Cheap Rosetta Stone: Korean Explorer (Software) (Windows 95, Windows 2000, Macintosh, Windows XP, Windows NT, Windows 98) Price

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Customer Reviews of Rosetta Stone: Korean Explorer

Unlike one of the other reviewers, I was also glad that the interactive version allowed the listener to listen to the properly pronounced word instead of showing a "phonetic" spelling. The Korean language has many consonants for which there is no English equivalent, like a letter between k and g, a letter between l and r, and a letter between p and b, and those can be extremely difficult and even more confusing to describe than simply listening to the properly pronounced word and trying to mimic it. The native Engligh speaker who tries to substitute an English "equivalent" for one of the actual sounds will be learning to pronounce the word incorrectly! And a language learned improperly in the first place is much more difficult to correct than simply learning it correctly the first time.

My biggest gripe about this method is that it doesn't take advantage of the inherent logic in the Korean alphabet - which is phonetic itself! If there was only a single chapter on the characters and their pronunciations, then this program would be complete. As it stands, I would recommend that the student of Korean first study the alphabet before beginnning this program. The lack of focus on the Korean characters and their pronunciations is the reason that I give this program only 3 stars.

Not for complete beginners or intermediates
I was not very impressed with this program at all. I am a Korean linguist and I was hoping this would help to expand my knowledge, however, it is way too simple for someone with any prior formal language training. On the other hand, I noticed that it does not even teach the alphabet, a vital key to learning any language. The only reason it got two stars was because if someone could obtain training on the Korena alphabet, then this could be an excellent tool for beginners.

A good START!
I made a mistake when buying this product thinking it was going to teach me korean. Instead it's just an introduction to the world of "rosetta stone" with just two units in Korean and a single lesson (11 lessons seem to make a unit) in each of a ton of different languages that I don't care about. The learning mechanism seems very good. In different activity modes you either see pictures and have to pick out the correct text or vise versa. Some activities only include sound forcing you to improve listening skills, some only include text focusing on reading skills. With repetition you learn very fast and can record your progress.

The best thing (which is not included in the explorer) would be to have the complete lesson set of the language you want to learn and the language you already know. That way you could learn both by visual inspection and by translation. But with the explorer you can only learn from translation on the very first (and only) lesson which is included in english.