A blatant plug that I'm not even getting paid for.

DH's company works with a French Company. This has been fact of life for us for more than 10 years. The French people speak good English, mostly. Of the languages that are not English that I speak, French is not one of them. Recently, however, it has become necessary for DH to learn French. I am such a geek that I am voluntarily studying it alongside him.

To that end, he purchased software called Rosetta Stone. I can't tell you how cool this stuff is. The marketing and advertising BS for Rosetta stone claims to be able to teach any foreign language to anyone using methods that are deeply intuitive. Having learned more than one foreign language, I did not believe a word of it. That was before I turned it on.

It is deeply intuitive. I do not understand at all how it works, but it does. I have not learned much more than simple sentences, a few verbs, a few nouns, however I know them letter-perfect.

I am hopeful that we are both able to be conversant in French soon. Rosetta stone is frightfully expensive. For the two units that DH purchased, it was $600. I don't have a stray $600 lying around, do you? If I did, I would be purchasing Spanish and every other language I'd like to learn.

Then there is the voice recognition software. Sigh. You have to activate it to get Rosetta stone to work. And you have to talk to the fucking computer so that it begins to recognize you and your speech patterns. I have dictated this blog post using the voice recognition software and when it works it is cool. Otherwise, it is a consummate pain in the ass. I have never thought that I am difficult to understand, nor do I have particularly strong Midwest burr to my voice. But the computer sure seems to think so. If I could remember all of the mistakes that it has made thus far, you would be howling.


So buy the Rosetta Stone software. The jury's still out on the voice recognition software.