Monthly General Meeting

You could fly to England to see the Rosetta Stone, (more about this later) or you could come to our General Meeting on West 11th Street, where we will have a demo of the Rosetta Stone’s language learning program. This is a remarkable interactive computer program.

Rosetta calls their approach “Dynamic Immersion”. Their goal is to teach a new language the way your learned your first language as a child, by looking at real world items and listening to your mom, a teacher, your older friends talk to you. With this program you are presented with photos of real world items and situations. You hear a native speaker describe them and you parrot back what you heard. Next the items are shown randomly and you speak back to the program. If you make a mistake, you are corrected and the intelligence of the program remembers your problems and brings up the words again in a different context. As you learn the program advances and becomes more complex. You start to read simple things, recognize more words, hear conversations, and become more comfortable with what you are learning, very much the way you learned to speak as a growing child. It is a gentle way to learn and most people think of it as fun.

This is computer aided learning and it is a far cry from language tapes and books many of us tried with varying degrees of success. Tapes are linier. Try to find and replay a section you heard 20 minutes ago, that’s an exercise in frustration. A CD inherently is a major advance in indexing. But the Rosetta’s real strength is the intelligence built into the program. The software comes with a microphone and earphones. If you mispronounce a word it helps you get it right. If you are having trouble with pronunciation you can turn on a visualization of the voice pattern of the native speaker and then compare it with the pattern of your own pronunciation. Instant feedback is a major asset throughout the program.

Their rule of thumb is if you spend 20 minutes a day you can learn most languages in six months. 40 minutes a day and you learn pretty much twice as fast. The program is a worldwide success. It is used by our diplomatic core and our military. 31 languages are available. The company is very confident in the success of their method and software. You have six months to try the software, and if you don’t like it, you get a full refund. That is outstanding!

The program works on Windows PC’s and Mac OS 10.4 and 10.5.

Now back to other Rosetta Stone which is on exhibit in The British Museum. This stone is an ancient Egyptian artifact, originally created in 196 BC, that had three translations of a single passage that greatly aided the modern understanding of hieroglyphics. One of the languages was ancient Greek, another was hieroglyphics. This was the key to unlock and learn a really foreign and forgotten language.

Hacking, in the original sense of the word, was looking at a program or software to understand how it works. In 1822 a French scholar was able to unlock the code of hieroglyphics and cross reference it with ancient Greek. So I believe this scholar was a true hacker, too bad he did not have a computer to speed his work.

The purpose of the text was to honor the pharaoh, and it listed all the good things he had done for the priests and the people of Egypt. So this language software company honored the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, the key to foreign languages, with their corporate name. However, I don’t believe ancient hieroglyphics is one of the 31 languages offered – yet.

We hope you become an NYPC member, and if you are a member, then be sure to tell a friend that this is one of New York City's Best Bargains.

by William Ginsberg

6:00PM   Doors Open
6:30PM   Announcements, Questions and Answers
7PM       Presentation

The meeting is at our usual location, PS 41.
116 West 11th Street (just West of 6th Avenue)  Google Map (new window)