![]() So the rest is "is eating" … right? Not quite. But what do they mean? Tā is both "he" and "she". In Mandarin, this is four short syllables: tā zài chī fàn. Now we must get into practice a bit, and into Mandarin, to see where this is not always the case. In theory, you should never struggle too hard to figure out what’s going on. Then you get to the book is the chair, with the book on the chair. If you see, in Mandarin, the man is reading a, you will have already learned "The man is reading…" and the picture will make clear that the new word is "book". The learner is solving the language like a puzzle. Gradually, things get more complex: the girl drinks juice, the girl drinks water, the man reads a newspaper. Soon, you move to pairs: a boy and a girl, a man and a boy, a boy and a bicycle. Or you’ll see and hear zìxíngch ē ,and have to pick which of four pictures has a bicycle in it. Soon you start practicing them: you see the picture of the bicycle and have to click on one of four words, only one of which is zìxíngch ē, bicycle. You hear the word, see the word written and see the picture at the same time. First, the learner gets a few nouns: a man, a woman, a car, a bicycle. It uses only pictures and words in the target language. But to describe in a few words: Rosetta Stone does not use your native language. Those who don’t know how Rosetta Stone works are encouraged to try the demo. Rosetta Stone focuses on getting you to speak.) The short verdict, after many hours spent: though it still has shortcomings, Rosetta Stone has come a long way, and I think it is a genuinely useful tool for language-learning. The software lets you learn with Chinese characters, but is not really designed to teach this unique and difficult system. (I tested Mandarin using Pinyin romanisation only. So what does today’s top-end version, Version 4 TOTALe, look like? I spent several months with the software, working on Mandarin. The peculiar difficulties of each language would get more focus, even while the basic lessons stayed the same. Between Version 2 (which I had tested) and Version 3, customisation was added for each language. The software should have singled it out for explicit practice.įortunately, Rosetta Stone agreed. The learner was just supposed to figure out that when there were two people, the ending would change from – oon to –aan. But Rosetta Stone did not single out and teach the dual separately. But the Arabic version I looked at would occasionally show a man and a woman with the word yamshiaan, "they walk." The dual is distinctive to Arabic and a few other languages. One example: an early Rosetta Stone lesson teaches the difference between "he walks" (singular) and "they walk" (plural). Arabic and Swedish pose very different challenges to the learner.
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