Rosetta Stone makes language learning software for world languages and a few years ago began offering contractual products for indigenous languages through their Endangered Languages Program, ostensibly hoping to take advantage of a surge in federal dollars available for Native American language development programs. They tout their approach as "immersion" because they don't focus on grammar or structure. Instead, users are presented with a screen containing four images; they hear a spoken phrase in the target language; and they then must click on the image which best represents that phrase. Users are not required to speak, though they can certainly repeat the phrase if they so desire.
The NY Times article describes the case of an Iranian woman who "spoke only Farsi until her arrival here [in the US] two years ago." The article then implies that she "learned" English using the Rosetta Stone product. Ironically, this anecdote belies the truth about RS and other such products. While multimedia tools can be a useful supplement to language learning, they rarely actually "teach" a language. The canned responses ("the man is standing in front of the red car") fail to provide naturalistic conversational context. In this particular case, since the woman spoke only Farsi until coming the US, she must have begun using RS only after coming to the US. She didn't learn English from RS; she learned English by being immersed in English, English-language media, and English-speaking culture for a period of two years. Such immersion opportunities are rarely available for endangered languages.
Should we expect more significant results from Rosetta Stone products aimed at endangered languages? A May 23, 2007 NPR story about the Iñupiaq Rosetta Stone suggests not. Rather, the RS spokesperson makes it clear that the goal is to objectify the language, reflecting his view that indigenous languages like Iñupiaq are sacred. Boxing the language up in a shrink-wrapped bright yellow package goes a long way toward achieving that aim, but it's not yet clear how many people will actually learn Iñupiaq using this method. At the conclusion of the NPR interview, an aspiring Iñupiaq learner notes that "there are conversations he wants to have that he can only have in Iñupiaq." Whether or not the CD-ROM will give him those tools remains to be seen. The fact that the NPR correspondent consistently pronounces Iñupiat and Iñupiaq as in-you-pate and in-you-pack, respectively, doesn't bode well.