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Rosetta Stone Acquires Livemocha

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Re: Rosetta Stone Acquires Livemocha

#41

Post by TillE »

Ovid wrote: post #31
keiferski wrote: post #25

For anyone who's looking to learn a foreign language - try Pimsleur. Easily the best program I've come across. It's primarily audio, but it works really, really well.

Pimsleur is awesome for pronunciation (I've had a Dutch speaker tell me I sounded Dutch when I explained, in Dutch, that I couldn't speak Dutch), but after you finish the initial work, you get a rather limited vocabulary of about 500 words or so. Instead, many recommend using a serious course like Assimil, Michel Thomas, or Barron's (basically revamped versions of the Foreign Service Courses) with Pimsleur to help yo…

Michel Thomas is probably the best crash course for grammar, though he's a little quirky and not for everyone. You'll need to supplement it with other resources for vocabulary and phrases.

But if you actually follow the instructions to pause the recording and think whenever prompted, it's a great place to start truly learning a language.

Re: Rosetta Stone Acquires Livemocha

#42

Post by billybob255 »

Ovid wrote: post #22

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/…

I was coincidentally looking for the FSI courses the other day and found a site that catalogs various places to find them.

http://ielanguages.com/blog/death-of-a-language-website-fsi-...

Re: Rosetta Stone Acquires Livemocha

#43

Post by polymatter »

keiferski wrote: post #25

For anyone who's looking to learn a foreign language - try Pimsleur. Easily the best program I've come across. It's primarily audio, but it works really, really well.

I also highly recommend Pimsleur. I used it for Mandarin and apart from using a few dated terms, was brilliant.

Re: Rosetta Stone Acquires Livemocha

#44

Post by lingolive »

Duolingo is good for understanding structure and is far more mobile and immersive than RST. I agree with most of the comments here that it's difficult to find a full-service solution since different learners have different needs.

It's very interesting that general consumers recognize RST for what it is: a massive marketing machine that took a standard, linguistic approach to language learning and applied it across many languages. What other products are so bluntly recognized as overpriced but fantastically executed from a marketing & sales approach to where year in and year out people are coming through the door?!?! I would argue that LiveMocha was just as guilty of applying a standard solution across many langauges. Different languages require different methods and approaches.

I run http://lingo-live.com/ which is focused solely on Spanish. As a result, we have a small customer base who NEED or REALLY WANT to learn Spanish and have catered our product to this very specific need (also we further segmented our users into people who mainly want to SPEAK Spanish vs. write or read it, have very busy schedules, and are comfortable accessing their learning entirely over the internet, including live lessons with their tutor over Skype). Not having to worry about how we teach Chinese/Portugese/English/Esperanto... is a huge benefit and we can rely far less on ad spend and more on referrals and WoM since our students are actively engaged with our Spanish service and have someone keeping them accountable to their learning.

Then again, the number one answer we get when speaking to potential students when we ask how they would have gone about searching for a Spanish learning solution is "Rosetta Stone Spanish". Maybe the marketing is more powerful than WoM but how sustainable is it? RST has been running in the red for the last 3 years despite some significant cost-cutting and there are countless articles about the inefficacy of their solution (a few below) http://language101.com/reviews/rosetta-stone/ http://www.fluentin3months.com/rosetta-stone-review/ http://seekingalpha.com/article/254261-why-rosetta-stone-s-s...

I don't believe LM offers them much in the way of technology but it will be interesting to see what happens with RST's balance sheet behind them from a marketing perspective. The acquisition was a great deal for RST even if they dissolve LM.

Re: Rosetta Stone Acquires Livemocha

#46

Post by Ovid »

billybob255 wrote: post #42
Ovid wrote: post #22

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/…

I was coincidentally looking for the FSI courses the other day and found a site that catalogs various places to find them. http://ielanguages.com/blog/death-of-a-language-website-fsi-...

That's awesome! Thanks for that. I love you. Don't tell my wife.

Re: Rosetta Stone Acquires Livemocha

#47

Post by lingolive »

lingolive wrote: post #44

Duolingo is good for understanding structure and is far more mobile and immersive than RST. I agree with most of the comments here that it's difficult to find a full-service solution since different learners have different needs. It's very interesting that general consumers recognize RST for what it is: a massive marketing machine that took a standard, linguistic approach to language learning and applied it across ma…

The below press release says they will be integrating RST's products into LM's platform but this seems odd. LM runs on Harper Collins curriculum so I imagine the only thing they're integrating is the social network. RST hired Stringfellow last year so this is supposed to be his big splash. We'll see...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/04/02/rosett...

Re: Rosetta Stone Acquires Livemocha

#48

Post by purplelobster »

smackfu wrote: post #40
Ovid wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pimsleur is awesome for pronunciation (I've had a Dutch speaker tell me I sounded Dutch when I explained, in Dutch, that I couldn't speak Dutch), but after you finish the initial work, you get a rather limited vocabulary of about 500 words or so. Instead, many recommend using a serious course like Assimil, Michel Thomas, or Barron's (basically revamped versions of the Foreign Service Courses) with Pimsleur to help yo…

Yeah, I found Pimsleur great for the quickie intro courses. Only covers the basic tourist stuff, but pronounced correctly, and well memorized. I did Spanish, Italian, and French, and felt fairly confident in my limited vocabulary. But when I tried to use the real Spanish I course, I found I wasn't really learning the language, but instead memorizing whole sentence translations. At a certain point, they try to get you…

Pimsleur is also great for making you more comfortable speaking the language. You can memorize thousands of words and expressions, but you need to be comfortable with them and be able to speak with a somewhat conversational speed for it to be useful.

I also feel that the implicit grammar learning works fine for me. I had to memorize German grammar in school, and although I can still repeat my "durch, fur, gegen, ohne, um" and "an, auf, in, hinter, neben, uber, unter, vor, zwischen", and I was very good at grammar at the time, that hasn't helped me at all. To this day I can't speak German even though I was probably the "top" student (read: the only one who was motivated enough to care).

Re: Rosetta Stone Acquires Livemocha

#50

Post by personlurking »

Ovid wrote: post #26
darxius wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting article, but unfortunately all the videos have been taken down :(

Bah, you're right. I've seen the videos before so I didn't bother to try to watch them again. He was widely mocked for that, but now I can't find those videos anywhere . That's very curious.

Not sure which spot you're referring to but here's a vid of Phelps speaking Chinese http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nTevZ7a5mM
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