For those of you who don’t remember, on the Rosetta Stone is inscribed the same story in three scripts: Greek, hieroglyphic, and an ancient Egyptian demotic. Before the Stone was found, scholars understood Greek and some of the demotic, but had little understanding of those funny Egyptian pictures. With the Rosetta Stone, archaeologists were able to decipher the hieroglyphic and demotic versions by comparing them to the Greek.
Fairfield Language Technologies takes a similar approach to teaching languages that are a bit more modern. Basically, Rosetta Stone (the program, not the slab) presents you with pictures, or pictures and speech, and you learn by matching. This is called the “natural” or “comprehensive” approach. To more analytic types it may feel like tightrope walking without a net (where are all the standard grammatical rules like “verb second”?), but plenty of academic research supports this method. It is, after all, the way we all learned our native language, and Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote most of his philosophy after noting that children learned what those hard things on the ground were called when an adult pointed and said, “rocks.”
The $395 price tag may seem steep, especially for something titled “Level I,” but each Level of each language provides an amazing amount of vocabulary and exercises — eight units containing 10 or 11 chapters, with one review chapter. Fairfield claims that Level I teaches basic grammatical structures and approximately 1,100 words; we didn’t have the chance to count, but our extrapolation would agree. Fairfield also claims that one language Level is the equivalent of one year of a college language course, or two years of a high school class, and indeed, you could spend a year getting through one level.
Still, sheer volume does not a pedagogical miracle make. Though the Rosetta Stone Language Library offers words, words, words, and runs in exhaustingly customizable “Run Modes” (with text and voice, text only, flashcard, photos and text, and so on), you learn grammar only by example and what you can infer. The thick book that comes with each CD-ROM contains a printed list of what you hear in each chapter (the phrase “la fille boit,” for example, but not how to conjugate “boivre”), and a few exercises in the back. However, each chapter, when run through in Tutorial Mode, does an excellent job of hammering into your head what the Chinese word for “cat” sounds like and looks like in Pinyin, simplified, or traditional characters. With a microphone, you can record yourself repeating the program’s dictation, and play it back for feedback; language lab was always a pain, but this feature is fairly pain-free and vital.
Even if you’re uneasy swimmer in the seas of language without a theoretical life-line, you’ll soon find yourself swimming, not drowning. The Rosetta Stone uses repetition excellently, and is smart enough to backtrack through tutorials to drill you on areas in which you’ve had problems. The natural approach actually begins to feel natural, and the intelligently structured lessons gently introduce prepositions, conjunctions, and other parts of speech, until you’ve got a firm grasp on them. The only thing missing are lessons in which you’d have to compose sentences or paragaphs from scratch, so you’d learn how to integrate all you’ve learned. And you will learn a lot. C’est vrai.
Rosetta Stone is available in Level I for Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Russian, Chinese, and English. Level I Japanese should be out soon. Level II English, Spanish, French, and (German should also be available, with Russian on its way.
Rosetta Stone is for serious language learners; dialect dabblers might be better off with the $59.95 PowerPac, which contains the first 22 chapters from Level I Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, and English. Also, keep in mind that Rosetta Stone is designed for those who want to learn how to be functional rather than scholarly in a language. As such, it’s best for those traveling, working internationally (NASA used this program for astronauts visiting the Russian space station — how cool is that?), or just trying to communicate with distant relatives. For these endeavors, the Rosetta Stone Language Lab is one of the best language applications we’ve seen.
Turner, D. D. (March 1997). Rosetta Stone Language Library. MacAddict. (pg. 71).
Fairfield Language Technologies
Applications
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POWERPAC.zip
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
