June 2008

It has been almost two years since my last posting, during which time I completed the first two lessons of the fourth unit. Then I moved from Windows to Ubuntu Feisty Fawn. Rosetta Stone almost ran under Feisty, but the sound did not work and the pinyin text was scrambled. I suppose I could have pressed forward with my understanding of the Chinese characters, which did display correctly, but understanding spoken Chinese is quite important.

I had my system set up to dual-boot, but the penalty for infrequently booting Windows seemed to be much time spent downloading updates and rebooting, which sad to say was sufficient to discourage me.

However, I recently upgraded to Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, and eventually tried running Rosetta Stone. To my delight, after a small amount of fiddling with winecfg, it worked!!! The only shortcomings I have noticed thus far are:

1. The down-then-up accent (as in “wu”, or the number five) renders upside down.
2. The flat accent (as in ‘qi”, or the number seven) renders as a pair of dots similar to an umlaut.
3. The application hangs when trying to display test scores, but this is easily worked around by parsing the .wine/drive_c/Program Files/The Rosetta Stone/The Rosetta Stone/Prefs/TRSTestResults file.

I redid a few random lessons, and was pleasantly surprised that I remembered most of the words. I then completed lesson 3 of unit 4, which was quite easy given that it was all numbers. So hopefully, I will return to regular progress in my Chinese.