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Week 7: Перевод (Transfer)

Well, I hit a milestone this week; I completed Unit 1 of Level 1! It’s about time, now only a thousand more lessons to go and I will have reached automaticity. This milestone lesson actually goes along pretty well with this week’s readings on transfer. So here goes.

This lesson was different from the others because it tried to mimic a real life context where I would have a conversation with people, asking and responding to questions that we each posed. It pretended that I was out for a hike with my dog and I ran into a couple people and we started to chat. Rosetta had certain questions and responses it wanted me to ask, but all of these were based on things that I had already learned, even though I couldn’t recall them that quickly.

"Do you have a dog?" "Да. У меня есть собака." (Yes, I have a dog.)
(You might think that the guy should be saying, "Is that your dog?", but he's not.
"Do you have a dog?" is sort of a bad phrase to put with this picture.)

"Что вы делаете?" (What are you doing?) "I'm reading."

"Что это?" (What is that?) "It's coffee."

"Do you have a cup?" "Да. У меня есть чашка." (Yes, I have a cup.)

"What do you have?" "Это хлеб." (It's bread.)

"What's he doing?" "He's eating!"

This is a form of near transfer. Rosetta tried to get me to transfer information I had previously received to a similar context within the program. Far transfer will be when I use this in a real life context (e.g. in Russia), which will be the real challenge. But even in this near transfer experience I think I felt as I would if I were in a real life, far transfer context. This was the first time I had this sort of lesson, and so I got kind of confused and flustered when I had to work to understand what people were actually saying, and not just match up a phrase with a picture. Then I also had to remember how to say certain things, which was also not easy. I went through and did this lesson about four times (repetition), so that I could at least recall better how to say certain things.


In all, I’m not so sure that Rosetta prepped me very well for this near transfer experience, but it is nice that it included this kind of thing. It is pretty difficult to have to transfer information to a new situation without, as the How People Learn book points out, having first mastered the material. I feel like I know what our readings are saying when the knowledge we gain in school can potentially only be useful for a school context. Schools may help us develop our minds in different ways, but there are certain classes we take because we really want to be able to transfer that information to a new context outside of school. At the same time, I don’t really expect to become fluent through using Rosetta Stone, I just want a foundation to work with.

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