I feel bad; I am supposed to have been writing about our experience and progress with Rosetta Stone and I haven’t said a word about it in ages.  That’s because we’d been having technical difficulties.  (Not RS’s fault — our “school”  computer was having issues.)  They seem to be resolved now, at least enough for the computer to function, and Ariel’s been pretty consistently using the software for a couple of weeks now.  (I haven’t found a time I can consistently use it, yet.  I’m lucky if I can squeeze in thirty minutes uninterrupted for quiet time before my children wake up, regardless of how late or early I get up.  They have radar or something.)

I’m not usually in there with Ariel when she does it, and the software uses headphones, so I don’t hear it much, either, but I am sensing progress.  Her pronunciation is greatly improving, for one thing!  At first, she wanted to “read” the words off of the screen — with typical American pronunciation — instead of listening as the words were pronounced, so her own pronunciation was awful.  But now I’m hearing the difference, even in words that aren’t part of the software.  The other day she was playing Wii, and she was “speed slicing” against a computer character, “Pablo.”  She recognized how his name should have been pronounced.  Before Rosetta Stone, she would not have pronounced this properly.