OtherRSGuy

Es estupido que esa es una de las primeras preguntas que los estudiantes del idioma aprenden, porque no es posible leer ningun libro en la biblioteca que tuviste que usar espaniol para encontrar!

are you planning on learning more? Yes, some with Rosetta Stone, and others without. If I didn't already buy a French set before I left, I would 100% still go out and buy one when I decide to finally pick that one up.

Why are you no longer with the company? were they jerks? Yes, awful on all levels. No communication from top to bottom, no acceptance of ANYTHING, positive or negative, from bottom to top. My immediate manager was an awesome dude and we still have dinner together once in awhile, but everyone from his level up is a sack of shit, including his direct superior who fired me on the basis of a rule that may or may not exist.

Sidenote - this superior (also mirroring the story that very few people were actually interested in language) told me Chinese was her passion, then told me not to tell customers that we use a roman alphabet, but rather that we use pinyin. I said, "Right. Pinyin is literally the romanized writing of Chinese." "No, we say romaji for Japanese, that's roman." "Yes, that's probably the Japanese word for 'romanized.' They mean the same thing. When I talk to customers I say 'We give you the option to see pinyin, which is the romanization of Mandarin.' " "No, it's not roman, that's romaji for Japanese." et cetera.

I believe it was actually you who met a former R&D intern whose job it was to copy and paste the new sentences into where their Spanish equivalents were in the course.

I feel like we should also add, when explaining the design of the course, that it was designed based on a monolingual American's ideas of learning and teaching Spanish. It's clear based on some of the nonsense usage, especially in other languages, that just mirrors the equivalent words in English word order / idiom.

I feel bad for the R&D guys honestly. I'll bet there's probably some prototype new versions, units of new languages, etc. that have been researched, written, and coded - but will never see the light of day. There's probably some enthusiastic young linguists in there that have the right idea and took the job for what they thought was a language company, and are now just being forced to edit the pictures in the Spanish program to look prettier.

This is interesting, because one the one hand - they would send out trainings on "how to overcome objections based on Pimsleur/Berlitz/etc." There's never been any official decree that Universities are the only competition, but it was certainly an attitude I saw a lot of on all levels.