Quote Originally Posted by Will View Post
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.