Blogging Too Far: The Mystery of the Rosetta Stone

So I have to get something off my chest that’s been there for a while.  And it deals with everything I’ve been taught about what effective teaching is, and what it shouldn’t be.

I've been trying to learn Spanish now for about 4 years.  I failed German in high school and let me tell you I'm not too crash hot on English.  When other kids were learning about verbs and nouns, I was down the back of the classroom on a bean-bag "constructing" my own version of language, at the direction of my hippy teacher.

This year I'm going to spend my time half in the third world.  So I need to pick up on my Spanish darn quickly. And my in-laws have no tolerance for me not knowing the language.  Comedy and light-heartedness is not part of the culture.  I once bought the grandmother of the family a beautiful cake, and meaning to say "It's OK, it was nothing," I of course said "I got it out of the garbage."  And at this gathering with the whole extended family filling many rooms, everyone stopped and gasped at the insult I had just given the family matriarch.

So me being a techo nerd, I am trying to learn Spanish with computers.  There are bucket-loads of Spanish Language podcasts.  So many to choose from, most free, and most extremely well made.  I favoured a series called ‘Coffee Break Spanish’ and by the looks of iTunes, so did everyone else.  It was one of the most popular podcasts listed, education or not.

And it was easy to tell why.  It was like the people who made it had read everything about modern education theory and were able to create a perfect world where all of those essential factors could co-exist in harmony.  Go ahead, download it.  It’s education perfection.  Beautiful elocution, great themes, a great mix of voices, lots of explanations and easy revisions.  With downloadable worksheets, and get this...  Each week participants were encouraged to practice, and email in recordings of themselves practicing the lesson.  And it would be re-played at the start of the next lesson, as a way of revising the last lesson.  Like, how perfect was that. 

So I listened to Coffee Break Spanish for hours and hours every day, while in the gym, riding my bike to work, going to sleep at night.  The crux came when I started learning and needed the lesson materials.  They cost money.  And I hate paying for anything.  So when I have to get out my credit card, I need to be sure that what I am paying for is the best of the best.  And Coffee Break Spanish didn't have the reputation to go along with the price.

So then I found the most incredibly entertaining audio series ever made, called Michel Thomas Teaches Spanish.  It is eight CDs jam packed full of Michel Thomas teaching two other people.  You only hear their voices, but they make a lot of mistakes.  And it's rote.  8 hours of the same thing, repeated over and over and over.  There might be 200 words taught in the course, but they are taught in the same sentences every time. 

Anyway, what makes this so entertaining is Michel Thomas berating his "learners" continually throughout the series.  “No, do it again!” “No, that’s wrong!”  “No, listen to me!”  And all of the time you can practically feel the spittle coming from Michel Thomas and hitting the poor learners in the face.  And then he gets up really close to the microphone and just chews like a cow, recording in CD quality the saliva moving from one part of his mouth to the other. 

I have to say that after 3 or 4 years of this, the only Spanish that I know from heart is the stuff I learned from these CDs.  They are infectious.  It's like being in a classroom and staying invisible, while the teacher picks on the slow kids.  It's a great way to learn - you feel smarter than the other kids and there is no way the teacher will ever call on you and make you  feel nervous.  I wonder how we can take that lesson into our own classrooms.

Listen to the introduction here:

Another product that keeps coming up in my research is Rosetta Stone.  Everyone swore by it, including actors needing to learn a new language for a new movie.  All the reviews were unanimous. Nothing else could be considered. Rosetta Stone was it.

So I got Rosetta Stone.  And you know what it is?  Rote, rote and more rote.  Rote to the power of twelve.  The system is a set of pictures of yellow balls, girls on horses and men with red jumpers.  You pick out the man in the red shirt.  You pick out the yellow ball.  Did you forget about that red shirt?  It doesn't matter, because here it is again!

For the first time in ages, I actually felt I could learn a language, because I got lots of green ticks.  And I liked the rote.  I didn’t care if I saw the yellow ball for the 500^th time.  I think I needed to see it 500 times.  Rote was affirming, easy, it kept proving itself as a great way of learning.  It was fun too, in a strange sort of way.  And when I got something wrong, I went back and wanted to fix up those mistakes.  I get bored and my mind wanders very easily, but the rote kept my on track continually. 

And I was learning through a pedagogy that I had been taught was bad.  The yellow ball wasn’t in the context of a real life situation.  It never was part of a theme.  I wasn’t solving a real world problem.  It wasn’t personalised to me or my community.  Everyone all over the world, young or old, learning any of Rosetta Stone’s languages was seeing the same yellow ball, no matter what language they are learning.

That whole experience has really freaked me out.  I found Rosetta Stone great, and it seems like a lot of other people swear by it.  But it’s rote.  Here was an example of me being a learner, where all of the research I’d been a mouth-piece of for 15 years was wrong.

All of this recently came to a head last week when I needed to find my partner, somewhere in Peru.  As it happens in a third world country, the electricity, phone and water all blew up at once.  I hadn't heard from my partner for a while, and I get worried since the "buses" so like to crash into one another with fiery explosions all too regularly.  So I started calling near-random numbers written on old scraps of paper, asking for any news of bus related deaths.  And somehow I got onto Uncle George (pronounced "Horhe"),  who put me onto Catalina, who told me things were OK at home.  And by some miracle, I spoke decent Spanish.  And it was all from Michel Thomas.  In times of stress, the spitting podcaster pulled through.

But I’m still thinking about the mystery of rote and Rosetta Stone - and I think it will end up teaching me more than the podcasts.  Is that another example of reality making fun of theory?  It’s weird actually being a learner again, my experiences being pretty much opposite what I was told they would be.  I started to wonder how much we listen to our learners about how they like to learn, or instead how we let researchers and experts tell us how we learn best.  Rote, in this instance, is a whole lot of fun, and it's effective.  It's not language learning like it should be, but the rest of the world is doing it, and they like it. Why don't we?