Monday, May 11, 2009

On Wall Street, Rosetta Stone tries new Lingua Franca - washingtonpost.com

May 11, 2009

Frustrated trying to learn German through traditional methods of repetition and rote grammar memorization, Allen Stoltzfus spent a year as a college student studying economics at a Germany university.

It worked. And Stoltzfus returned to the United States convinced that full immersion was the fastest and most effective way to learn a foreign tongue. That was his inspiration for a firm that would become Rosetta Stone, which last month made its debut as a public company on the New York Stock Exchange.

With its stock closing up 40 percent on its first day of trading, the local company appears to be a bright spot in the economic drudgery. Now the company hopes to use the money it raised to expand operations abroad and introduce new types of Web-based language instruction software...