My wife and I are considering buying the Rosetta Stone thing for Christmas this year. We both want to learn another language and have read that RS is one of the best for learning. We have two things that were butting heads on though. Which language would be best to learn were looking at a lot of travel in Europe as well as the rest of the world and she says French would be best Im leaning towards Spanish. The other thing is Im wondering if theres a better tutor out there besides Rosetta Stone? Any input into this would be greatly appreciated.
I don't know about other languages but I heard Spanish and Italian are very similar, could be 2 birds with one stone?
Spanish would be most useful in the states, for traveling in Europe Id probably go with French I took quite a few years of french in high school, and wish I would've taken Spanish instead. I had to take one Spanish class in college and it has been infinitely more useful than all the years of french I took. I'm not fluent in either language, far from it actually, but the best way to practice is to speak it. I picked up LOTS of Spanish working on a tree crew this summer
They are very similar My brother in law is from Honduras and while he cant speak Italian he can understand it.
We use Rosetta Stone with students that have just arrived from out of country. Our Brazilian student is quite fluent in English now. We also offer language courses through our distance learning school using Rosetta Stone. I don't know if you can go too far wrong using it. it would be a toss up as to whether Spanish or French would be more useful.
I would love to learn another language again. I should have paid. Ore attention in high school during Spanish, I can talk a little but not much of it. I learned (Pennsylvania Dutch) a version of German when I was a kid. It is great knowing another language. I have thought about getting Rosetta Stone before. Heard really good things about it.
Matt, where in Europe are you going to be travelling and is it for business or pleasure? I took three years of German in High School and still remember some of it. It's an interesting language and I've always appreciated their culture. I've never been to Europe but when my wife was in the Army she spent time in both France and Germany. She liked Germany much much better and said Paris was very overrated.
My wife is working on getting her certification as a travel agent with a focus on cultural European travel. She thinks knowing a second language would be helpful with that as well as our personal travels. We've been to several places in Europe and have never had a real language problem but it would be nice to be able to communicate with people in another language. I know that whatever we pick well end up going somewhere and still not be able to communicate but she thinks French is a more common language outside of English. I would like to learn German but she's very much against that.
I remember reading an article last week about a global survey someone did that said Germany was the best country in the world. The US however seems to always be slipping in these studies when it comes to peace, freedom, economics etc etc It's like my three year old kept saying all day Saturday after listening to some music with me "turn out the lights, the party's over."
