Alternatives to Rosetta Stone

This won't really help your wife or kid, but I find once you have the beginner stuff down, one thing that helps is ripping DVDs of movies you like, download the subtitle files of both languages, and compile it all as an AVI.

For example, say you're learning German. You'd end up with movies you really enjoy in German, with both, German and English subtitles at the same time. Not really helpful for beginners, but excellent once you get over that initial learning bump.

People always recommend to watch soap operas or news segments, and ummm... no. I'd prefer to watch Inception or Limitless, or whatever movie. Then as you're going through the movie, whenever you see a word / phrase you don't know, look it up, and add it to your flashcards / whatever to learn. Takes a while going through the first movie, but definitely helps.

Plus it teaches you how to talk normally, instead of like an informal walking school book. Instead of learning to say, "where will you go today?", you'll learn to say, "so where you off to today?".
 


For your kid find some popular German cartoons and kid's shows., he's young enough he'll absorb what they saying and doing pretty quickly. Youtube has a few, but also check on Amazon, iTunes and Netflix.

I just started private lessons and this is something that my teacher told me, but also was told by some foreign friends that this is how they learned English.
 
kingofsp said:
Just learn love. It's the universal language.
Click to expand...

live-through-feeling-live-through-love.jpg
 
I didn't get on with Rosetta Stone (or Linguaphone), seemed to just go in one ear and out the other. I used Pimsleur, after a friend's recommendation, and it's different gravy; superb. I'm now pretty good at a few languages.
 
I've had good results using this:

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXk4Bp-XpQw]Google Translate for Animals - YouTube[/ame]
 
duolingo is another alternative, interesting monetization strategy as well.

Once you get a base, I'd suggest hopping on couchsurfing and offering to do a language exchange (e.g you speak only in Spanish and they speak only in English and help correct each other).
 
tencentpiece said:
duolingo is another alternative, interesting monetization strategy as well.

Once you get a base, I'd suggest hopping on couchsurfing and offering to do a language exchange (e.g you speak only in Spanish and they speak only in English and help correct each other).
Click to expand...

I'll be sure to put my 3 year old on a plane right away :)

Duolingo looks interesting. I'll dig into that a bit more.
 
mx=headroom said:
I'll be sure to put my 3 year old on a plane right away :)

Duolingo looks interesting. I'll dig into that a bit more.
Click to expand...

I should've been clearer, you do the language exchange via skype. Teach your three year old German the same way you're teaching them English, might be worth trying to find a German exchange student who can act as a babysitter as well.

Also German is a pretty useless second language for a child.
 
+1 for Pismleur. Learnt a decent amount of Italian with the course. You need flash cards or something to complement as it is a bit light on noun vocabulary IMO. But very strong on general concepts, sentence structure, tenses etc.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom