Rosetta Stone

After five years of middle and high school Spanish classes my abilities to converse in Spanish are minimal. A step above cave man grunting but not ahead by much. The idea of tutoring my children in a subject where I had very little confidence was daunting.

Enter my mom, a full blooded Chilean woman with a passion for teaching. The only problem- juggling schedules and Zoom calls were hard on us.

I looked into other language sources. My husband loves learning languages and has tried several different resources through his work. We both agreed we'd give Rosetta Stone a shot.

Course: Spanish Source: Rosetta Stone

Cost: Lifetime Unlimited Languages $199/child. Or $6.99-11.99/mo depending on how many months you commit to. Note: The unlimited languages means you can do multiple languages at the same time or when your kid is done with one they can move on to another.

Pros:

1. You don't have to be a fluent speaker to be able to have your kids learn.

2. The lessons are self graded and they even breakdown the lessons for you so you don't have to assign them to your kids like in other curriculum.

3. The microphone option means your kids learn not only how to understand but how to SPEAK the language.

4. It's immersive.

5. It uses context clues similar to how we learned our mother language as a baby.

6. We have access to other languages if down the road the kids want to switch to French, Mandarin, etc.

Cons:

1. Sometimes it's too immersive. If you don't fully understand what something means it can be easy to get further down into a lesson by guessing without comprehending and then you find yourself stuck later.

2. The microphone can be buggy sometimes. Even if I don't speak the language fluently, I grew up in a home and community heavily influenced by Spanish culture. Sometimes, but not very often, the microphone will keep saying a word is wrong when I can hear they are saying it perfectly.

3. It progresses quickly. There isn't much spiral learning as I would like for little kids.

4. Lessons that should probably be broken up are instead presented as one. Every day the lesson plan gives a set of course work for them to do. Some days are much longer than others.

I think this is better suited for older kids. Our "Captain" (7 years old) manages to finish his lessons with minimal complaining. "Princess" (5 years old) has been struggling more as the lessons progress. This is where I wish more of that spiral learning was taken into account. "Bud Bud" (3 years old) enjoys it but he doesn't care if he gets it right or wrong. We don't make him do it since he doesn't start homeschooling officially for awhile but he has insisted on doing everything his older siblings do.

For now it has been great to have consistent practice in our home without needing my constant supervision and I can see this being more useful in later years.

This research costs time and resources so if you are interested in helping the continuing research please consider sending $1, $5, or even $10 so we can continue: http://paypal.me/serenamcmurdie

Thanks!