Rocket Bomber - article - reviews - commentary - Rosetta Stone - Week 1: Install - and First Impressions

Armed with a blatant disregard for the included documentation (which I’m sure is lovely and to which I’ll resort when I get stuck, but one of the things I’d like to test is how idiot-resistant the product is) along with my preferred means for ripping audio CDs to mp3, and also a stopwatch, the first thing in my nifty new Rosetta Stone Japanese Box that I tackled were the audio CDs.

Personally, for my mp3 needs I like an older, free program called Audiograbber [link] which uses LAME mp3 encoding [also free, link, and which can be downloaded from either sourceforge or the Audiograbber site] and when running on a computer with modern CD/DVD optical drives and a decent (3 year old in this case) processor the two in combination can rip a CD in about a fifth of the time it takes to actually listen to it.

(Audiograbber can also use different encoders but I’ve had no problem with LAME, and as stated: free)

Audiograbber connects to freedb.org [wiki] to check for the track titles and other disc info [thankfully Freedb is still under GNU, which is nice considering the CDDB/Gracenote/Sony debacle, and so this free search function still works — and so Audiograbber is able to ID the discs, track info and all, at a click of a button]. Some other user or users (or perhaps, Rosetta-chan herself) have entered all the requisite info for the Rosetta Stone discs, but naming conventions on Freedb are inconsistent — I had to do some minor tweaks to ensure file-naming consistency (and so that a mp3 player would be able to default to playing the tracks in the proper order) but that only took a minute. After that, it was just a matter of swapping the CDs and figuring out what else to do for the next 65 minutes. (hint: I started writing this post)

And Please Note: Did you hear me complain about DRM or restrictions or hassles in converting the audio to mp3 or anything like that? The answer is no. Straight up, no problems. At no point was I prompted for a code or a password. All it took was about an hour of my time. Kudos to Rosetta Stone Ltd. for making this matter this simple: a technical problem rather than a legal one.

Also: 12 discs, no errors — I know there are occasionally manufacturing errors (though nowhere near as many as claimed by customers when they attempt to return product in stores) and while my laptop stuttered slightly while reading the last three tracks on level 2, unit 3, it wasn’t a irrecoverable error and it stalled the whole process for all of 5 minutes, before I could correct it.

And of course, someone who doesn’t have an mp3 ripper (let alone a preferred program) can still listen to the CDs — that’s 30 year-old technology right there, and nothing wrong with it; I’m just weird in that I haven’t played an actual CD for 5 (or maybe 6) years — I always rip them to mp3 files first.

At 128kbps, the 249 audio tracks found on the 12 CDs (4 each for the three levels) take up 612 megs and constitute 11 hours and 7 minutes of audio.

Installation of the base software took just a few minutes; adding on each of the three Japanese language levels took a bit longer. All in all, I want to say it took just a half hour but I was tired (this was right before bed) so I wasn’t as assiduous in timing this portion; nodding off (half-asleep, and smidge over half-drunk) I still managed to install the program without touching a single piece of documentation. …OK, so I had to touch one piece of card stock: the one with the activation code on it.

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The following evening I finally had a chance to try out my shiny new toy.

There are options for allowing more than one user on the software (just create another user name and sign in) which is handy — if you’re planning to travel it would be nice if your chosen travelling companions could also speak the language (or at least bothered to learn some basics). RS has set things up so everyone can learn at their own pace, with independent tracking — even if they’re all on the same machine.

For my needs, it might be interesting to set up two ‘users’ so I can run two tracks simultaneously: one for learning the kana and kanji, and one for speaking Japanese — a thought that hadn’t even occured to me before I saw this popup window while starting the program the first time

So if all you want to do, say, is read Japanese Manga in the original you could just take that fourth option “Reading and Writing” and go with it. Similarly, if you only had two weeks before your flight and wanted to rush through the speaking/listening portions without getting bogged down in the convoluted writing system, it looks like RS anticipated that use as well.

Concerning the hardware: The included headset is plug-n-play, a breeze to install (Windows recognized it right away) and additionally,

the Rosetta Stone software picked up my current mic, so if I wanted to I could use whatever I’m most comfortable with. Even if you are currently using a headset for the pronunciation lessons, but would rather skip it (maybe you’re dragging the laptop to the coffeeshop or library for an afternoon) there is the option to turn off the feature temporarily. I’ll leave a review of the speech-recognition-part of package for next week; for now, let’s go over some first impressions and post a few images.

Each level is split into units, and each unit into at least five parts that deal with five language competencies: Pronunciation, Vocabulary, Grammar, Reading/Writing, or Speaking/Listening — or some combination of these.

(The very first time you run the program, RS runs a nice little intro video explaining the course)

The lessons are immersive: the only language in the lesson is Japanese, and you either pick it up fast or learn by guessing (given the solo, self teaching aspect: many questions in the first Vocabularly unit were multiple choice). While a straight line graph (like on the ‘title page’ pictured above) may make the course seem short and fairly linear, let me just point out that this is the first unit of four in Japanese Level One, and each little check box is a bit more involved than the included time-estimates would indicate. Sure, they say a grammar lesson is ‘about 10 minutes’ but my guess is we’ll be coming back to this several times before we ‘get’ it.

Fortunately, you can repeat each lesson as many times as you’d like. At least to start off with, the concepts are presented clearly and repetition and reinforcement make it easy to pick up the gist of what’s being taught. Retention is a different matter, and how each lesson builds toward overall language proficiency is one of those things that no one would be able to tell from just a day — or even a week (which is why I’m willing to give this 6 months).

Since the very first part of Level 1 > Unit 1 > Lesson 1 is a pronunciation exercise, we’ll cover the included harware and speech recognition next week. Following that, I’ll see if I can describe how learning a language with a logographic writing system and a syllabary rather than an alphabet differs from, say, learning a western European language (or even Greek and Russian).

(I’ll try to have these posted on Mondays, but as you’ve already guessed it depends on my work schedule.)