James Tauber's Blog 2006/12
My Rosetta Stone Experience So Far
Jamie Turner asked in a comment how I'm liking the Rosetta Stone Italian courses.
First of all, I got the Internet-based version rather than the box. It's subscription based, but unless you plan on using it for a year or two, it's much cheaper to go the Internet-based version.
As far as I can tell it's all Shockwave based anyway so there's no difference in functionality. You have to be connected to the Internet, of course, and a couple of times the client had trouble getting data from the server, but those were minor problems for the cost saving.
One nice thing about the Internet version, which might not be true of the boxed version, is I get previews of all the other languages they offer.
As I've mentioned before, I had to download the Shockwave plugin and, as it's not a Universal Binary yet, run it with Apple's Rosetta. Rosetta on Rosetta, but it works fine.
So what do I think of the course? It seems very good for learning to read as well as to understand isolated spoken sentences. I don't feel it does nearly as good a job as Pimsleur at teaching me to speak, or participate in conversations. Pimsleur has a remarkable ability to get you giving responses in Italian without having to think. I don't see Rosetta doing that, however, Rosetta is giving me a much better (and faster) knowledge of the grammar than Pimsleur.
Rosetta's approach is very simple. Four pictures—four phrases or sentences. Depending on what style of exercise you want to do, you interact with the pictures and sentences in a different way. Once exercise involves reading and hearing a sentence, being shown four pictures and having to pick which picture is being referred to. This is done in a set of four so you end up matching up four sentences with four pictures. Another style is being shown one picture and four phrases / sentences and having to pick which phrase or sentence matches the picture.
The variations are supposed to suit different learning styles, but I found the choice a little overwhelming. It's too repetitive to do all the different exercise types over exactly the same material. I ended up just sticking to one exercise type. I may repeat the course doing a different exercise type once I'm finished with this one. That may be more of what's intended anyway as once you finish one lesson in one style, it takes you on the next lesson in that same style anyway.
There are exercise styles for speaking and writing as well but I haven't gotten into those yet.
The matching approach works well not only for vocabulary but also grammar. They'll show pictures of a girl about to cut a piece of paper, a girl in the middle of cutting a piece of paper and a girl who has cut a piece of paper. And so you learn verbal inflection for tense and aspect that way. I found that quite effective, although I would like to couple that with some sort of summary at the end.
One thing I really missed, though, was that, other than each set of four questions being shuffled randomly, the progression is entirely programmatic. The questions are never based on what you've got right or wrong in the past. I think that's a huge missed opportunity—something combining the Rosetta Stone approach with the sort of thing I'm implementing in Quisition would be very powerful.
At the end of the day, though, I would recommend Rosetta Stone for reading and listening comprehension (preferring Pimsleur for learning conversational skills). Note that you can view a free demo to see for yourself if you like the Rosetta Stone style.
Hope this is of some use to people considering Rosetta Stone. And stay tuned, as I might use this blog to explore an implementation of my own that makes various improvements I'd like to see.
by James Tauber : Created on Dec. 21, 2006 : Last modified Dec. 21, 2006 : Categories language_learning : 4 comments (permalink)
My New Favourite Micro-ISV
My new favourite Micro-ISV is Hog Bay Software, makers of Mori (my latest outliner of choice) and WriteRoom (which is rapidly becoming my preferred text editor for brainstorming and jotting down ideas).
Polished applications, polished website and seemingly very focused on the user community. And how's this for transparency: they publish their sales figures.
UPDATE: Another neat thing they do, which I forgot to mention, is give suggestions for alternative competitive products. For example, on the page for their timer, Clockwork, they say:
The truth is that computer timers are a dime a dozen. If you just need a simple timer I would try out Pester or one of the many other free timers that are availible. If you've decided to pay for a timer then you should take a look at Alarm Clock Pro. It seems to be the feature leader for OS X timers, but as a result it's not simple and may be more then you want or need. Clockwork tries to split the difference. I think its clean interface and full screen mode are what set it appart.
Wow! How refreshing.
by James Tauber : Created on Dec. 20, 2006 : Last modified Dec. 21, 2006 : 1 comment (permalink)
Italian Dr Seuss
Doing Rosetta Stone Italian Level 2, I came across the following sentence which sounds like something out of Dr Seuss:
Mette la lettera nella cassetta delle lettere
It means (in the context of the exercise) something like 'she puts the letter in the letter box'.
by James Tauber : Created on Dec. 19, 2006 : Last modified Dec. 19, 2006 : 2 comments (permalink)
The Darfur Wall
What a wonderful idea! A clever way to attract donors and the founders pay all administrative costs.
Consider buying a number or ten. Perhaps a birthday or anniversary (you get to choose the first number - and get one random number for each additional dollar).
by James Tauber : Created on Dec. 9, 2006 : Last modified Dec. 9, 2006 : 1 comment (permalink)
Alibi On The Lot
Tom Bennett, my filmmaking partner, is entering to be a contestant on the filmmaking show On The Lot.
His entry includes a trailer for Alibi Phone Network, the short film that Tom wrote and directed and I produced (along with James Marcus), shot, edited and scored.
You can watch his entry (including the trailer) at http://films.thelot.com/films/890. You can also rate it highly if you like ;)
by James Tauber : Created on Dec. 9, 2006 : Last modified Dec. 9, 2006 : Categories filmmaking alibi_phone_network : 0 comments (permalink)
XML Beginnings, Part 1
Seeing as it's the 10th Anniversary of XML, I thought I'd reminisce a little about my small involvement in its beginnings.
In 1994, I was interested in two seemingly distinct fields—corpus linguistics and Web publishing—that happened to both have something to do with SGML. So I decided to learn more about SGML.
I rapidly became an SGML snob of sorts, lamenting the state of HTML and arguing on various mailing lists and newsgroups how much better the Web would be with SGML.
Towards the end of 1995, I started to think seriously about some of the things that would be necessary to make SGML on the Web a reality. One component, I thought, would be a way of resolving SGML's formal public identifiers. SGML Open (which became OASIS eventually) had catalogs but they were like hosts files. What was needed was something more like DNS.
So I came up with an extension to SGML Open Catalogs to allow for hierarchical resolution. You can read a version of my proposal at: http://jtauber.com/1996/03/standards/fpi-urn/delegate.html
This got the attention of Eduardo Gutentag at Sun who thought Jon Bosak (who had recently joined Sun from Novell) might be interested. It also got the attention of Paul Grosso who invited me to present the idea to a meeting of SGML Open in early 1996. I was interning at Sun Labs in Chelmsford at the time and Sun agreed to fly me over to Long Beach for the meeting. My idea seemed to be received well—Charles Goldfarb described it as a "dandy" which was very exciting for a 22-year-old SGML aspirant.
I spent some time after the meeting talking to Jon and Eduardo about SGML on the Web.
After my internship, Sun offered me a job (actually a couple of different positions, including running a website for reusable Java classes, but that's another story). I also interviewed with EBT. For personal reasons, however, I decided to move back to Australia.
I was still interested in SGML on the Web, though, and the next component I thought would be necessary was an implementation of the DSSSL stylesheet language. My vision was to build a tool that would output the result of DSSSL to both Tk widgets for online display and something like PDF for printing.
A couple of months after my return to Australia, I was emailing with Jon Bosak about my DSSSL ideas. And that's when he told me some amazing news: he had convinced the W3C to let him set up a group to look at SGML on the Web and he asked if I'd be interested in being part of the group.
(to be continued)
by James Tauber : Created on Dec. 5, 2006 : Last modified Dec. 5, 2006 : Categories xml : 0 comments (permalink)