Rosetta Stone Software For Learning Spanish

Rosetta Stone is basically the best software to get if you want to learn Spanish on your computer. It's used by many government agencies when they need to have their people speaking Spanish. There are several different sections available when you use the software. They each give you teaching and practice with a different area of Spanish knowledge. Let's take a look at a few of the sections here.

Reading And Listening

Here's what the Reading And Listening section of the Rosetta Stone software course is like. They show you four pictures on the screen. And in each picture there is a person with some action taking place. There's a Spanish sentence at the top of the screen. As the page loads, you hear the Spanish sentence, then you get to click on the picture that best fits what the Spanish sentence says. If you need to listen to the sentence again you can click on a button and the narrator repeats the sentence. There's an audio feedback clip sound when you click on one of the pictures.

There's one sound effect for when you get the answer correct, and there's another sound that you hear when an incorrect answer is chosen. You have the option to customize these right and wrong answer sounds in the setup area by choosing from several different sounds for correct answers, and another group of several different sounds for incorrect answers. Or you can opt to turn the sound effects off altogether.

Typing

Are you interested in learning Spanish so you're able to type in emails, letters, forums, or other things on the computer? There's a section in Rosetta Stone where you get to practice typing Spanish sentences. It goes like this: They put a picture at the top of the screen that has some action taking place in it. Someone is throwing a ball or doing some other type of activity. You can press the audio sound button as much as you like and listen to the native speaking narrator repeat the sentence that accurately describes that action taking place in the photo. There's a computer keypad at the bottom the screen with a window that shows the letters you're typing in. It looks and acts like a common computer word processor. You can also use the keys on your real computer keyboard to type in the sentence. Click the repeat button over and over as much as you want and type in the sentence you hear in Spanish into the word processor. When you're finished, you click the "Check Entry" button. The program will tell you if what you typed in is correct.

They do a good job of checking your spelling, and the program will complain if you type in an n where you should have typed in a ñ. By the way, even if you like using the computer keyboard, you might find it easier to use the keyboard on the screen for entering characters like the ñ character.

Speaking

In the speaking section, you get to play a Spanish phrase or sentence and listen to it being spoken correctly by a native Spanish speaker. Then there is a voice recorder built in and you can use your computer's microphone and record yourself saying the same phrase or sentence. You can then play back the recording of your own voice and see if it sounds the same. You can repeat this process over and over until you get your Spanish speaking closer and closer to the sound of the native speaker. Everyone who's listened to Spanish when they start learning knows how very fast it goes by when spoken by a native. It's difficult to determine where the different words begin and end, especially when you're hearing things for the first time.

A nice feature of the playback of the native speaker in this section is you can have a choice of playing the sentence or phrase at normal conversational speed, you can switch the speed to play it slower by clicking a radio button, then clicking on play. Or you can click a third button and play it back extra slow. So there are three speeds to play back the native sound. For difficult phrases, you'll probably want to begin with the extra slow setting, practice and work your way up to the medium speed setting, and then finally end up working at the full speed for normal conversation speed setting.