4 stars (Great, but one major flaw.) - This program, simply put, is great! The concept behind it is so simple, yet it so effective. The student can never get bored because there are always new drills, new phrases, new pictures, and new exercises.
The only reason I gave this a four instead of a five was the price. (see my review on Pimsleur Portuguese). The program is good but it is far from complex. Anyone can make it; it is just a series of jpeg images and mp3 audio files put together. I seriously doubt this product's price should be this high. Many great students eager to learn the beautiful language called Portuguese may be drawn away from this great program simply because of the price. This is why I think this program should be much cheaper than advertised. After all, it's a language progam, not an engineer's development tool.
Portuguese can be a hard language at first, but this progam can help even the most linguistically challenged student achieve his or her goal of learning a foreign language. I sure did!
5 stars (Thanks Rosetta Stone) - This program is amazing! I've had it for only a couple years and although I'm only on the first couple lessons of Level I Unit 2 of Brazilian Portuguese on an on/off basis, so wonderful is this course in it's ability to reach me it doesn't matter that I'm not drilling myself constantly. I can get away from it for a while, get back to it and remember because it uses picture association which is more effective than just reading text. I've discovered to my ecastacy that I'm actually starting to think in the language exclusively. Unlike other langauge courses I've taken it's laboriously confusing to be expected to translate because of the tendency to think in your own language first, comparing, then putting things together back into the foreign language. With this course I can now look at a picture that says "the girl has black hair" and having learned all the words in Portugese, I'm not thinking in English to begin with. And perhaps someone seeing the picture of "the girl has black hair" as being impractical for every day use, but I see it as sentence structure, tense, then meaning, and the joy of seeing a person out in the world with black hair and think it in Portugese is pretty awesome just as it's awesome to be able to count from 1-10 in French, Spanish, Brazilian Portugese, German. My only problem are the 3 speakers. Two of them are very clear while the third tends to run everything together which is frustrating. But then again, one has to get used to how different people speak. When I eventually master Brazilian Portugese Levels I and II I'll get the French, German and Spanish. Thanks Rosetta Stone for making learning so enjoyable.
4 stars (Starting Out) - I have only begun to use this program. The person before me failed to keep everyone up to date on their progress so I have decided to share my experience with others. I have only completed Lesson 1, Unit 1. I did not do the pronunciation part of the exercises but I am buying a microphone so I can. So far, I feel that I will be able to retain the fundamentals of the language. I've only learned a few words, but I enjoy the way it teaches you. Instead of learning a language like you did in high school or college the program teaches you as if you were a child learning to speak for the first time. It shows you the picture of an object and then states what it is. Like um homem for a man and uma bola for a ball. I'll keep you guys posted. |
