21–30 of 51 posts
Goodbye Livemocha. So RS have decided to try and remove some competition. Who's next in line?
Isnt rosetta stone a paid service ? LM was free if i remember. what alternative is there as free service for learning languages ?
http://www.streetsmartlanguagelearning.com/2010/02/rosetta-s...
On the other hand, there are tools like Assimil which absolutely rock, but no one seems to have heard of them. The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) courses are decent and free (by law because they're in the public domain) but the main site hosting them seems down (http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php). Someone's tried to create "pretty" versions of the FSI courses at http://www.ielanguages.com/fsi/fsiproject.html, but they never got very far.
Update: some of the FSI courses are still available at the Internet Archive (http://web.archive.org/web/20130113232657/http://fsi-languag...), but the MP3s can't be downloaded.
I remember celebrating their 1,000,000th user. There was something special about being able to run SQL queries on 1,000,000 users. The whole system, then, ran on cake PHP code.
One of the things I remember is that they had a wall of the weird requests and things they got from users. One was a man that masqueraded as a hot chick and then messaged himself sexy messages from a different account but the same IP. Another I remember was an eloquent and irate englishman who insisted we use words like colour instead of color.
This doesn't bode well. If you get involved in the spoken language learning community (and hey, who doesn't?), you quickly find out that serious enthusiasts hate Rosetta Stone. It's known for its marketing prowess and not its pedagogy. Here's a lovely little blog entry which uses the hilarity of Michael Phelps and his attempts to learn Chinese with RS as an example: http://www.streetsmartlanguagelearning.com/2010/02/…
This doesn't bode well. If you get involved in the spoken language learning community (and hey, who doesn't?), you quickly find out that serious enthusiasts hate Rosetta Stone. It's known for its marketing prowess and not its pedagogy. Here's a lovely little blog entry which uses the hilarity of Michael Phelps and his attempts to learn Chinese with RS as an example: http://www.streetsmartlanguagelearning.com/2010/02/…
That's an interesting article, but unfortunately all the videos have been taken down :(
This doesn't bode well. If you get involved in the spoken language learning community (and hey, who doesn't?), you quickly find out that serious enthusiasts hate Rosetta Stone. It's known for its marketing prowess and not its pedagogy. Here's a lovely little blog entry which uses the hilarity of Michael Phelps and his attempts to learn Chinese with RS as an example: http://www.streetsmartlanguagelearning.com/2010/02/…
Michael Phelps would have been much better off if he had just learned one phrase... "Hello, little friend (nihao xiao pengyou)". In China, children a fascinated by foreigners and love to point. I know of no other phrase that so consistently wins smiles from children and parents alike. Even if Michael Phelps had completed all the Rosetta Stone levels, he still would have never known how to greet a child.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
www.duolingo.com is utterly excellent, particularly if you know bits of a language already.
nice ! i'll check it out. please dont hesitate, if you know other (cheap or free) language learning online services , share them ;)
Goodbye Livemocha. So RS have decided to try and remove some competition. Who's next in line?
Isnt rosetta stone a paid service ? LM was free if i remember. what alternative is there as free service for learning languages ?
I can only see the new bosses spamming and burning out the LiveMocha vibe & goodwill because they don't understand it's not a "platform", it's a community. It grew precisely because it's the opposite of how the RS management team thinks. To see more of this perspective, read the press release & coverage from the RS side... very telling.