Rosetta Stone: Learn Languages

I wanted to wait several months before writing a review. I have now been studying Hebrew for six months with Rosetta Stone. I bought the year-long program, and I am on track for a one-year completion. I think you get a lot out of it if you put a lot into it. I study every day. The program is amazing! I had tried another program that was teaching me to transliterate into English first. It was slow and I wasn’t learning much because my eyes always went to the English transliteration rather than the Hebrew letters. I also tried a sample lesson with another company that used only audio as the “best way” to learn a language. I realized I am a visual learner, so just listening to audio did not work for me. But now with Rosetta Stone, I am reading the words in the Hebrew alphabet and understanding what I am reading. I awake in the middle of the night with Hebrew words and phrases running through my mind. The pictures are enjoyable, and help me to understand words and phrases. My vocabulary is amazing! I think my pronunciation is getting better and better as well. It is such a natural and fun way of learning. Right now, I am studying the past tense, and I thought it would be difficult, but I am understanding it just fine. When I get through with Hebrew, I may learn another language through Rosetta Stone just for fun!

If you rely on translating, I don’t think you can ever become fluent. Each language has words and phrases that simply cannot be translated. When you have a conversation in a foreign language and you have to translate the foreign words you hear into your native language and then translate your response from native back into foreign language, you will not only get tired and stressed out but your conversation will not be fluent and natural. What works for me are images. When learning the foreign word for flowers for example, I don’t translate into my native language but imagine a picture of flowers in my head. Then coming up with Blumen, fleures, flores, etc. in a foreign language conversation is much faster and requires much less brain power than translating. Those are just my 2 cents. This approach works best for me. I’m a foreign language major with 4 foreign languages. English is my 3rd language. Everyone is different and has their preferred way of learning but I encourage everyone to try the immersion approach for one or two weeks and see how it goes. App works great. I only encountered one small glitch but that may have been a glitch on my device.

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The teaching on this app, I love. It's a great idea. I wish I'd went month to month at this point though rather than pay for two years. It is the buggiest app I've ever used. In fact, it's so buggy the uncommon word "hate" comes to mind. I went all the way thru module three recently and got to the last lesson. I get a pop-up that says, skipping ahead? You didn't finish all the lessons. I go back and look and sure enough, the Review lesson I'd done said I'd not done it. This particular one I knew I'd done...8 times! You see, for the Review lessons, you can't retake and fix one card, it makes you retake the entire lesson! I wanted a 100% so I retook it until I did. Guess what... It apparently lost all progress. I ended up taking it two more times, finally getting everything right. When I finished, it said I missed one anyways. What!? I have another Review that I know I'll never get right because despite voice set to easy and having taken a year in college of German from a native German, it says I cannot pronounce one word. I gave up. In some lessons I can use the wrong word entirely when I'm trying to guess the dialogue and get a 100% but in the Review, which you must fully retake if you miss something, it won't get the single word right. In short, if you are a perfectionist or have limited time to waste on bugs, this is not the app for you. There are better ones for free that won't make you cuss in front of children or want to throw your phone.

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I got this because I have the actual PC version of the Japanese Rosetta Stone, and I thought I would be able to access it through the app. Instead, it’s acting like it's a completely different thing?? In the app I can see all the progress I’ve made from where I’ve done it on my computer, but I can’t continue anything and the only option is a huge green button that says “unlock full access” which asks if you want to buy a subscription when you hit it. I already bought the program (which was very expensive), so why in the world would I want to pay nearly as much as what I already purchased for the SAME THING I already purchased when I already have it?? This is just as bad as when Adobe switched from selling full real CD copies of their programs to being subscription-based. Very very disappointed that you can’t get free mobile access when you have already bought the darn thing; it feels like they’re punishing people who prefer buying complete versions instead of subscriptions. I could have sworn back when I bought my RS that it said there was a mobile option for people who bought the physical copy, but evidently this isn’t it. If they’re going to treat this like a totally separate thing you have to pay for, it seems like the progress from your physical copy shouldn’t even be there at all.

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You can download the app for free, and even do a lesson. Then it asks you to sign up for a subscription. If you wait a day or so, you get an email with a special offer of $5.99/month. Turns out though, it's not $5.99 a month, it's $147, paid all at once, which gets you a subscription for 24 months. Yes, that comes out to $5.99 a month if you don't understand finance, but it's a lot different if you don't want to pony up that much all at once. Worse, after the term is up, they'll automatically re-subscribe you at their full price, no discount. I hate this underhanded method of taking money from anyone who's not paying attention, and a bunch of people are going to pay a LOT of money for something they don't want. It's close to thievery, and it makes Rosetta Stone nearly dishonest. EDIT: After using this for a couple of weeks, I still think it's pretty good at teaching language. However, the speech module, where it listens to you and grades how well you say things, is completely useless. It doesn't understand you at all, no matter how clearly you say it, and no matter how low you set the bar. I had to turn off the Mic to be able to get through those chapters. The program complained that my Mic was bad, but it works just fine on audio notes and FaceTime, so it's not my Mic.