Start With Useless Words and Phrases

Rosetta Stone starts with a list of words like man, girl, apple and so on. Their approach appears to makes sense when you are buying the software from an airport kiosk, but it’s not the best way to start.

After you learn a list of vocabulary words, you will go on to phrases that are not especially useful. For example, in the Rosetta Stone Russian program, there is a picture of a boy lying face down in a park with a soccer ball balancing on his back.

The sentence you are supposed to learn is: “The boy is under the ball.”  How many times in your life will you need to say that?  How about this phrase from the Korean program: “The people have a pen.”
Rosetta Stone does have some practical phrases like “What’s your name?”  The problem is that they aren’t anywhere near the beginning of the program.

Sadly, many people will give up before they ever reach the practical phrases they should have been learning from day one.

If you do try to learn with Rosetta Stone, don’t give up because of the boring list of vocabulary words they start you out with.