Rosetta Stone Part 1

So here is how Unit 1- Lesson One went.

I did the lesson first, which is a good thing because the instructions for each section are not very clear. It's possible if I had sat through that whole long introduction to the program part it may have been explained it there, but I tuned out after 10 minutes of hearing about the "total immersion system".

Lesson one equaled about 30 minutes. You go through 5 different parts... pronunciation, grammar, spelling, writing, .... and others. There is a lot of repetition which is GREAT. You will see the core Lesson One words in different ways, spoken and writen, at least 50 times. You will repeat those words back to the program prabably 25-30 times.

They introduce a word by speaking it and showing it over a picture of the item, then you match the spoken/shown word to a matching picture. You do that for several different items, in this lesson is was about learning girl, boy, lady, man. They then toss in things for those people to do, in this lesson eat, drink, cook, swim, run, and write. Only they don't tell you straight up BEBEN=DRINK. You have to figure that out from the picture and probably getting a few questions wrong. This I found frustrating.
You are also asked to speak the word/phrase into the microphone and it grades your try. In the pronuciation section it breaks the words down into parts and grades your trys. NA, then DA, for swim. (yeah I didn't know this was swim either I thought it was the word for nothing) I was fine with this section til the word CO-ME. I was about to toss the laptop into the street over the CO part. It wanted a short gutteral CO almost like a cough. That was totally un-natural for me.
When my son sat down to the computer for his Lesson One I sat and watched him because I knew he would have questions on the HOW TO end. Like when it says Una Nina (pretend that has a ~ over the n) and then pops up this blank window and then it waits. And if you didn't have help you'd be like... okkkkkk now what. Which is exactly what he did. This is where you repeat the word to it and it DINGS or BONGS.
There is also a audio companion CD. So far it's listen and repeat. I'll let you know more about it after we move on.

So far my cons are only that if you are using a computer with a touchy touch pad or one that likes to randomly lock up you will lose parts of your lesson and take a hit in the score department. It does grade you. This irriated my son no end. When we got to the end of his lesson one we realized it lost two sections of his lesson totally so he will have to retake those because this is for his school. This happened to me also but since I know I did take the section and passed it at the time, I'm not retaking it.

I'll update again after Unit 1-Lesson Two.