Comment by Ovid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ovid | Hacker News Reader

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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/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.

There is a ton of good stuff out there, and I agree that Rosetta stone is awful. Rostetta Stone from a business perspective is brilliant in that they get $400 for the software upfront, and most people give up and blame themselves, not the software. It also demos very well, but gets really boring really quickly.

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.

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.

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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