Rosetta Stone: throw her into a shark infested pool to teach her to swim

So, at the beginning of the summer I tried to sign up for a Korean 1 class at my local JC, but found out the only class offered within a 50 mile radius was full already (thanks budget cuts). So I decided to invest and buy the Korean Level 1 Rosetta Stone package. Armed with nothing but "Anyong" (thanks Arrested Development), I installed the CD, signed up for the online perks, watched the introduction video with bright, hopeful eyes, and expectantly started the lessons right then and there. BOOM. Seemingly random arrays of pictures thrown together with nonsensical noises, symbols I didn't understand and long pauses as though the program was expecting me to do something...it was like a fast-paced slideshow of doom. Slowly, sounds began to repeat, pictures made reappearances, things started to make some sense. Every now and then it would ask me to repeat something into a microphone and then (modern technology never ceases to amaze) it would analyze my voice snippet and decide if I had repeated well enough. Usually, I hadn't. 

This was the automatically selected profile photo for me in Rosetta Stone. Obviously they're doing something right.

For the first week or so, I was raring to go...it was exciting after you got over the first knee jerk reaction of fear and horror. Every day after work I'd settle in at my desk and try to make sense of the things that people were saying to me. But then, as I got to the end of the first unit, it started pestering me to schedule something called a "Studio Session". After every unit, Rosetta Stone suggests that we participate in a session with other interactive learners and a native speaker who guides us through some practice. Now, I am about to be a language teacher, I understand the importance and benefit of this, but it sounded awful. So I scheduled it for a few weeks out and promptly stopped thinking about it. Two weeks later...I rescheduled for a few weeks later. And so on and so forth. 

Cut to three days ago when I realized my life was about to become one giant Rosetta Stone Session, except nobody would be trying to help me. So I scheduled it and sucked it up. 

And now, here I am, having just successfully completed my first Studio Session and I feel pretty damn good! A little unsure of what just happened, but otherwise, good. The session started with a very cheerful Korean woman named Elisha speaking to me, smiling, saying things I didn't understand, so I simply "안녕하세요"-ed back and tried to sound confident in my ability to tell the difference between a 고양이 (cat) and a 개 (dog). Soon, Bart--the other terrified and confused participant--joined in and we started off on the ultimate slideshow of doom. We both could see Elisha, but couldn't see each other. Every now and then I'd make sense of what she was saying and in response, she'd give me a very excited "Bravo!" and flash 10 fingers at the screen--I'm assuming her way of telling me I was scoring high on her secret "Customer Success Rating". By the end Bart and I were commiserating silently about our shared discomfort (I was trying to send him brainwaves, at least)...and somehow, I'm pretty sure I lost some strange guessing game about red cars. But the important thing was I felt as though I'd actually made some progress. Elisha's excited chatter (while still not totally making sense) didn't sound like gibberish anymore, and I felt better about the fact that Bart was having trouble with this as well.  

" The one car...doctor...brain scans? Two boys have schools supplies! Happy!"

I'm still overall undecided on my judgement of Rosetta Stone as a language learning software. I personally think very structurally and consequently I like being able to see translations of things and understand grammatical structures and so on--which Rosetta Stone does not include. Also, I'm not the best self-starter...put me in a class where I'm getting a grade and I'll work my butt off. Give me "virtual stamps" when I finish a new lesson...yeah, a nap sounds great. But, I will say, the more I dedicate myself to Rosetta stone, the more I'm seeing functional progress. My vocabulary is growing, I feel like I can make some basic statements about everyday life, and I understand some of the grammar, as it applies to use in actual speech. 

I don't think I'll be fluent in 27 days, but at least I'll be more used to being thrown into the middle of a Korean speaking world.