I really want to learn Russian, and I was wondering if Rosetta Stone is the best way?
Saturday, July 31st, 2010 at
3:38 pm
Will it teach me the alphabet and stuff, or will it all be vocab?
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Tagged with: alphabet
Filed under: Russian Language
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I’m working on learning Russian also. I have both the German and Russian versions of Rosetta Stone. Rosetta Stone was quite helpful with my German. My Russian? Absolutely useless. I had better luck with Livemocha. It’s like Rosetta Stone, but free, and I personally think it’s organized quite a bit better. Plus you can contact other users of all nationalities speaking all different languages, and submit exercises (written and spoken) for native speakers to review and help you with. That’s probably what has helped me most, along with research online. I’ve been looking for some good books on Russian but am having trouble finding them at my local bookstores… When I get the money to do so, I need to find some good ones online!
And all Rosetta Stone does is sits you down, shows you a picture, and says things like, "The woman eats." "The man drinks." "The girl sleeps." "The boy writes." But it doesn’t give you translations, which really bugs me; Livemocha actually translates it to English for you, which I found very very helpful. It just expects you to catch on to the concept eventually. But neither Rosetta Stone or Livemocha go in-depth about the alphabet or grammar or anything like that; in that sense, it’s kind of vocab-only. But with Livemocha, it tries to clarify it for you, the rule, the exceptions, etc… where Rosetta Stone tends just to spit out random things at you. I am under the impression that both Rosetta Stone and Livemocha will take you about as far as they can fluency-wise before it’s up to you to just get real-life immersion in the language. Speaking to others (Russians/Eastern Europeans, in this case), writing to/chatting with others, etc… (You also have chat and videochat features on Livemocha; videochat can be one-way if you wish, allowing the other person to simply listen and type responses.)
If you want to learn grammar, search online, use books, even take classes locally (for example, I hear one of our local community colleges offers a course open to high school and above). To help broaden your understanding and for help with memorization, use Rosetta Stone or Livemocha; again, I found Livemocha much more helpful and quite a bit cheaper (obviously, since it’s free). And get out there, find some Russian-speaking friends, and speak with them! Native speakers are priceless.
Good luck!
In my German class we did Rosetta Stone. It’s acually pretty good. Try it
No. The best way to learn Russian is to move there. But im guessing your not so yeah rosetta stone is pretty good but all on its own it sucks. Get some books on russian and watch russian tv and buy russian books to practice reading (hell you might not understand but its still practice thats what i do with japanese)
you could go to this one website and download a 33 hours of video..my friend is using it an he said its good.. Look for Pimsleur russian