it hard to buy learn-yourself-German sets.

I would concentrate on learning the language of the area you are moving to, i.e. German-speaking Switzerland. It will be hard enough learning Standard German because you will also be hearing the local dialect of Swiss German, which is only really used orally. It slows the process of learning German compared, say, to learning up in Germany.

Concentrate on learning Standard German (i.e. what they teach you in courses and on the Rosetta Stone) and don't even try consciously to learn (understand) dialect until you are almost fluent in Standard German. You'll start to absorb some of it naturally but trying to learn it in tandem with Standard German will just confuse you.

Swiss people will spot that you are a beginner and automatically switch to Standard German anyway.

I have both Rosetta Stone and Michel Thomas (recent recommendation) and also lots of books.

Michel Thomas is far and away the best of the bunch imo as you learn the formation of sentence structure.

Rosetta stone is useful for learning vocabulary but it felt like rote learning to me.

i fooled around a bit with Rosseta stone, it is good as an introduction but leaves you asking why a lot. It fails to explain to you the grammar rules and the building blocks. I got the feeling you were just learning phrases and no concept of sentence construction.

My thoughts too.

oh and what really annoyed me was its attempt to listen to what i would say and make me do it again if i did it wrong...when in fact either the program or the mike was wigging out! i think that is the main reason i stopped lol

agree, Rosetta stone is good for the vocabulary, but missing the grammar rules. Check COFFEE BREAK FRENCH podcast in Itunes...

Rosetta Stone is really good, if you want to sit back and follow someone else's plan and you are happy to devote 100s of easy/mundane hours to it.

It really does work that way, with its repetitive and slow style you start to associate images and phrases without trying to translate them, and you start to recognize what 'sounds' right and wrong and thus you get the grammar (a little). But it can be painful, fighting through slow quizzes on what continent is Nord Amerika, and the fact that continent in Deutsch is Kontinent, when I would prefer to practice my adjective endings.


So it is certainly better to combine it with other tools such as free podcasts and websites, which give you the grammar rules and things at a faster pace, and tend to fit nicely on top of Rosetta Stone.

Rosetta Stone is good to supplement other learning that you have going on (or just verbal practice) as I found it fustrating on its own. If you are used to structure, where you learn from grammatical rules, RS will drive you crazy. Once I paired it with something which went through the basic rules, I found it worked much better.

Frankly, I found that for learning French, there are better (and cheaper, if not free) resources on the web.

Good luck!

I've been using Rosetta Stone alongside my weekly classes at ECap, and I agree with the previous poster that it's a good supplement. Helps you with vocab. As for grammar, it either supplemented what I had learnt in class, or would trigger me to google for online resources to explain why a certain grammatical construct is the way it is.

In summary, use it as a supplement, not as the main source of learning. Good luck!

Thank you for the suggestion, i went to Itunes and couldn't find all the lessons they have them jumbled up and lesson 1 for example isn't there. Was that your experience?

Thanks
Gianna

Rosetta Stone didn't work for me. Then, I tried Michel Thomas method, it worked better.

I'm looking at them all and I came across Pimsleur, any thoughts on this method? Thanks!

I had a good hard look at Rosetta stone and decided it was very expensive and didn't go into grammar or anything. For me it wasn't worth it.

I bought it and it was not worth it, left me with more questions than it answered.

I agree with some of the other replies: Rosetta Stone is OK for vocab, but not much else. I tried it as well as Michel Thomas but by far the best method/product for me was Pimsleur. You can purchase the mp3 version online as well as download a free sample from some sites (I used http://www.learnoutloud.com/Catalog/...I-Unit-1/36555). I found Michel helpful, but not quite as thorough as I'd have liked (and some of his turn-of-phrases are apparently quite outdated).

Cheers

I do not like it as an adult learning method. While it may be useful to learn some basic things through association, it does not effectively teach the nuances of grammar and syntax.

Further it is not a good source if looking to get a few useful phrases, as it starts very basic and builds upon each lesson. As such, you cannot simply just do the lessons. You sometimes have to spend extra time studying them and repeating them to get some things to stick, or to have that "ah hah!" moment.

If it's a language that doesn't use a latin alphabet, it's even tricker, because you have to use the keyboard and learn not only to recognize the characters, but also to type them. (and I don't like this because you never really learn how to write them). When I tried Hindi, I had an especially difficult time because the RS course doesn't teach the alphabet... you just jump right in.

What I hated the most with Rosetta Stone, it doesn't recognize my pronounciation well. So I had to repeat like a parrot. And my way learning isn't exactly the way Rosetta Stone teaches me. So I gave up after few try.

I haven't yet tried pimselur. Some say it's good. Some say it's not, the reason for some don't like was it repeats and repeats which makes you bored after while. But I am not sure whether this is correct info as I haven't yet tried.

Probably you need to find the method that works for you.

I learned with Michel thomas quite a lot but forgot already as I don't practice.

Michel thomas teaches you the structure on how to build the sentence and so on rather than vocab. But they also got a vocab line. But I found less interesting. I may give it one more go.

Few people learn languages "automatically" and to learn another language if done thoroughly IS work. I have taken up a paid assignment as a private German teacher once per week. The student is a Latin American lady who came to CH 8 years ago and has a 6 years old son who speaks fluently Swiss German but of course not yet Standard German. When being there I throughout the hour strictly keep to Standard German, and try to bring a bit of grammar and structure into her German language mess. She does not lack intelligence at all, but I strongly suspect that she never learnt proper Spanish grammar either. Another aspect to be cared about is prononciation(s) and regional variations.

I have done such teachings for apprentices in our company in the 80ies in German, French and English. The problem was that they, majority-wise of Italian origin, spoke Swiss German perfectly well and were better in French in a general way then their native Swiss colleagues, but missed structures, grammar and spelling. Critical was the situation with English, as in aircargo your professional (legally binding) language IS English, and not just a "bla-bla Swinglish English" but a correct one. Things did not arrive with those teachers of the Commercial School of KV-Z really well, so that action was needed.

My grandfather (mother-side) language-wise was good but a bit the "victim" of his father (my grand-grandfather) who had lived for roughly a decade in the USA, but had returned in the late 1870ies and married. AND demanded of his son fairly early to learn properly English, which was not excactly easy at the time. He then had to ride by train to Zürich in the evening twice per week and when needing more of it on one side in the 1920ies bought some of the earliest "audio" things available, and had one radio tuned on the BBC and listened to BBC broadcasts and to speeches of people like Lloyd George, Ramsay McDonald, and Neville Chamberlain. He by some self-courses also learnt Italian, and so was the correspondent in his company for English, French and Italian. He improved his linguistic proficiencies by meeting Englishmen, Frenchmen and Italians while on holidays in the Alps, sitting together with them until midnight.

He of course heavily encouraged the enthusiasm of his daughter for other languages