Thread: Computer program for Russian???

Hello, I was thinking about getting a computer program for learning Russian, but I have no idea what to get. I hear Rosetta Stone is crap, but I'm not sure if it's true. But if any one has any good suggestions/comments please!!!

Originally Posted by Will

Hello, I was thinking about getting a computer program for learning Russian, but I have no idea what to get. I hear Rosetta Stone is crap, but I'm not sure if it's true. But if any one has any good suggestions/comments please!!!

Are you self-taught? I teach myself and I have not had great luck with computer programs. I've tried Rosetta and it didn't work well for me, but I had got a second-hand copy and I'm not sure I got the entire "package" with what I got.


Other programs that I got along the course of time, LanguageNow! and Byku among them, never worked out well for me. I think the reason for this, in my case, was that these programs are basically extended sets of flash cards - they focus on learning words and the meaning of them, but in many cases they don't breach the concept of the different forms of words - for me that's ALL the meat of the language, declensions, conjugations, the different forms words can take, pet/patronymic/modified names/words, words' roots that lead back through Greek, Latin and Proto-Ind.. The programs were nice for knowing words like "aeroport" but ultimately never felt like I was getting anywhere.

Rosetta Stone's website for language conversations, sharedtalk.com, is nice; it's free, too. And although some people think they're not very helpful, I found Livemocha.com and busuu.com (two very similar language-learning community websites) to be very helpful indeed.. I even ended up paying for the full monthly membership for busuu.com, though the free account ultimately provides most of the value that the paid account does, and might not be worth paying for. (In my case, the full account ties me in with a lot of recorded speaking/pronunciation help, which I need because my pronunciation is terrible [though improving]).

If you *do* find anything as far as programs that ends up being useful, please post it here. I'm not closed to the idea of using a program, but I don't want to start another one that ends up being a bunch of vocab crunch and flash cards but doesn't really use the forms of the language.

Preamble: I work for the company that develops this application, so I am biased.

In my experience, applications like Rosetta Stone rarely lead to any good results. If you want to focus on perfecting your knowledge of Russian grammar, I would recommend checking out our application (Grammatica - Analyzes grammar and inserts stress marks into any Russian text). It will display the grammatical properties of every word in any Russian text. It can also display stress marks for all Russian words. While there are multiple free tools (Starling etc) that can do this for a single selected word, I haven't encountered any applications that can do this for a whole text. The Russian Dictionary Tree mimics some of the functionality of our application, but it doesn't actually have an analysis engine that can do this for any text.

Here is a screenshot of our application:



If you have any questions, feel free to contact me via PM and/or email.

I am also very interested in a computer program to help me learn Russian. Not something that will just teach me words. I want something that teaches me Russian grammar since Russian grammar is way harder than English.

It's very interesting and seems like a great program. Did you work on it yourself?

One piece of information I am missing from the website is the price for the full version. I can't find the price on the site. Do you know it?

I wouldn't call Rosetta Stone crap, it will teach you some Russian but it's the equivalent of a $600 government hammer. The price and commercials lead you to believe it's an entire house building kit and it's not so don't buy it expecting to move into your new Russian lanuage home upon completion of the program. You have a lot of work to do, and you got a hammer.

My other problem with RS is you get a generic program not specific to your native language. I'm sure there are benefits to hearing only your new lanuage but RS wants you to believe that guessing which picture matches the new Russian word reinforces your learning. It doesn't. It's just cheaper for them that way. Eventually I might figure out the Russian words I'm hearing through my laptop speakers are "elephant feet" but I'm impatient so I look it up on a free app. Then I save it in the free app so next time I need to say "elephant feet" I'm ready. Typing the words into the free app helps me remember them too.. but for $600 (or whatever the program costs) why do I need a free app?

There is also the issue of having to spend even more time than you already do in front of a computer if you really want this to work.. but you said you want a computer program.

I've never played a computer game but I think they cost about $45 for a whole lot of computer programing and even Windows 7 Pro is cheap compared to RS. Work bought my copy of RS so it's okay for free but for $600 it's crap.

Originally Posted by Dmemme

I am also very interested in a computer program to help me learn Russian. Not something that will just teach me words. I want something that teaches me Russian grammar since Russian grammar is way harder than English.

Hi Dmemme,

Do try out our application. We designed it for students who are serious about learning Russian. We do include translations, but that's really a bonus feature. The primary focus of our application is on displaying grammatical information and stress marks.

Originally Posted by Hanna

It's very interesting and seems like a great program. Did you work on it yourself?

One piece of information I am missing from the website is the price for the full version. I can't find the price on the site. Do you know it?

Hi Hana,

The full version of our application costs $69. You can get it here: Grammatica. You can try it out for free for a period of 20 days. If it suits your needs, you can purchase the full version.

We are planning to release a large update to our application in the next few weeks. It will make the application run quicker, be more stable and it will feature an updated database of Russian words.

I would recommend that you sign up to our facebook group if you're interested in our application:

https://www.facebook.com/grammatica.russian

Best regards,

Vlad