Rosetta Stone

My brother gave my Rosetta Stone as part of my graduation gift. The other part was a set of very sharp knives that amused my father and I since they were packed in the box with his Father's Day card. So, I started playing around with the Polish Rosetta Stone finally (since I finally have a computer with a working CD/DVD drive... booyeah).

It's fun (or bomba).

I worked though a couple lessons last night. They're going really quickly since they aren't introducing me to much that I haven't already studied. I imagine I'd be incredibly frustrated if I didn't already know that Poland changes the endings to its words for nearly every occasion. Luckily, I have a basic understanding of that. There are some things I fail to understand, though.

For example, I learned the word for "to swim" (pływać). However, the pictures show two different things when talking about groups of people.
When they're swimming in the same direction: Oni płyną.
When they're swimming in different directions: Oni pływają.

Evidently this is a very Polish thing to do - having two verbs for whether an action is being performed in the same direction or different directions.

The same thing happens with walking, except the difference between:
Oni chodzą (different directions).
Oni idą (same direction/together).

I haven't encountered this before. So I've no idea why the endings of the words change based on whether the activity is performed by multiple people together (think: flashmob at the mall) or multiple people separately (think: people shopping at a mall).

Other than that, the activities are pretty fun, once you figure out what they want from you. I'm not sure it's worth the close to $600 retail for Levels 1,2, and 3. But sales seem to always be around 250 or so. I'm pretty sure my brother got a good deal that was far far far far far less than that. It's a pretty nice alternative to LiveMocha, since it was written more specifically for English speakers learning Polish. LiveMocha is more a translation of lessons for learning English into Polish. So, it doesn't focus on the grammar in the same way. The problem so far is that there isn't enough output required from me. LiveMocha encourages me to write whole paragraphs by myself, but I've only had to type two sentences into Rosetta Stone so far. I think using them together will be the best way to further my learning.