The boy is on top of the airplane! - adventures with Rosetta Stone

I started working my way through the first lesson in Rosetta Stone: Mandarin I tonight, determined to give it a go at learning some of this language. My MIL spoke a little Chinese around the house over XMAS and I was able to pick up a couple phrases. I KNOW, I KNOW, this will NOT be easy.

I haven't totally figured out the Rosetta Stone method yet but it seems to be very photo oriented, teaches you a couple words and then mixes them into different situations adding some vocabulary. It doesn't directly translate all of the words so, prepositions, for example, are on you to figure out. At least at this stage. I was always pretty good in foreign language in school having studied Spanish and French for ~3 years each and always did well in pronunciation. Chinese is in a whole 'nother league!

Rosetta Stone has a feature where it pronounces a phrase and then records you reciting it, showing some fancy sound wave. It then scores you on how well you pronounced it. I used my wife as a calibrator to make sure the meter wasn't broken a few times as I was pegged in the red. Man, this is tough. One thing I scored top notch on was, "The boy is on top of the airplane". While I am quite proud of that accomplishment, I'm not sure how handy this will be in Taiwan. If I was on a tarmac at Taoyuan  and looked out the windown to see some precocious, meddling tot messing around on the wing of an airplane, I'm not sure if I would even tell anyone.

In the middle of lesson 1 my cat sneezed and this big cat booger shot out of his nose and landed on my sweater. Now if it taught me, "the cat booger is on top of my sweater"...that would actually be useful.

On another note...my HR dept has processed my "localization package" and have a meeting with them tomorrow night to review it. They haven't yet exposed the details but they think it's complicated enough that they need to share it over Netmeeting so they can, I dunno, point to stuff.