Top positive review
5 people found this helpful
excellent for beginers and for non-beginners
By Ruth on Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2010
I have never taken a class in Spanish, but have picked up bits of it from students and parents over the years... just enough to communicate on a very basic level. I bought the Rosetta Stone Latin American Spanish to help me with vocabulary and with my listening skills. It is great. I love how the language is paired with pictures so I can recall the picture that conveys the meaning. It is presented in such a way that there is no difficulty figuring out which words the pictures are teaching, and the native language speakers have just enough differences in their accents to provide experience hearing the same words said in slightly different ways. There is a great deal of review built into the program to help make recall more automatic, and I find myself practicing phrases or thinking of words throughout the day from the lesson I have just finished. They just pop into my head :-) I listen to the reinforcing audio CD in the car after I finish a lesson and find that the pictures used for the words and phrases really do come to my mind. The online part is a little scary at first, but fun. There are games to play to reinforce learning at the level you have reached that are for single players (not so scary) double players, and more... I have played a few of the double player games and it was interesting to use the language I had learned to communicate with another learner at my level. I have not yet scheduled a session for using my Spanish with an online native language speaker, but plan to soon. This would be a great way for people who do not have access to native language speakers to practice. i have native language speakers available to me at work, and they are helping me practice. The single player games are different enough that they reinforce learning in different ways, all of them beneficial. I particularly like one which reads at a normal pace, a reading or is like a news report and then i am to find the words that I know and hear that are embedded in what I am hearing. I can't say enough that is good about this program. I find it fun and I am learning from it. i have not yet reached a point where i am over my head, and I do not expect to get that feeling considering how the material is presented and the multiple ways for review and practice that are built in. I listen, speak, practice pronunciation (which gives me feedback if I am correct or incorrect), and write. I am learning vocabulary, grammar, and conversation. And the Spanish I have been using has been improving according to the native language speakers with whom I work.
Top critical review
248 people found this helpful
Does Rosetta Stone work? Here's your answer.
By Amazon Customer on Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2011
Beginning with Level 1, I am now halfway through Level 5. So I think I'm qualified to give good insight on what it's good at, what it's not, and the big question: does Rosetta Stone "work." First, it's fun and actually addictive. I've come this far in less than a month. I avidly look forward to my Spanish sessions, and am reluctant to stop. So the fun factor is 5 stars. But RS gets there by pandering to its audience, and for being too easy in places. When it's not multiple choice - the easy part - it gets hard real quick. You sail through all the MC parts, and then you hit the Writing section. It can be murder - and that's even with the accent-sensitive feature turned off! It's hard because it's not multiple choice, it's unforgiving, and it's more like real language lessons. The rest of the course should be more this way. But then it would be more like work, and far fewer people would buy. So RS takes the short cuts. What it's good at is teaching vocabulary. The repetition and the pictures work just fine. What it's terrible at is grammar and verb tenses. Here the pictures are often no help at all. RS Spanish desperately needs a companion grammar book. RS is now like a bad teacher in school. He or she might have been a great teacher, but they decided that there was only way to teach, and they closed their minds to the other ways. I should say that I've supplemented my RS sessions by immersing myself in Spanish-language radio, TV, and newspaper. This is easy to do almost anywhere, but still easier for me since I live in L. A. Start listening to radio en espanol and you'll immediately know the limitations of Rosetta Stone. The words come out like machine-gun fire, all strung together. At first, this was painful to do. I felt like a stroke victim - awakening in a world where I knew only one word in ten, and everything was moving far too fast for me. After a few weeks, though, I just got used to it. If I concentrate hard, I can maybe make out 10- 20% of what's being said, and at least I get the general drift. I am determined to live in this "stroke" world longer, and we'll see if the magical thing that people talk about, a sort of language osmosis, will some day come to me. But I doubt if it will be soon. Reading is easier. Tip: subscribe to El Universal on your Kindle, and set a Spanish to English dictionary as the default dictionary. You can look up words on the fly, and read at something like a slow-normal rate. This might end up being a better learning tool - and far cheaper! - than Rosetta Stone (though it doesn't help with pronunciation). As for the much-groused-about voice recognition feature, I think it's fine. Occasionally it doesn't recognize a phrase until you've repeated it a dozen times, but it's rare enough. The fact is, YOU know when you've pronounced something right - we don't need a computer to tell us. Finally, what RS is good for, and how it's worked for me, is focusing my work on the language. It can be a central tool, and a fun one. But it can't be the only tool. Es imposible.
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