Ever since 8th grade, I’ve been learning Spanish. Has it been fun? That depends on your definition of fun. If you’re learning it when the curriculum actually teaches you what things are, what they mean, grammar, etc., then yeah, it’s fun. But when it’s attempting to teach you the language via the use of pictures and it doesn’t explain anything to you, then it is a waste of time where you have to ask yourself “Why did I sign up for this?” (I’m looking at you Rossetta Stone). Here’s my experience with learning languages and my thoughts on what must’ve been going through people’s heads while they were making up these languages.
The first language I ever tried learning was Italian. Why Italian? Because it was supposedly an easy language to learn and my favorite character in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series spoke Italian. Unfortunately, though, I didn’t learn/ retain a lot so I can’t tell you much about Italian grammar, verbs, nouns, or anything else. I started attempting to learn Italian when I was in 7th grade and honestly, I learned more Italian from Google Translate than anything else. My family and I had no idea what we were doing when choosing a language learning app or what was required to get credit for a foreign language class, so we pretty much just chose whatever happened to look good and offered a student discount and that happened to be Rosetta Stone.
Now, if you happen to use Rosetta Stone and have learned a lot from it, good for you. But it did not work for me at all.
My mom only signed me up for the online courses, not knowing that they had workbooks as well. Would the workbooks have helped? I have no idea. I’ve never used one. However, because repetition seems to help solidify language learning in my mind a lot better than just hearing it spoken, I think it could’ve, but alas! the crappy online courses were all I used.
For those of you who have never used Rosetta stone before, here’s how it works. It’s a visual based curriculum, which means that you get to learn different words in your target language by looking at the picture provided and matching the correct word or phrase to that picture. You start at a beginner level, learning how to say things like boy (bambino), girl (bambina), woman (donna), man (uomo), hello (ciao), goodbye (arrivederci), “Where’s the bathroom?” etc. before moving on to the more intermediate and advanced levels where you encounter more and more complex sentence structures. While this way of learning can work (I use it all the time in my Spanish workbooks), the reason why it doesn’t for Rosetta Stone is because nowhere do they teach you about the grammatical differences for words, how they’re gendered, what the heck the preterit/perfect/imperfect/future/present verbs tenses are. You are just left to guess what the meaning of the phrase is based on the picture. What’s worse is everything is in Italian. They don’t give you the English translation to help you at all. There was no way that 12–13-year-old me was going to remember everything.
At the end of 7th grade, when I went into 8th grade, I changed my foreign language class to Spanish, a language that I figured I would use a lot more than Italian. At that point, I was just fed up with trying to remember what I had “learned” (I learned barely anything), and wanted a change. The problem was, I was still stuck with Rosetta Stone, where I had the same problems as I had while trying to learn Italian.
This was especially embarrassing because half of my extended family speaks not just Latin-American Spanish, but also Spanish from Spain. That meant that when I tried to converse with them in Spanish, I was basically only able to say “¡Hola!” “¿Como estás?”, and “Sí.” I had no understanding of any of the verb conjugations and definitely couldn’t understand the rapid-fire Spanish that my family members would speak when they heard me speak Spanish.
Finally, in 9th grade, I switched to a different Spanish course called Rocket Spanish and got the appropriate curriculum with workbooks and everything to do some actual learning. While this isn’t an ad for Rocket Spanish or Rocket Languages, I can tell you right now that it is way better than Rosetta Stone. Not only does it teach basic sentences in Spanish, but it also teaches you about the differences in dialects, the geography of Spanish-speaking countries, cultural differences, etc. I’ve been taking it for two years and while I am by no means fluent in Latin-American Spanish, now I know how to conjugate verbs correctly, how to use pronouns and prepositions well, and (most importantly) how to be sarcastic and snarky in a foreign language. For example, if you have annoying siblings and your mom doesn’t like it when you tell them to shut up, you can just yell, “¡Cállate!” or if someone says “That’s Spanish,” when someone else says “No bueno” like we don’t all know what that means, you can say, “Sí, sabemos que esa es español. No somos tontos.” (Translation: Yes, we know that that is Spanish. We aren’t dumb.)
Does that mean that you’ll get your siblings to shut up or classmates to stop saying obvious things.
Nope.
But you’ll confuse the heck out of them if they don’t know what you’re saying.
Until next time,
M.J.
The Tanuki Corner 
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