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Rosetta Stone Chinese (Mandarin), Level 1 with Audio Companion |  | From: Rosetta Stone Category: Software
List Price: $229.00 Buy New: $206.10 as of 3/14/2010 21:20 CDT details You Save: $22.90 (10%)
New (3) Used (1) from $206.10
Seller: Amazon.com Rating: 11 reviews Sales Rank: 1418
Format: CD-ROM Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Mac OS X Media: CD-ROM Edition: Level 1 Operating System: Mac OS X Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2 Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 6.5 x 3
MPN: 20215 Model: 20215 ISBN: 1603916954 UPC: 794678202155 EAN: 9781603916950 ASIN: B001AFEBGI
Release Date: June 16, 2008 Shipping: Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Features:
| • | Rosetta Stone teaches you a new language naturally, by getting you to think, live and breathe the language | | • | Innovative solutions get you speaking new words, right from the start | | • | Rosetta Stone moves forward only when you're ready--you drive the pace, you set the schedule | | • | With Rosetta Stone, you'll discover a foundation of key vocabulary that you'll use to build into a whole new language | | • | Audio Companion lets you take the Rosetta Stone experience anywhere: in the car, at the gym, or on-the-go |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Rosetta Stone Personal Edition contains everything you need to give the voice inside of you a new language. The method used recreates the natural way you learned your first language, revealing skills that you already have. This approach has won numerous awards, and has been adopted by countless organizations, schools and millions of users around the world. Join the language revolution today. Only with Rosetta Stone. The comprehensive language-learning solution that fits your life. Learn Naturally Learn your next language the same way you learned your first language. Dynamic Immersion empowers you to see, hear and comprehend without translating or memorizing. You already have this ability. Rosetta Stone simply unlocks it. Engage Interactively Get feedback to move forward. You learn best by doing, and you'll apply what you've learned to get to the next step. Rosetta Stone adapts to your individual needs and skills, because you drive the program with your progress. Speak Confidently Start speaking immediately. From the very first lesson, you'll speak. You'll begin with essential basics, which form the building blocks of the language. Soon you'll create new sentences on your own, using words you've learned. Have Fun Best of all, Rosetta Stone is addictive. With every entertaining activity, you'll feel success. You'll want to use Rosetta Stone to have that next moment, that next breakthrough. So you'll keep using it, and you'll learn more! That's language-learning success. That's Rosetta Stone. No translation or memorization required. The most effective way to learn a new language is to be surrounded by it. When you were an infant, your parents taught you this way, by intuitively associating words with images. That's the ultimate language lab, but most language-learning programs completely ignore this. Think about all of the ways you've tried to learn a language: classes at school, tapes and cassettes, even software that uses your native language as a base for your next one. What do they all have in common? Translation and memorization.
Instead of taking a "direct flight" from your brain to your new language, translation and memorization connects you to your old language. You always have to "fly" from your brain, to your native tongue ... and then translate what you've memorized to communicate. That might work for a few words, but what happens when you get to a sentence or phrase? When you have to change tenses? You're going to make a lot of "connecting flights." That's why those other methods are so frustrating ... and why they fail. Enter Dynamic Immersion. This method encourages you to think like a baby. You'll pair words with vivid, real-life images and make connections between things you know and the new language. Soon, you'll be thinking in a new language, stringing words together into phrases that you create. Innovative technology. Rosetta Stone places this Dynamic Immersion method at the core of a suite of software that works with you to develop your skills. The simple, intuitive interface helps to keep you engaged in the solution, while advanced speech recognition technology makes certain that you're speaking correctly and accurately. Best of all, Rosetta Stone never leaves you behind. You'll only move forward when you're ready, when you've become comfortable and confident. Discover the building blocks of a new language: Level 1. Your journey begins with a foundation of fundamental vocabulary and language structure that you'll need to begin to think, live and breathe in your new language. Rosetta Stone's solution will give you the confidence to master basic conversational skills. You'll be able to introduce yourself, say "Hello" and "Goodbye," ask and answer simple questions, go shopping and so much more. Audio Companion With Audio Companion, you'll enhance the Rosetta Stone experience wherever you go. You'll learn new skills on the computer, and then reinforce what you've learned with Audio Companion. Simply play the CDs on a stereo or download them to a MP3 Player. Each Audio Companion activity corresponds to a lesson in the Rosetta Stone software, so you can turn your travel time into productive language-learning time. Inside the box, you'll find: - Version 3 Personal Edition CD-ROM software for Level 1 (Windows/Mac)
- Headset microphone
- User's guide
- Audio Companion, a multiple-CD set to play or download to your MP3 player

Product Description As children, we gradually learned our first language through a process of associating mental images with words or phrases, accompanied by complete immersion in our environment. This approach was simple because it was natural and allowed the brain to adapt to increasing complexity. In learning a new language, Rosetta Stone replicates this process to provide the best and friendliest language learning software tool. Learn as many languages as you want!
Rosetta Stone Personal Edition contains everything you need to start learning a language. It's built around the award-winning Rosetta Stone curriculum, which has been adopted by organizations around the world including the U.S. Army, NASA, major corporations such as Deutsche Telecom, IKEA, Royal Dutch Shell, and over 10,000 schools worldwide--and is available in 31 languages spoken by over 90% of the world's population.
Proceed at Your Own Pace - Rosetta Stone is considerate of your time. Anytime, anywhere, you can learn a new language with Rosetta Stone. You learn comfortably without feeling pressured or overwhelmed. Rosetta Stone provides guidance to make your language learning effective, fast, and enjoyable with a process that is intuitive, interactive, and visually engaging. At the end of each lesson, you are given the opportunity to test your new skills. And, since Rosetta Stone automatically records your progress, you can easily pick up where you left off, when other priorities arise.
Dynamic Immersion - Rosetta Stone uses rich visual imagery to help you learn. You will be presented with sets of images to match correctly with a spoken or written phrase in the new language. You will advance to the next set of prompts once you've successfully matched words and images and pronounced the words correctly. With Dynamic Immersion, you learn by directly associating your new language with images--nothing is lost in translation.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 11
It seems educational, but it is really overrated March 14, 2010 Shawn S. Augsburger Based upon all the marketing that Rosetta Stone does you would think that their software was really novel and far superior to other language learning methods, but after some time with the software I am not so sure. The software starts by having the user presented with various pictures and the software speaks the words for you for the phrases that you are practicing that particular unit. At no point even in the "grammar" sessions is the concept of even basic word order ever even presented. They basically presume that one is going to learn by trial and error, which given enough time will work, but without some basic understanding of grammar one is mindlessly repeating phrases until one discovers a pattern, which isn't exactly the most efficient means of learning. While that is obviously the *only* way people learn an L1 language (ie. your first language, mother tongue, etc.) with L2 language learning it is sometimes helpful in cases where grammar of the language that one is learning is substantially different from one's native language to have some direct instruction on grammar sense without knowing grammar you can't really understand or use the language. Since Mandarin Chinese isn't even in the same general language group it isn't too surprising that the grammar rules are a bit different than English and hence even a little background might be helpful.
A few other criticisms that I see are that such obviously useful concepts such as cardinal numbers don't get presented early. In most language courses I'm familiar with such concepts get introduced fairly early. One thing that gets a bit monotonous is that there isn't much variety whereas voices. As far as I can tell there are two female voices and two male voices that simply get shuffled around. Another criticism I notice is the lack of authentic texts. In the traditional courses I've taken for a foreign language there has always been various authentic real world uses of the language in question (eg. newspapers, advertisements, cartoons, etc.) that are used in exercises. Despite the cost of the program so far as I can tell Rosetta Stone didn't bother to license the use of any actual authentic content. Obviously licensing content costs money, but it seems exceedingly lazy to not even try to spend the time to make up some content. If one were learning a language via immersion in a country where said language was the primary language one obviously would obviously see the language all around them in various non-contrived uses. Therefore, Rosetta Stone's boast of immersion seems to be a bit of marketing hype in my opinion. Heck, they don't even seem to teach anything about culture. In the absence of understanding a bit of the culture one misses out on certain cultural references or phrases that would be useful in conversations.
Based upon the sample phrases I believe that I figured out a lot, but I ironically found "cheating" and looking up the definitions to a couple of the words in the canned phrases helpful insofar as that I wasn't guessing wrong repeatedly from the context of the sentence. The marketing claims that one can build confidence to use one's vocabulary in real situations, but I don't see any opportunity to actually create one's own sentences and have the software grade your grammar. As anyone who has ever used a grammar checker in Microsoft Word or similar application knows designing one that has perfect comprehension of grammatical rules can be difficult so expecting software to be able to grade your mini essays in a language that you are learning may be a bit of a tall order. This is one area that would find in a traditional classroom environment that doesn't really get duplicated well in this software. The "writing" sections are little more than picking 2-3 options. To make matters worse often times the answers are basically verbatim of what one had seen in the opening section of a lesson. Sure, I may have remembered the brief sentence from the opening lesson, but that doesn't mean I really understand the grammar rules or even understand what is being said. The rather repetitive near verbatim followup lessons make the lessons boring at times insofar as that one is merely reviewing existing material without learning anything new.
While I think that the product clearly has some value for the cost of the product I am a bit disappointed. I could see this as more of benefit towards students as a supplement to more traditional foreign language instruction, but I could hardly recommend this as a replacement for traditional language instruction.
Disappointed with ResettaStone Chinese January 27, 2010 R. Wolberg (Walnut Creek, CA USA) 0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The instructions on how to use the product were confusing and inadequate. I quickly decided that it was much too difficult
for me to attempt to learn. The immersion method might be improved if the system offered translations as it was especially confusing. I could not figure out how the interactive portion worked as the User's Guide didn't explain.
Disappointed May 10, 2009 John A. Parke (Marietta, Georgia United States) 18 out of 18 found this review helpful
I bought this product with great expectations. I have been trying off and on for years to learn to be mildly conversant in Mandarin Chinese. I completed two semesters of college level Chinese, but that has been some time ago. My interest rekindled by the Rosetta Stone ads persuaded me to try the product.
The first course shows you a series of pictures with captions in Chinese along with a spoken description in Mandarin of what you are seeing. Later you are shown four pictures simultaneously on one screen with a query in Mandarin as to what you are seeing. The problem for me was that it was not always clear in the single photo series as to what I was seeing. For instance there is a picture of a chef cooking in a wok. Was this depicting cooking, a chef, a restaurant, or something else? There is no English subtitle or "cheat sheet" to help. When the quiz portion showed various pictures with a spoken query it was very hard for me to answer, because I wasn't sure as to what I had seen in the first place.
I don't think I would have made it through the first three lessons had I not had previous experience with Mandarin Chinese. By the end of the third lesson, I was so frustrated; I couldn't continue and returned the product.
There is one feature that I thought was good, but also appears in other software products of this ilk. Since Mandarin is a tonal language, the software matches your tones to the correct tone and alerts you as to whether you are correct or not. For Chinese this is a must have feature.
Some people may benefit from this product if they are more visually attuned to what they are seeing. It reminds me of the icons used by many software products; many make no sense to me but seem obvious to others (which is why flyovers were invented).
Rosetta Stone = Chinese February 4, 2009 ni-hao! (Portage, MI USA) 0 out of 1 found this review helpful
wonderful product with spoken words, user can monitor his/her own speech compared to actual chinese speaker. many opportunities for review and test your own knowledge/progress.
Rosetta Stone is amazing! January 26, 2009 jorjugan's wife This is by far the best language software on the market. You will be speaking and understanding Chinese in no time. Several of the other reviewers have done a wonderful job of listing all of the outstanding qualities this program has to offer, but you really do have to see it to believe it. If you have ever wanted to learn another language, Rosetta Stone is the way to go.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 11
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