maeve66 | Re: Rosetta Stone questions (Reply)

From:

maeve66.livejournal.com

I've had Rosetta Stone since Saturday night; I'm on lesson five of Unit 1 (that is, I completed all the components of lessons 1 through 4). I am very, very... structured? I won't skip around, I know. I majored in French, in college, and love learning languages -- also, I've taught elementary French a couple of times, so I am sort of used to language instruction pedagogies. Rosetta Stone seems to use the i + 1 formula -- slowly increasing the complexity of input -- exactly as is recommended these days. I DO like that sort of semi-immersion methodology, where they don't tell me anything and I had to figure out that "raha" etc. meant the progressive gerund, or whatever it's called. But at the same time, I've been dipping into other sources and trying desperately to figure stuff out from movies and music for a while now -- so I already knew that "raha" etc. meant that. Once RS moves beyond the base knowledge I've got, then I guess we'll see how quickly I can move, etc. I like trying to figure out the structures and word order from the input, I guess.

I've been interested in learning Hindi and Urdu since I was... oh, nineteen or so? Maybe even earlier. But I have actually been working on systematically picking it up since... maybe January? February? I got a notebook at that point and started writing down what I thought I was hearing in movies, and sorting things into categories -- adjectives, verbs, nouns, numbers, frequent expressions, etc.

And then in the past month or so, I have bought the Snell "Teach Yourself" book and mini-dictionary; a phrasebook/mini dictionary; a used Hindi-English dictionary (not the McGregor; I want to get that, but who knows when...). I bought a silly sort of kids' workbook for learning the Devanagari script -- "Your First 100 Words in Hindi", but it was too silly to take seriously. I mean, I used it, but mostly just to make flash cards.

My other main resources (apart from reliably wonderful Bollywood movies and filmi music) are friends, like