Rosetta Stone Version 4 TOTALe

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• Pros

  • Excellent user experience.
  • Polished interface.
  • Highly intuitive.
  • Strong tech support.
  • Mobile component for on-the-go learning.

• Cons

  • No cultural information.
  • Language taught out of context.
  • Expensive.

• Bottom Line

  Though a bit pricey, Rosetta Stone continues to be the best full-featured software for learning a new language.

Mango Languages is an online language-learning service with a deal that seems too good to be true. For $20 per month or $175 per year, you can have unfettered access to all its language-learning programs, which includes more than 60! Even more enticing, a subscription might be free through your public library. What's the catch? Well, the very best language-learning programs teach you a new language in a way that sticks, and unfortunately, that's not how Mango Languages operates. Its core material is tedious and dry, and for languages with a different writing system, there isn't any introduction to it. You're much better off with Rosetta Stone, PCMag's Editors' Choice among paid language-learning programs, or Duolingo, the Editors' Choice among free programs. Both of those programs offer more hand-holding, but in a good way, teaching you basic concepts little by little until they stick. Mango might be a last resort if you can't find your language of choice taught elsewhere, but I wouldn't recommend starting with it.

Languages Offered
Of all the language-learning software I've seen, Mango has by far the most languages in its catalog. Excluding English and pirate, Mango offers: American Sign Language, Egyptian Arabic, Iraqi Arabic, Levantine Arabic, Arabic (MSA), Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Cherokee, Mandarin Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dari, Dutch, Dzongkha, Farsi (Persian), Finnish, French, Canadian French, German, Greek, Ancient Greek, Koine Greek, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Igbo, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kazakh, Korean, Latin, Malay, Malayalam, Norwegian, Pashto, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Shakespeare English, Shanghainese, Slovak, Latin American Spanish, European Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Tuvan, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, and Yiddish.

Duolingo, which is free, has only ten fully developed courses: Danish, Dutch, French, German, Irish, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. It has ten more (excluding Klingon) that are in various stages of development but clearly not finished products yet.

Rosetta Stone has courses for 27 languages, not counting programs for English or British English. Because Rosetta Stone is a paid product, you won't find any languages that are half-baked, the way some are in Duolingo.

Pimsleur Comprehensive and Transparent Language Online also offer a wide array of languages. Pimsleur has 49 language programs and is excellent, but it's almost all audio-based, which isn't for everyone. Transparent has 60 language programs, excluding English and not counting transliterated versions separately. Transparent Language is very self-directed and requires some discipline to work through the lessons, though. The languages offered by Mango Languages, Pimsleur, and Transparent don't overlap 100 percent, so if there's a language you need not in Mango's library, do look at these other courses.

Price

As mentioned, Mango Languages might be free if your local library offers it through its database. I was able to create a Mango Languages account for free by logging into my New York Public Library account from a home computer.

If you can't get it for free, a membership costs $20 per month or $175 per year. The fact that you get access to all the languages in Mango's catalog sounds like a phenomenal deal, but, be realistic. Are you really going to study more than one, or at most two languages? Perhaps for large households in which everyone is studying a different language it might make sense. I'd still caution people not to be lured by the 'bargain' alone.

Babbel has a similar deal in which you can pay to access all the language programs it offers (13 of them) for a price: a standard subscription fee, which starts at $12.95 monthly, plus an additional $16.50 per month.

With most other language-learning software, you only get one language when you sign up. Rosetta Stone has one of the highest price tags, but its quality matches it. An annual membership has a list price of $299, although it regularly sells at a discount for $199. Head-to-head, however, I think Rosetta Stone is superior to Mango Languages.

Living Language offers a Platinum subscription for $179, which gives you one year of access to the online course for the language of your choice, plus 12 e-tutoring sessions and access to iOS apps. It's a really good deal if you are going to take advantage of the e-tutoring sessions, which are very good, especially for more advanced speakers. Transparent Language charges $29.95 per month for its online courses, which is on the steep side, with discounts if you buy six months or a year upfront.

The audio program Pimsleur Comprehensive costs $119 for lessons 1 through 30, which will keep you busy for a month if you do one per day. Those lessons are delivered as MP3 downloads, with no interactive components online. While Pimsleur Comprehensive is the least interactive of the language-learning programs I've tested, the pedagogy itself is very high quality. Don't dismiss it, especially if Pimsleur has the language you need.

Mango's Lessons
I tried out Mango Languages by attempting to learn some Tamil, a language with a different writing system than English. In the past, I've also used a travel version of the software, called Mango Passport, to pick up some German. The core material is very similar in both Mango Languages and Mango Passport.

The overall structure in Mango Languages is very clear. You have units, chapters, and lessons, and you work sequentially through them. Each lesson has somewhere around 50 flashcards, which are the primary way you learn new words and phrases. A card might expose you to a new word or phrase, ask you to repeat it, ask you to repeat part of it, or ask you to recall something you've already learned.

With many flashcard apps, the whole point of using technology to power them is to have adaptive learning. For example, if you're asked to recall a word and you get it wrong, that card should soon show up. If you get a particular word right a certain number of times, the system should retire it until much later. There's a whole field theory about adaptive learning, and there are several smart ways to implement it.

Mango Languages doesn't put anything smart into its flashcards at all. There is no scoring, so there is no adapting the cards to what you know or don't know. The cards are in a static order. You can't even self-score cards to keep track of words you could remember and those you couldn't, which is how Transparent Language Online manages flashcards. Rosetta Stone and Duolingo score you right or wrong as you go through the exercises and keep track of words or concepts that you should study again.

The first Tamil lesson took me about 12 minutes to complete, and I think I retained about half of the new words I was supposed to learn. By the following day, I had forgotten them all. Learning was tougher because Mango Languages never introduced the Tamil script. So I was looking at a swirl of lines that meant nothing to me. Hovering over a word shows a transliterated version of it, which provides a little more insight, but about a third of the time, the phonetics that I heard didn't match the pronunciation guide. In the end, I opened a note-taking app and created my own phrasebook with phonetics. At least my own notes made sense to me when I reviewed them later.

As I mentioned, there is no right/wrong scoring at all in the core material, so you might as well be using a text book or stack of paper flashcards in conjunction with a few audio files. When you compare this style of teaching to Rosetta Stone, which uses deductive learning, it's clear why Rosetta Stone is superior: You have to think! Here's an example. With Rosetta Stone, let's say you've learned the words for boy, girl, and man. Then you see four pictures, that of a boy, girl, man, and woman. You haven't learned the word for 'woman' yet. The program will announce words, and you click on the corresponding picture. When you hear the word for 'woman' for the first time, your brain thinks, 'I don't know that word. But I do know the words for boy, girl, and man, and it wasn't one of those words. So this new word must be woman.' It's not complicated. It's not difficult. But it is memorable, or at least more memorable than Mango's method.

Mango Languages, by contrast, tells you the word for hello, and then immediately after asks you, 'Do you remember how to say, 'hello?' After 50 flashcards like this, my motivation to go on was minimal.

I felt much more motivated with Duolingo, which has you complete short exercises, scores you right or wrong as you go, and repeats concepts or words you got wrong before you can advance to the next set of exercises. With Duolingo, there's more variety. Even Pimsleur Comprehensive, the audio-based program, gets you to think more than Mango does. Pimsleur uses a lot of call and response, telling you how to say a word and then at some point asking you to repeat or recall it, but the timing is what makes it work. Pimsleur spaces out when you hear a word for the first time and when you're asked to recall it very carefully. You're often being asked to remember words just when you were at the brink of forgetting them. Also, Pimsleur spends a lot of time on pronunciation, breaking words into syllables that you hear and say over and over. Mango just kind of throws words at you.

Additional Content

While I knock Mango Languages for having unmemorable, dry, and poorly presented core content, I have to hand it to the program for the extra material it offers. Some of it is pretty interesting.

For example, I poked around the French Premiere content and found I could watch entire movies, scene by scene, with both English and French subtitles enabled (or just one or the other if I preferred). At the end of the scene was a breakdown of the dialogue so I could examine it more slowly and closely. It's great stuff! It's slicker than Yabla, another online program that uses videos to help language learners practice listening to a new tongue. Plus, Yabla uses short videos, whereas Mango has full-length movies. It's not available for every languages, but there are multiple movies for Spanish, plus one each for French, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese.

If you're not a stone-cold beginner, you might also explore Mango Languages' speciality courses, such as medical Spanish or Russian slang. This material is presented in the same manner as the core beginner material, with lackluster flashcards, so don't expect any fancy learning systems here. Still, if you just need to drill through some vocabulary for a specific situation, such as business or legal practice, it might be worth a shot.

Final Word

As compelling a deal as Mango Languages seems to offer, I can't recommend it for learning a new language. There may be some material worth exploring, such as Premiere movie content, but, on the whole, you can find better resources to learn or practice a language. Try PCMag's Editors' Choices first: Duolingo in the free category, and Rosetta Stone among paid programs.

Here's how to change a home Wi-Fi network's name, password, or other elements.

Your router stores the settings for your home Wi-Fi network. So if you want to change something, you have to log into your router's software, also known as firmware. From there, you can change the name of your network, the password, the security level, create a guest network, and set up or change a variety of other options. But how do you get into your router to make those changes?

You log into your router's firmware through a browser. Any browser will do. At the address field, type the IP address of your router. Most routers use an address of 192.168.1.1. But that's not always the case, so first you want to confirm the address of your router.

Open up a command prompt from within Windows. In Windows 7, click on the Start button and type cmd in the search programs and files field. In Windows 8.1 and above, press the Windows + R buttons and type cmd. At the command prompt window, type ipconfig at the prompt itself and press Enter. Scroll to the top of the window until you see a setting for Default Gateway under Wi-Fi. That's your router, and the number next to it is your router's IP address. Note that address.

Close the command-prompt window by typing exit at the prompt or clicking 'X' on the pop-up. Type your router's IP address in the address field of your Web browser and press Enter. You'll be asked for a username and password to access your router's firmware. This is either the default username and password for your router, or a unique username and password that you may have created when you set up the router.

If you created a unique username and password, and you remember what they are, that's great. Just enter them in the appropriate fields, and your router's firmware settings appear. You can now change whatever elements you want, typically screen by screen. On each screen, you may need to apply any changes before you move onto the next screen. When you're done, you may be asked to log in again to your router. After you've done that, just close your browser.

Okay, that doesn't sound too hard. But…yep, there's always a but, what if you don't know the username and password for logging into your router? Many routers use a default username of admin and a default password of password. You can try those to see if they get you in.

If not, some routers offer a password-recovery feature. If this is true of your router, this option should appear if you enter the wrong username and password and then press Cancel at the login prompt. Echo night 2 iso.

Still can't get in? Then you'll need to try to find the default username and password. Your best bet is to run a Google or Bing search with the brand name of your router followed by the phrase default username and password, such as 'netgear router default username and password' or 'linksys router default username and password.'

The search results should display the default username and password. Now try logging into your router with those default credentials. Hopefully, that will get you in. If not, then that probably means you or someone else changed the default username and password at some point. In that case, you may simply want to reset your router so all settings revert back to their defaults. You'll usually find a small Reset button on your router. Use a pointed object such as a pen or paper clip to push in and hold the Reset button for around 10 seconds. Then release the button.

You should now be able to log into your router using the default username and password. Your first task will be to change the wireless network name, wireless network password, and security level. You should also go through each screen to see if there are other settings you wish to change. Documentation and built-in help should be available to assist you with these screens if you're not sure how to set them. Most current or recent routers also have setup wizards that can take care of some of this labor for you.

The process for logging into your router should be the same whether you use your Internet provider's router or you purchased your own router. It should also be the same whether you use a dedicated router or a combination modem/router supplied by your provider.

Finally, you can and should change your router's username and password from their default values. This better secures your router so only you can access the firmware screens. Just remember the new credentials to avoid having to reset the router to make any changes in the future.

For more, check out 7 Router Features You Should Be Using for Better Wi-Fi. And be sure to test your own Internet speed.

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