We had lunch yesterday with a group of Fulbrighter who are leaving. It is always a somber time for us to lose our 'friends' of one or two semesters.
We were discussing Hungarian and each of our failed attempts at learning it. One of the women in attendance was saying her friend works for Rosetta Stone. They have been working on a Hungarian version for 3 years without success, so are thinking of giving it up.
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5 comments:
This doesn't surprise me! My husband is Hungarian and I've been working on it for a long time now. And I'm GREAT at learning languages! That Onion article got me all excited thinking they might be actually releasing a Hungarian version. But FYI, a GREAT GREAT GREAT website that I've used in the past is www.livemocha.com which is very similar to Rosetta Stone, but all free. And that has Hungarian.
Best,
Cheri
PS I'm a food blogger who does a lot of Hungarian Recipes at http://theWateringMouth.com :D
You do know that the Onion is a satirical news site don't you?
"Seriously, it's not too late to learn Spanish, French, or even German, all of which are really much more useful languages in pretty much any context. Why are you doing this?" (quote from Rosetta Stone - Hungarian first disk) ---> What a load of bollocks!!! I would say they are a bit judgemental towards the Hungarian language and speakers favouring the indo-european languages. As a Hungarian and Romanian language speaker (double citizenship) I can attest that I did not have any problem learning hungarian as it is my native language. However I ve met a romanians living in Hungary and Romania who wave learned hungarian. Where's a will there s a way!!! On the other hand I think it's more to do with marketing and profitability than the ability to do a Language leaning software. Hope Rosetta reconsiders and does a Hungarian learning disk for their latest release : 3.4.7.
I think neurologists would disagree with the comment starting with "Seriously..." for those of us who have conducted research on second language acquisition, it is a known fact by neurologists that the brain begins to lose its ability to recognize and distinguish sound of different languages after the age of 40 years. There may be those who are better than others, but as a general rule, this does apply.
Yes, I agree that the older one gets the harder it is to learn a new language. My problem was that Rosetta Stone had stereotyped the hungarian language as being hard to learn, less usefull language. It's as if you would said that Europeans should stay away from learning lets say urdu (an example) just because learning " Spanish, French, or even German, all of which are really much more useful languages in pretty much any context" .
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