Literary Discussions

I am currently using version 3 of Rosetta Stone as one of my tools to learn Mandarin. I am currently in Course 2, Level 3. I have also recently started using chineselearnonline.com's free audio course as well as the Beginning Chinese book by John DeFrancis.

Each of these tools has its strength and weaknesses. I find that Rosetta Stone does a very good job with repitition and embedding vocabulary into my brain. They do this by having me listen to it, speak it, write it, and read it in pinyin. However, I have to make sure I have a good dictionary around at the beggining of each new level to make sure I am understanding correctly what the words are suppose to mean. 

I also like the speech recognition functionality which forces me to pronounce the words closer to how they actually should be. The audio only courses that I found, like chineselearnonline.com, don't have a feedback mechanism to tell you how close you are getting. Speech recognition isn't perfect and can at times be frustrating but with a little work I understand what pronuciation mistakes I am making.

The weakneses I find are a lack of focus on grammer, no english translation of anything, and I found that I was starting to become dependent on seeing the pinyin and was using that as a crutch in translating the sentences while they were spoken.

Overall I am happy with Rosetta Stone and find it continues to add value to my studies. It does things that neither the book nor audio courses do and I personally feel I wouldn't be very far along without it.