Rosetta Stone
Anybody tried it? What were your impressions?
11 Answers
I remember at least one very similar thread which got several responses. You may want to search for it, as it will probably be helpful to you.
I would strongly advise against Rossetta Stone. The claim in its advertisements - that it is used by NASA lol 
is a falsification. The £500 price is a joke.
It has 18 levels of 10 exercises each. Each exercise has 30 multiple choice questions. It gets very very repetetive and tedious. There are about a total of 20 different nouns manzana apple, perro dog, gato - cat used in the first 3 levels ( ie 30 exercises of 30 questions each). That is 600 questions to learn a bunch of words you could learn easily without rossetta stone.
And during this time you are not getting much grammar either. Well you are not getting any grammar.
Los ninos estan saltando. The children are jumping. A basic present tense. That was about level 4 (ie after about 10 hours of rossetta stone)
In other words you are spending hours upon hours learning basic words nouns, adjectives and the verb estar.
I have read some pretty bad reviews as well. I heard someone spent hours every day for months to do the entire russian rossetta stone and when a russian friend tried a conversation with that person, they were helpless.
I would reccomend this site, and the Pimsleur language learning proggrame. Michel Thomas is also good but he claims to be able to teach you the language in 8 hours which just isnt going to happen. Pimsleur has 90 lesson of half an hour each (though realistically you should be spending 45 to an hour on each lesson pausing rewinding). Each lesson goes slow and sentences are repeated ad nauseum but you are challenged to form sentences in your head rather than to pick a multiple choice picture. I finally finished it recently. I wish there was more but anyone who gets through all 90 tapes will have basic spanish automatically installed in their head by the end of it.
hitchens: If you're going to give a bad "review" of Rosetta Stone, at least tell the truth.
The claim in its advertisements - that it is used by NASA lol rolleyes is a falsification. The £500 price is a joke.
It has 18 levels of 10 exercises each. Each exercise has 30 multiple choice questions. It gets very very repetetive and tedious. There are about a total of 20 different nouns manzana apple, perro dog, gato - cat used in the first 3 levels ( ie 30 exercises of 30 questions each).
- Rosetta Stone is used by NASA, at least it is at the Johnson Space Center.
- You need to learn to count. When you say "about a total of 20 different nouns in the first three levels" is either an extreme exaggeration or an outright lie.
I have gone through 5(five) levels of Rosetta Stone and I have literally hundreds of nouns in my vocabulary that I learned from RS, and the list is publicly available. Oh yeah, I speak Spanish, and I can converse in Spanish, and I'm not "lost" when someone talks to me in Spanish.
Here is a link to the Level One course contents. According to your math there should be about 6.3 nouns in the first level (20 nouns in 3 levels). When you get through counting the nouns, get back to me.
i have used the Rosetta Stone since last months. in my inpreesion, it is good tools to begain your spanish learning.i have interaction and feedback, the photos are also attractive. and the most important point is the language in the software is all spanish, which can help me get rid of the influnce of native language. for me, English and spanish both second language. so it is very important for me.
I'm using Visual Link from U.S. Institute of Languages. I think it's a very good program. You should be able to go on line and get a sample lesson. I think the complete program costs less than $300.00 and may be closer to $200.00. They teach vosotros, but you can opt out. It is not voice interactive.
Something else I can recommend, is Verbarrator, from Learning Like Crazy. It conjugates hundreds of verbs and gives example sentences. I give it 4 out of 5 stars because I think there are a few things they could have done better. All in all it"s a very good tool. The download is $60 U.S. 
I don't see that it has anything to offer us that you can't get from here andLive Mocha and busuu etc. etc.
I would do it for languages like Turkish, that don't have as many resources available for people learning.. but for Spanish? There are more free resources than I could ever get through!
I like the old fashioned book - and -tape method. Because it works for me, it doesn't work for everyone. The thing is it's a lot cheaper, Hugo Spanish in 3 months is about 10 dollars on Amazon and it's a great grammar overview.
For the record, the whole course of Rosetta stone costs 600 dollars. I don't know how high a level that would plan to get you to.
You can buy the first level on it's own for 200 dollars.
I would cost you well over a 1000 dollars all together if you decided to buy them individually. I think that's why people are quoting "500" rather than "200"
I am using it for Spanish (Latin American). It is a useful tool, especially for teaching vocabulary in context, but in my opinion its main weakness is teaching grammar.
I used it for Portuguese and loved it, but I already had a Spanish base. I don't know how it would be for a person to try it without any prior experience.
As MacFadden stated, there are many threads on this topic. However, this thread is the most recent. Hopefully, you will find it helpful. 
The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a stela, a free-standing stone inscribed with Egyptian governmental or religious records. We're confident we'll reach of goal of basic communication in Spanish;Click link site: http://www.perfectrosettastone.info/
I found Rosetta Stone not as easy to learn from as SpanishDict!
