supremelearning and other courses

0Supremelearning advertises on this site. I haven't been able to find any reviews of this material. Does any-one know any-thing about it beyond what the company itself says?02br
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00 What other courses for EFL/ESL has any-one used? How do you rate them?02br
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00As starters, I'll give my take on Rosetta Stone. I tried to use RS for learning Korean. It was perhaps the most frustrating experience in my life (certainly the most frustrating language-learning experience). The idea is to learn the way you learned L1. How-ever, adults don't learn the same way as toddlers do: we have certain skills and vast amounts of knowledge that they don't, and we have also lost certain talents that they have. Specifically, I can consciously generalize and understand rules explained to me. I am not give a chance to do the latter in RS, which has NO explanations and NO translations. Thre are simply pictures and target language texts and audio. You practice until you get them right - or give up. I worked on this material about two hours a day. I got to the point where I could get all the right answers, but in many cases I never did have any idea what I was saying: the contrasts are mot made clear: For example, am I supposed to be learning that the circle is in front of the square, or bigger than the rectangle or that it is red, or.... What is being taught with the kid on the skate-board - he's falling, jump, fly, boy, man, youth, fast, almost ... I have no idea. There are too many of these unclearly decipherable pictures. Other problems have to do with the specifics of Korean: There are two distinct numbering systems in Korean,;but instead of telling you that (which would go against RS's principles), they just expose you to first one and, when they come to clocks, the other. No-where did I find any-thing that would have helped me (at all, much less quickly) know, e.g., the simple rule that when you go shopping, you use hana-dul-set... for the number of items you want and il-i-sam... for the amount of money you pay. A Korean friend told me that the phrases used on the RS CD were often not normal (not that they were wrong, jsut that people simply don't talk that way). The program was advertised as having a money-back guarantee. When I wrote to get my money back in exchange for the CDs, I never got a response. After the second e-mail, I gave up.02br
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00 I've read that the Russian RS CD does not reflect the distinctions made in the person speaking that are necessary in Russian.02br
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00 On the other hand, an acquaintance who knew Portuguese was very happy with his (illegally obtained) copy of RS Spanish. I also found the free snippets of Indonesian My feeling is that if you already have a handle on the language or if the language is an IE language or of similar structure, RS can be generally all right for a native speaker of an IE language. But beware if this is not the case. I warn off all my Korean EFL students, since I assume they'll have problems mirroring the ones I had.0-