I decided I would like to learn a new language.  My goal is simply to learn it for the sake of learning it, and to exercise my tired old brain.  Learning new things is the best way to keep the mind working at its top potential.

I selected Mandarin, and ordered Rosetta Stone directly from the company. Having tried to learn other languages when I was in school, I was anxious to try the “Immersion Method” which Rosetta Stone uses. Languages were not my strong suit during my college days.

The lessons are configurable according to whether you want to learn speaking and listening, reading and writing, or both.  The reading and writing lessons allow the choice of Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, or Hanyu Pinyin characters.  I chose Pinyin, and selected only speaking and listening lessons. I doubt there is enough years left in my life to learn the chinese characters.

I installed RS (Rosetta Stone) on a laptop, and setup two accounts; one for me, and another for my wife. I also invested in a pair of Plantronics gaming headsets with microphones so that both of us could hear the lessons together. We had to purchase an audio splitter to do this; and we only plug in one of the headset microphones at a time.

The lessons consist mainly of RS speaking phrases and sentences while showing a set of pictures. The language is presented both as spoken and written words. The student learns the meaning of the words and phrases by matching up the words with the pictures. Nowhere is the meaning of any word actually presented though.

I bought several Chinese dictionaries to assist in my learning experience, and one of the things that puzzle me is that RS presents words which are not in any of the dictionaries. For instance, in the sentence “Ta shi cong zhong guo lai de”, Neither ‘lai de’ nor ‘laide’ appears in a Chinese dictionary. The sentence says: “He is from China”; at least from my understanding of the lesson, but the exact meaning of ‘lai de’ escapes me so far.

Another problem is that the written Pinyin is often broken into syllables which leaves the student without clue as to which and how many syllables make up an entire word which can be found in a dictionary. Perhaps this is because Chinese graphic characters represent syllables and not necessarily words.

RS language courses are broken up into levels, which are subdivided into Units, which are further divided into Lessons. There are core lessons which present the vocabulary and grammar, and then shorter lessons which drill vocabulary, pronunciation, reading, writing, and grammar skills. Core lessons are generally about 45 minutes in length, and the other lessons are 10 to 15 minutes.

Periodically, RS will interrupt the students progression, and present a review of an earlier lesson. This is a very good feature, as it is very easy to forget something learned earlier when it is not being constantly used. I have also found that it is worthwhile to go back and redo the core lessons on my own from time to time.

There are several bugs in the RS software which I have discovered. One is that a review lesson keeps repeating until the RS program is terminated and restarted. Another is that the pronunciation lessons (at least for Mandarin) are presented in Chinese graphic characters with no option to use Pinyin even though Pinyin is chosen for the other lessons.

Overall, I think that Rosetta Stone is an excellent way to learn the fundamentals of a new language. I doubt I will ever have an extensive Chinese vocabulary from the RS lessons alone, but If I had to one day live within the Chinese culture, I would have a very good start.

Although there are several small problems with the RS software, I recommend the program if you seriously want to learn a new language on your own. I only wish it had been available 40 years ago.