How I have used Rosetta Stone "Somewhat Successfully"

Hello y'all!

(Okay when I say "Somewhat Successfully" in the title, I mean this to share that some people are successful with RS, and others are not. Although RS isn't perfect, it's still a great tool when you know how to get the most out of it!)

So I have been a user of Rosetta Stone for YEARS, and I have found little tips and tricks for myself that I thought I would share for those who sort of struggle to get the hang of RS. My mom used Rosetta Stone in college, and she actually became so proficient in Spanish that the college asked her to become a Spanish tutor. Because I was quite young when she was using Rosetta Stone in college, I usually sat next to her at our home computer while she did her lessons. I had picked up on Spanish super quickly from Rosetta Stone, and I eventually started to compete in Spanish language competitions in high school. We would travel and I would recite poetry or do plays in Spanish, and with all of the hard work and dedication I took to learn, I placed first in every event. I don't mean this to boast, but I worked for years to become "fluent."

My tips:

- Write every single sentence down. With each page of the RS course, the sentences are almost the same, the words just switch up at times. Try creating sentences with words that were taught from RS, but weren't used in the sentences. This is called "sentence mining." If you want to double check if these newly created sentences are correct, consult with a native speaker. I grew up around Spanish-speaking people, so I had plenty of people to help me along the way. When I was learning German with RS, I didn't have any friends who spoke it, so using language chatting apps really helped! People on these apps are there for you to learn! They will help you!

- Speak from day 1. I cannot emphasize how extremely important this is. Breaking out of the shell of becoming intimidated to say something incorrectly is extremely important. People make mistakes in English all the time. I am now 20 years old, and I still hear my native English friends use the subjunctive incorrectly. In English it's not, "If I was you," but rather "If I WERE you." If people correct you, don't take that as shame, as these should be tips to help improve your target language, and could make you sound more like a native speaker in that language. Rosetta Stone's speaking activities are very mid, but they help with pronunciation and they help you learn to think and respond in your target language. These activities with RS are trying to help you to be able to start real life conversation.

- Do not translate everything word for word. If you find a picture and you have no idea what the word means, try to make the connection with the word and picture and continue to the end of the lesson. Even if you don't understand, perhaps use the Vocabulary section of the program. When we learn our native language, we were never told another way to say it. We as children would see an apple, and our parents would tell us the word "apple." After hearing it a few times in context with other sentences, we learned to connotate an apple with the word. Learn your target language how a child learns their first, that's the whole purpose of RS. This also helps you learn to not translate everything word for word in your head. RS strives off of Comprehensible Input (If you don't know what that is, check out this article! It's a great read! https://www.leonardoenglish.com/blog/comprehensible-input)

- My final and greatest tip for RS, download the course content. It will be in a pdf form. Although it doesn't show any of the pictures, it gives you every single sentence and conversation of the course. This will help with reading. You could read these on your phone or on a computer, and they are great tools that not a lot of people utilize. You cannot copy the words or sentences from the pdf form, and if you can, you would be lucky to paste the word/sentence and it is copied correctly.

I hope you can take some of my tips that I used for RS and apply them to your language learning. Although these might seem like the bare minimum, they were HUGE tools that I used to help me get the most out of Rosetta Stone!

Let me know what y'all think! :)

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