Is Rosetta Stone language software any good?
It depends on your level of comfort learning a new language, and how comfortable you are testing yourself, but I would suggest a combination of: *One of NTC Publishing’s “Teach Yourself” titles- they’re a wonderful, comprehensive beginning series that include grammar and vocabulary, and they do an excellent job of explaining the irregularities in a new language. *One of Pocket Books’ Language/English – English/Language dictionaries (they include the verb infinitives and base noun forms as well as conjugated and declined forms, where other dictionaries don’t.) *One of the Barron’s 501 Verbs series- the entire book is made up of tables of infinitive verbs and their different conjugated forms, but they’ll cover most of the verbs you’ll need to get a good, working knowledge of a new language. *A Berlitz beginner’s course on tape or CD- you won’t use this so much to learn the lessons, but to learn how to pronounce and inflect the words. I also really recommend finding a native speaker who i
I’m not prospero but I’d like to learn a language too, specifically Thai. I’m a native English speaker, comfortable reading French, less comfortable with Latin, and able to plod along in German if I have a grammar and a dictionary at my elbow. I wish very much to learn at least one non-Western language and culture before my brain seizes up and gets old-dog/new-tricks problems. I picked Thai because it has a neat looking non-Western script but it’s an alphabet and I wouldn’t be looking at ten years of memorizing ideograms as I would for Chinese or Japanese. But Thai is a tonal language like Chinese and I would really need to hear lots of it in order to learn to speak. I expect I can find a native Thai speaker around here to practice with but I’m also looking for CDs (or software with audio) so I can do some listening every day, can’t afford daily lessons from a human. This is important: I am very much more comfortable with old-style language learning (i.e. memorizing declensions, conjug
