How much do you actually learn in those classes...

[pinknic38]

So I was wondering about the studying languages abroad thing. I know some of you TPers have done it, and I am considering doing it when I get back, for a summer. I want to learn German. The Army offers Rosetta Stone for FREE which rocks but the computer I use here at work doesn't have the damn shockwave player and I don't have admin rights to install new software (freakign shared computers ) so I am going to try to see if out commo guys can put it in on here.

So anyway if I do some Rosetta Stone and work on that until summer, and then do one of those courses (was looking at the casa bremen one) for say, 9 weeks, what level do you think I would be at by the end? I realize language is something that is a continual process and you can't just wake up fluent one day but yeah... just wondering if these courses are actually worth their money...

Thanks!

[lilwings]

Rosetta is actually pretty good. It works really well for developing vocab, but the grammer stuff always left me a little confused, and you don't have an instructor to ask questions to. If you have a good ear for the vocabulary going into the actually course later, it will make it that much easier for you learn. After 9 weeks of complete immersion, you'd be well into the beginning stages of conversational knowledge.

Once you get a few years of education in the language under your belt, the hardest part is maintaining the vocab. I spent 13 years learning french and living outside of Paris for a while, and I am hard pressed to speak at the level I used to be at. Rosetta has a couple intermediate and advanced courses that can help with language re-fresher training.

Don't forget to look into your DLAB, by the way, once you feel strong enough in the language.

[joe7f]

Sorry Nicole, I thought I replied to this thread.

I did the language study abroad bit and found it helped me enormously. My vocabulary just skyrocketed. You end up getting the common words into your vocabulary because you are seeing and hearing them everywhere, that makes you able to understand more, which enables you to use context clues to learn even more.

As mentioned, while your speaking decays pretty quickly your understanding decays much slower!

I was also looking at Bremen based on Esther's suggestion or Heidelberg based on me liking nice small university towns. So I could end up seeing you next Summer (I am targeting June-July)

--Joey