The Rosetta Stone Audio Companion CD’s Aren’t Worth Trying

I was particularly interested in trying the Rosetta Stone Audio Companion CD’s advertised as coming with the program.  It’s been a while since I’ve used Rosetta Stone, and my previous experiences didn’t include any audio CD’s (I guess they didn’t exist back then).  I was looking forward to honing my pronunciation (a major strength of the computer program) and practicing useful conversations.  Sadly, I got neither.

The audio companion CD’s are nothing more than a listen-and-repeat version of the phrases covered in the corresponding computer lesson a la the Living Language Ultimate Spanish series.  Needless to say, this isn’t the most effective way to learn the language.  I mean sure, it’s better than nothing, but I expect more from a program as expensive as Rosetta Stone.  The complete Rosetta Stone program is upwards of $600 while Ultimate Spanish products are right at $100 for the complete program.  If I wanted listen and repeat, I would have bought Ultimate Spanish (actually, I did…not worth the money unless you can get it used for under $25, in my opinion).

That said, Rosetta Stone is still well worth buying.  It’s the best, most complete product I know of.  In conjunction with a good Spanish grammar aid (like the Practice Makes Perfect series), it can get you as close to fluency as you can get without traveling to a Spanish-speaking country and hiring a private tutor, for a fraction of the cost.  I just don’t appreciate the obvious money-grab of advertising the audio companions as a major pro of purchasing the program.  After all, if that method of learning Spanish actually worked, there would be no market for Rosetta Stone to begin with.

Buy Rosetta Stone from Amazon.com and see what all the talk is about.  It’s expensive, but I think it’s well worth the price.

Almost Perfect…

Spanish Verb Tenses has almost all the attributes of a superior learning tool.  It…

1. Follows A Logical Progression – The workbook starts with the easy stuff, the present indicative, and progressively works its way through more difficult subject matter such as the preterite vs imperfect, perfect and progressive tenses, and finally the subjunctive mood.
2. Contains Clear, Concise Grammar Explanations – Each section of each chapter is prefaced by a brief explanation of the grammar point about to be drilled.  While short, the explanations build on each other and are clear enough that even absolute beginners will be able to follow along provided they start at the beginning.
3. Contains Tons And Tons Of Drills – There’s no getting past it:  learning Spanish requires massive amounts of drilling to pound proper usage into your brain, and there’s no shortage of that here.  Amazingly enough, the drills are varied and interesting enough that you never really get bored.  Each section will take you an average of 20 or 30 minutes each, which is long enough to really learn the material you’re focusing on but not long enough to become terribly monotonous.
4. Requires You To Generate Complete Thoughts – Most grammar workbooks out there simply have you fill in the blank with the correct conjugation of a given verb.  Thus, after a few problems your mind goes on conjugation-autopilot as you mechanically complete the rest of the exercises.  The problem with that approach is you never quite integrate vocabulary, grammar, and conversational skills that way.  I mean the correct verb is given to you, along with its meaning.  You’ll never learn that way.  Spanish Verb Tenses, on the other hand, forces you to generate complete sentences on your own in response to some prompt, often without telling you which verb to use.  This keeps you constantly on your toes trying to figure out what form the correct response should take as well as the appropriate vocabulary to use.  Trust me, you will learn natural sentence structure much better this way and retain a lot more vocabulary to boot.
5. Every Chapter Ends With A Writing Assignment – Every chapter contains at least one (sometimes two or three) short writing assignments where you are either given an English paragraph and asked to translate it (in the beginning) or given a topic and asked to generate a completely original Spanish paragraph on the subject all on your own (towards the end of the book).
6. Covers Every Verb Tense And Grammar Aspect In The Language – I can’t think of anything this workbook misses, off the top of my head.  It covers every tense and aspect of Spanish verbs you need to know, including the infamous subjunctive mood, when to use the preterite vs imperfect, and common special constructions involving specific verbs (ir a- et al).

…But Not Quite Perfect

Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Verb Tenses is very much a master of the domain it purports to teach.  It claims to teach you everything you need to know about Spanish verbs and it accomplishes that goal very, very well; however, it doesn’t delve into aspects of Spanish grammar not related to verbs, such as pronouns, prepositions, noun gender, etc (for that, I highly recommend its companion workbook Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Pronouns And Prepositions).

Additionally, its impossible to get any real conversational practice from an $8 workbook.  Spanish Verb Tenses will teach you to form Spanish sentences, no doubt, but there’s a big difference between being able to write Spanish and being able to speak Spanish.  Thus, you’ll either need to purchase a good audio program for conversational practice or hit up your local Mexican restaurant.  But overall, this is a very small nitpick.  It’s only $8 after all.

Buy Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Verb Tenses and its companion Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Pronouns And Prepositions from Amazon today.

Graduated Interval Recall

Graduated interval recall is merely the spaced repetition of a word of phrase in such a way to maximize future recall.  When a new word, phrase, or grammar concept is first introduced, it is repeated more often.  Over time, the interval between repetitions becomes further and further apart as the learning becomes more familiar with its use.  Pimsleur’s published intervals are 5 seconds, 25 seconds, 2 minutes, 10 minutes, 1 hour, 5 hours, 1 day, 5 days, 25 days, 4 months, and 2 years.  That is, after initially learning a new phrase in the Pimsleur program, it will be repeated after 5 seconds, 25 seconds, 2 minutes, 10 minutes, etc so on and so forth until you finish the entire 90 day course (obviously, intervals beyond that 90 day period are pretty much impossible to implement in real life).

The Pimsleur Approach

The pimsleur approach is merely a real-world application of this theory.  If you were to time the Pimsleur program with a stop watch, you would find the interval between repetitions to more-or-less (although not exactly, obviously) match the above intervals.  Since each lesson is only 30 minutes long, some liberty must be taken with how the longer intervals are managed in order to get an actual product out the door, but the basic theory is followed quite closely and hasn’t changed for many years.  In fact, competing products like Rosetta Stone Spanish use similar concepts in their products.  Although Rosetta Stone focuses more on images than audio, the basic concept of the Pimsleur interval remains.

Read my full Pimsleur Spanish Review or buy Pimsleur Spanish from Amazon today!

Buy Used Rosetta Stone Spanish Online

The most obvious way around this initial cost hurdle, of course, is to search online for use Rosetta Stone Spanish software.  Unfortunately, my efforts in this direction yielded mixed results.  Probably the best and easiest place to buy used Rosetta Stone Spanish software is from the same place you’d buy it new:  the Amazon store.  The catch is, Amazon doesn’t always have used copies for sale in their inventory.  As I write this, they currently have no used copies but do have a few new copies for sale at $415, which is an $85 discount over what you’d pay elsewhere.  All in all not bad, but patience is a virtue when it comes to Amazon.  I have seen used Rosetta Stone Spanish software packages (including all three levels) going for as low as $280 in the past.

Another option is trying your luck at eBay.  I’m actually not a huge fan of eBay in general because it’s relatively easy to think you’re buying one thing but really end up getting another.  For something as expensive as Rosetta Stone, I would personally be more comfortable sticking with a reputable retailer like Amazon.  That said, you are much more likely to find a dirt-cheap deal on eBay than Amazon, but it’s buyer beware.  A recent search of eBay didn’t turn up any screaming bargains but again, patience is likely to be a virtue.

For more on Rosetta Stone, check out my full product review or the Amazon user reviews for other opinions and to buy Rosetta Stone used.

Looking For Exhaustive Drills? Look Elsewhere

I am a big fan of drills and I must admit I’m not entirely satisfied by the quantity of material here. Sure, it covers all the important concepts but it doesn’t hit you with wave after wave of drill to really solidify the concepts in your mind like Dorothy Richmond’s two Practice Makes Perfect workbooks Spanish Verb Tenses and Spanish Pronouns And Prepositions. And a few of the drills that are there seem odd and out of place, such as the drills focusing on linguistic terminology: it’s great to know what a labial fricative is, but that won’t necessarily help me learn Spanish more quickly. That said, this book’s all-Spanish strategy really encourages you to think and operate entirely in the Spanish language in a way Richmond’s English-based workbooks just don’t.

The Not-Quite-Advanced Advanced Spanish Workbook

Despite the word “Advanced” in the title, I found the concepts and exercises in this book to be more intermediate than advanced so don’t let that scare you away. The explanations, while written entirely in Spanish, don’t go out of their way to use obscure vocabulary and most of the more difficult words are included in the vocabulary section of every chapter with English translations. I don’t think anybody with a bit more than a basic understanding of the language would find anything here unreasonably difficult, although lower-intermediate learners will probably have to spend considerably more time trying to decipher what’s going on. But hey, there’s no substitute for just sitting down and struggling through your lessons so that not necessarily a bad thing.

A Solid, But Not Perfect, Course

Ideally, I would like to see Practice Makes Perfect’s grammatical rigor and Advanced Spanish Grammar’s Spanish-based instruction combined into a single, exhaustive resource. Still, the fact that all three of these workbooks can be had for under $30 on Amazon makes this sort of complaint a bit silly. Based on the benefits of the all-Spanish instruction alone, I can highly recommend this book for anybody at an intermediate level or above. That said, I don’t think this book alone would be sufficient to really solidify some of the more advanced concepts in your brain due to the relative lack of drilling. I used this book alongside both of Richmond’s Practice Makes Perfect workbooks and saw some pretty dramatic improvements in my reading, writing, and speaking skills in just a few months. Of course, none of these books will help you with your listening, but that’s what audio programs are for (Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone, while a bit expensive, are my picks for that).

Buy Marcial Prado’s Advanced Spanish Grammar: A Self-Teaching Guide from Amazon.