#3 Rosetta Stone Review

While we've heard some great things about the Rosetta Stone Course, it did not meet our expectations in comparison to some of the other great products we've seen.

Variety of Activities

One of the strengths of this program is that they really do teach you the language in a variety of methods. You recieve audio lessons and video lessons which encompass things like movies, cartoons, and reading exercises. Movies are high-quality, although the reading passages are about as exciting as watching paint dry. While it's certainly nice to have a program to help you learn to read the language, these are so basic that even a child could understand them.

One thing the Rosetta Course has that others lack is the speech recognition software. This is designed to tell you if you are pronouncing the words right, and it's a neat tool to play with, even if it is slightly buggy. If you speak too loudly into the microphone, or if you speak with an accent, then the system will have difficulty interpreting your speech patterns.

Unfortunately, the Rosetta Stone Spanish Course does not provide things like flash cards or audio lessons that are compatible with a regular MP3 or CD Player, so you'll be tied to your computer when progressing through the courses.

Practicality of Lessons

Here is where the Rosetta Stone Spanish Program went terribly wrong. The lessons in the beginning will cover some practical things like numbers and greetings, but after that, the course starts having lessons based around animals and children's games. In fact, after the first few lessons, there is very little which you can use in a regular everyday conversation. You have to wait until you're three or four weeks into the course before you learn anything about food, and it's another week after that before you learn about clothing and body parts.

If you're using this course to plan for a trip, then this is an awful way to go about learning the language.

Linguistic Fundamentals

We felt like the Rosetta Stone Course did a good job of teaching the fundamentals, but didn't go far enough. The picture/word association program was well done, and the vocabulary introduction really does take it one step at a time, but the system doesn't seem capable of too much flexibility. Their beginner module does not introduce the idea of tenses or complex verbs and as such, gives you a very limited ability to form sentences in conversation.

The feedback system you get from working with the software is quite good, especially if you can get the microphone piece to work properly. This is one of the strengths of the program, and is very helpful for learning the forms if you practice without the software on a regular basis. If you use the software as your only basis for practice, then you might be losing out on some learning opportunities because the fact is, there's not too many opportunities for speaking in real sentences like you'll need to in a real, everyday conversation.

Overall

Overall, the Rosetta Stone Spanish Course is fairly good, but it's very expensive, and we've seen much better from brands like Rocket Spanish and even Learning Spanish Like Crazy, both of which got higher reviews and come with a lower price tag.