Mr. Bitter's Business

I think one of the biggest obstacles for me in learning Russian will have to do with the encoding specificity principle. In other words, is my learning of Russian, primarily through Rosetta Stone, going to be context dependent? I said in my previous post that RS is always trying to get you to associate words with images, and vice versa. However, will I be able to transfer these words that I learn to other contexts? Or, even more difficult, will I be able to recall and use these words when I don’t have images to look at? After all, it’s not like all of our communication only points out the things we physically see in front of us. Encoding specificity tells us that what we learn is best recalled in the context that we learned it in. In a recent lesson I learned some colors, none of which I can recall right off. But if I go into RS and do the color lesson, then I am much better at recalling those colors and matching them up. On the other hand, it will probably just take time to be ...

That’s pronounced something like “zdravstuychte.” This week’s Russian lesson consisted of some basic greetings and some other vocabulary words. But for this first blog post it will probably be helpful if I explain how Rosetta Stone’s language lessons work. It’s set up, as you might expect, with five different levels and various units and lessons within each level. I’m on level one and have worked through the first couple units. The various lessons within each unit will help you with the following: vocabulary, grammar, writing, pronunciation, and reading. But regardless of which lesson you are on, in the end you’re always learning vocabulary, which is nice. A big part of the RS method is to provide you with pictures for every word or sentence, so that you can have some kind of visual to connect the word or phrase with. It will typically show you a set of pictures and have a word or phrase at the top that you match it up with. There is also always a voice that pronounces it fo...