 What's up guys, EvilD here. Today we're going to be talking about Rosetta Stone Chinese. Now I know there's a lot of polyglots out there who look down upon Rosetta Stone, they say it's an overpriced package. Basically it only got popular because it was first to market, but I'm a visual learner and kind of a comprehensive input style learner and there's really nothing out there for Chinese which is based around comprehensible input. So I wanted to give it a go and it's like eight dollars a month, it's less than Netflix and I'm using it a lot at the moment and realistically I've got Netflix and I don't use it so I should really like cancel that. Let's start with the pros, okay. So Rosetta Stone has a lot of pros. One, it's a super slick package like really nicely done. Everything fits well together. Second, all the voices are crystal clear so the audio is crystal clear. It's not like a lot of websites where you jump on and you're like what are they saying? It's like buzzing the noise and background and all sorts of weird stuff and it's crackling. Another thing is that it keeps building on top of what you've learned. You can see that there's actually a very well designed structure to it and it almost uses space repetition in how it introduces new concepts which is something I love and there's multiple speakers so you get to hear like multiple different accents and just in general the whole thing is obviously done by natives and being triple checked. Now I want to point that out because when I first tried Duolingo Chinese the one that came like out in beta I don't know now but when I first tried it there was mistakes in that like very obvious stupid mistakes and I would go to my wife. Am I wrong about this and I'd show her and she'd be like what? Who translated that? That was bad mistakes. Maybe it's perfectly good now but when I started with it it was bad and I just don't trust it anymore and I'm not really a fan of the Duolingo model anyway. So that was the pros. Now let's get into the cons because there is quite a few cons that come with it. Sometimes because it's comprehensible input, comprehensible input works best when there's like a visual indication of what's happening. It may have pictures but the pictures are static and sometimes it's hard to know what they're talking about in the picture because it could be any number of things you're just not sure which results in me then going to Google translate typing in the sentence and going oh of course and then going back and then just not having to do that anymore because I recognize what they were trying to say but a good comprehensible input course would make sure that would never happen. By the way I have an Esperanto comprehensible input course. It's not complete. There's a link in the description if you want to go check it out. The pictures are not culturally relevant like for example there was a sentence where they go what the fumo is from China which is like my parents come from China and it was clearly they wanted me to click on this one picture but the parents were clearly Egyptian and like that cultural maybe there is some Egyptian parents who come from China like maybe they moved there and they grew up there and then they moved back to Egypt. I don't know but like it just doesn't fit with the stereotype. Now the reason I say the stereotype is because comprehensible input needs to work on what you imagine it means. They should work with the stereotypes and make those courses culturally relevant. That course like the Chinese one has like lots of people from other countries which are clearly not Chinese and we know that China is like almost 100% Han nation. There's also culturally there's a lot of stuff that they introduced earlier which is culturally irrelevant. So for example sandwiches. Sun Mingjie. Like yeah sure that's great for me as an Australian. I love my sandwiches. I love Vegemite. Woohoo all to me but in China no one really talks about sandwiches that much like they should give you some relevant food like Zhejiang or Dapengji anything like that you know just some relevant food from the beginning. So obviously they have a base course which all languages are based on and then they just translate that. This also rolls into names. All the names that they introduce are clearly western names that have just been directly translated to Chinese like Mike which is like Mike. They should like pick common Chinese names which would make it more relevant again because knowing how to say Mike and Chinese is not really that relevant because if you're going to speak to someone whose name is Mike you're probably just going to call them Mike. Now some of the sentence structures can be way too long at the beginning like there was this one sentence where they said I like the red dress more than the brown dress so I want the red dress or something like that. When you're first learning these structures is like this long and then they're like hey now use the audio like voice recording with the microphone to see if you know it. Good luck. It's only going to take you 30 seconds to say that whole thing. So that was like a really bad thing to do on their part. They should be very careful about that. So voice recognition. This is like true for pretty much every app out there that uses voice recognition. It's a load of baloney. It doesn't actually work. All they're looking for is beats in your voice. So if they want you to say I want to eat food. Like you could say and it'll be like you got to write or you could say and it'll be like you got to write because they're just looking for the beats in your voice type of thing. So although it's kind of pointless I can see where the benefit lies in the fact that you have to say something and of course you're going to want to say something that's most likely correct but it gives you a false sense of correctness when it goes back at you. There are some points where it's like it's more precise than others but most of the time you could like say the sentence completely wrong as long as you hit the beats of the voice like the tones you'll be right and it'll just go yeah 100% great work mate. So yeah that's like that's a bad thing but that's not just a Rosetta thing. That's like general language learning software thing. So that was pretty much all I wanted to talk about Rosetta Stone. This is not like an affiliate video. I'm not saying you should go use or not use Rosetta Stone. Just wanted to give my input because I've been using it over the last few weeks. I actually like it. Like I do but I have to use Google translate to go look up some of their comprehensible input sentences because they're not comprehensible which is annoying and the culturally irrelevant stuff is annoying but overall I'd say it's a good package and in a few months I'm probably just gonna unsubscribe once I've done their whole course anyway. So yeah that's pretty much it. If you like this video like it share it around something to the channel so you all in the next video.