Rosetta Stone - Anyone Tried It?

[Shakey]

Has anyone ever tried the Rosetta Stone software to learn a new language?

Your thoughts.

Thanks in advance.

[Drache]

Actually no, the program will teach you sentances to use, but it wont teach you grammar unless you pay the $500 to learn all three levels. Also you will need the online version on top of that to talk to a real person to start learning the grammar. All in all, it can get pretty expensive and unless you cant take a real course in person, it will suffice.

[sick dawg]

Where I live the population is turning Latino very fast.  My dept. has one of the Rosetta Stone Spanish programs you can sign out to use, but it's always signed out. so I looked into getting one for myself until I found out it was $650.00. So I'll just learn my Spanish on the job in the streets and when I get into a jam, there is plan B. Plan B is when they no Englay, I just dangle cuffs and say too bad, looks like you get locked up until I can find out who you are and weather or not you're wanted for anything. BANG! They remember they speak English! How bout that! Seems to work every time!

[Manfred318]

I have the German version. It seems to work fairly well for me anyways. I kinda gave up on it a few months back and have since forgotten most of what I had learned. I need to pick it up again seeing how I have nothing better to do during the day. I wouldn't recommend forkin over the big bucks for it however, but if you can obtain it by other means its worth having.

[doctorpimp]

We have the Russian version.
It's kinda hard to get a grasp of the russian alphabet's characters.  The program doesn't do a very good job of explaining the grammar basics like Dracche said.  Not too bad if you want to get some basic words/phrases.
You can't beat a real teacher.

[71charger_fan]

I've heard good things about the product. But it's going to have its limits. I've tried Pimsleur, which is a lot less expensive and good for what it does, but there's no substitute for a real teacher. Arabic had me baffled until I finally hired a tutor. Once you start to grasp the patterns and how to construct verbs, it's not so bad. Imagine a language with no verb to be, but it has a was. I would think the software would be much better with a language with many cognates to English. Arabic has almost none. I'm sure you'll learn enough to get by, but I doubt any CD/DVD is going to teach the subtleties.