Patrick Cox

Patrick Cox

Patrick Cox runs The World's language desk. He reports and edits stories about the globalization of English, the bilingual brain, translation technology and more. He also hosts The World's podcast on language, The World in Words.

Rosetta Stone: the method behind the hype, a spelling bee with a twist, and Hillary’s Congo adventure

August 14, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment
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rsIn this week’s podcast, the rise and rise of Rosetta Stone. With big government contracts and a huge advertising campaign, Rosetta Stone is now America‘s #1 language teacher. It offers software-based language teaching programs in 31 languages (their assumption — perhaps well-founded — is that British English and American English are distinct languages, as are Castillian Spanish and Latin American Spanish). The company went public earlier this year, so with the money raised from that, expect to see and hear plenty more of its advertising.

If you learn the Rosetta Stone way, you’ll absorb a language the way an infant does. Well, that’s the theory. Can you really turn back the clock and re-create the conditions of babyhood and infancy on adults who already speak one or more languages?ichinese Rosetta Stone says you can in certain key ways. This infant method means that you learn through images and conversation, not grammar and translated vocab lists. Not everyone agrees, including many classroom-based language schools. The advice from Georgetown linguistics professor Alison Mackey is to use Rosetta Stone as one tool among many. And these days, there are plenty of tools out there. Me, I’m learning Chinese right now. I take classes at a small institute in Boston’s Chinatown, and I supplement that with podcasts. I’m struggling badly with Chinese characters, so I’ll probably download this iPhone app.

spellAlso in this week’s cast, non-native English speakers from around the world take part in an English spelling bee in New York. The backers of this competition, seemingly without irony, have christened it a “SpellEvent.” Not a word you’ll find in the dictionary. We hear from the winner and from other competitors. Finally, a note on Hillary Clinton‘s not-so-lost-in-translation moment in Kinshasa, Congo.

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Discussion

10 comments for “Rosetta Stone: the method behind the hype, a spelling bee with a twist, and Hillary’s Congo adventure”

  • http://www.jit-english-training.com Jeffrey Park

    On Rosetta Stone: I am a freelance English/business English trainer working in Munich, Germany and a former secondary school teacher in the US. I have absolutely nothing against learning platforms like Rosetta Stone, but I do believe that the gentlemen interviewed for this piece engaged in a bit of misrepresentation. They kept contrasting the “natural” Rosetta Stone language-learning method with the so-called Grammar-Translation Method, as if that were the prevalent approach in language learning. In reality, there is a very clear understanding in the field that more modern communicative, task-based and multi-sensory approaches are more effective (and rewarding!) than the horribly outdated G-T Method. And I can guarantee that a real live teacher/trainer can and should be far more adaptable to learner needs than any software program.

    Love the podcast!

    • Tracey Hagerty

      Thank you, Jeffrey, for pointing out that world language instruction has come a LONG way from the methodology that the over-30 crowd remembers. I invite the Rosetta Stone executives and anyone else to walk into their local elementary, middle or high school to experience modern-day language learning.

  • Elisa

    re the Spelling ‘Event’: I am a teacher at an international school in Germany, and a few years ago I and another teacher had the idea to have the first spelling bee at the school as a way to motivate the students, many of whom were not native english speakers. one of the ways we prepared them, besides having practice ‘bees’ in the classroom, was to show them the documentary ‘Spellbound’. They always marvelled at how hard the kids in the film studied and prepared for the bee. it ended up being great fun and the students really enjoyed it.

  • Monica Flitcraft

    I am a student in CST 229 course taught by Professor Philip Tirpak.

    This podcast has been my favorite to listen to by far. I am currently learning Arabic through Rosetta Stone and have been wondering about the success and failure rates of this program. I was happy to hear the podcast go over the way the method works. It was also good to hear what Linguistic Professors had to say about the program. I have just started using Rosetta Stone, and I too have had two words stuck in my head which mean “boy” and “girl”. Its quite fascinating to see that a costly program such as Rosetta Stone has evolved all around the world. I also found it humorous the way Hilary Clinton reacted towards the student’s question. Her tone seemed very rude and unprofessional. Although she might have been upset by the question, it is not difficult to inform the student in a professional matter that she wishes to only speak about her thoughts on the matter and not her husband. Keep it together CLINTON!
    The English Spelling Bee in New York was a wonderful idea! I hope to see them expand this to a different language such as an Arabic Spelling Bee for non-native speakers as well.
    Great Podcast.

  • http://www.rajshree.com rajshree

    very interesting n creative…..liked it!!

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