Rosetta+Stone+(Demosthenes)

Overview
Rosetta Stone is a language learning software, meant to rectify the traditional injustices of high school and college language programs (aka, to fix the fact that people never seem to learn from them). Is it possible that this software really is the solution to the trouble of learning languages?

**History**
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**Opinion**
In the last twenty years or so, the volume of software that has become widely available to the public is quite astounding. A large number of these programs deal with academic subject areas which many people struggle with-like language, math, SAT prep., etc. For those of us who may be short on extra time to study, extra money for extra classes, or the discipline to practice subjects we struggle with, online learning environments, like Rosetta Stone, seem to be a brilliant idea, even a savior in some situations. Here's why I think that (especially in the case of learning languages), the idea of learning from a computer sucks; is it really possible to replace the value of learning from human-to-human contact? Rosetta Stone's method encourages users to learn every language by associating familiar pictures with unfamiliar words. For an initial approach, not bad. It's important to know which one is the girl and which one is the boy. But beyond this, when you visit Kazakhstan, is it going to be particularly helpful to you to be able to point at someone and specify his or her gender, or the species of their pet? Probably not. It's also important to recognize that some languages include complex declension patterns and hyper-descriptive vocabulary, which are not so familiar to us English speakers. Sure, most Romance Languages have close to a 1:1 relationship with English, but what about Japanese? It's difficult to learn a language strictly based on structure, without acknowledging the cultural background that helped to form that language over the course of hundreds of years. Furthermore, without interacting with a live human, there isn't anyone to nitpick the accent and intonation of your spoken word. Though the program asks you to repeat certain words, it can't easily impart the understanding of **why** those words are said in a particular way. So, yes, $250 may seem like a small price for complete fluency in a language (or maybe it doesn't...that's still a lot of money for a couple of CDs), but is it really a substitute for traditional immersion? Probably not.

**Future Trends?**
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