Rosetta Stone Review

Rosetta stone is an amazing resource for language learning. I have tried French levels 1 and 2, as well as Russian level 3. This program helps people to learn a foreign language and improve their reading, writing and speaking skills through the use of various activities. It also offers instant immersion, since pictures are used to convey the meaning of each phrase.

The speaking activities involve pronouncing syllables, words or phrases. When you say each word, the computer will rate how well you pronounced it. It is also possible to change the difficulty of that meter. There are other activities for listening, in which the program will speak a sentence and you have to choose the corresponding picture. There are also grammar activities, as well as writing activities. In the grammar activities, the user selects the appropriate word from a pull down menu. In the writing exercises, the computer will say a phrase and then the user writes it out.

The good thing about this program is that it offers instant immersion, as well a good base of vocabulary. I don't think that the grammar building is very effective for all languages. It can teach you how to conjugate verbs and the rules of agreement, but I would think you would have to have prior knowledge of how that works, because none of the rules are explained. Also, it is ineffective for languages like Russian, because they use a case system. There are many irregularities for noun endings, and as I mentioned, this is not explained. For an English speaker, who has never taken Russian, this could be quite confusing, since we don't really recognize the cases that we use, and many of the languages that we learn are romance languages, which do not follow strict case systems. Another short coming for Rosetta Stone is the lack of video. There is a milestone at the end of each unit, but it is quite slow moving. They should have some sort of video to watch and answer questions about, so users can see the facial expressions and gestures native speakers use. Rosetta Stone also does not have an alphabet or pronunciation guide, which is key for learning an alphabet in another script and also necessary for reading. The activities are fun at first, but they begin to become a bit tedious after awhile. Another short coming of Rosetta Stone is the price. It is extremely expensive and thus not available to many people.

The reality is that there is access to many resources on the web for free that aid in foreign language acquisition. Rosetta Stone just makes it more convenient, since they provide many of the necessities in the form of a structured course that one can work at at their own pace.