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Rosetta Stone Spanish Review
Who is behind it - The Company
Rosetta Stone is a well-respected, publicly traded company that distributes off-line and online courses in 31 different languages, including Its Rosetta Stone Spanish product. It prides itself on its belief that learning a language should be fun, easy and effective.
Its headquarters is based in Arlington, Virginia.
Its target audiences include those wishing to learn a language for its sake: business professionals; schools; Armed Forces and home schoolers.
Product Details
Rosetta Spanish is not an online Spanish Language course. Rather you buy this product in a box filled with CD-ROMs. This company uses a “Dynamic Immersion” approach to learning a language. It claims that its approach is similar to how you and I actually learned our own languages ourselves. Immersion Spanish experience in a Spanish-speaking country is based on similar principles.
Rosetta states there is no need for translation, memorising or any verb drills in using its course. It uses activities, association of words to images, and positive feedback.
Learning topics revolve around greetings, basic questions and directions, introducing yourself, telling the time, naming and ordering food and drink, shopping, feelings, socialising, travel, work, interests and current events. Apparently there is some academic research showing that Rosetta Spanish really works.
Rosetta Spanish version 3 is the company's latest software on the market in 2010. It features its own in-house speech recognition program for instant language feedback,. This assists your correct Spanish pronunciation, and comes in a Spanish or Latin American mode. This Rosetta Spanish version includes around 10,000 photographic images for purpose of association with words and phrases plus around 15,000 sound files.
There are five skill Levels in the entire course and four different editions. These are, the personal edition, a classroom edition, enterprise edition and homeschool edition.
Version 3 includes five Latin American Spanish packages and five Castilian Spanish packages.
Lets have a quick look as to what is in each Level.
Rosetta Stone Spanish Spanish Level I
This level means to give you basic Spanish and some confidence to begin to speak Spanish yourself. It aims to give you some conversational skills and an ability to answer simple questions.
What you find in your product box for each level is:
- Version 3 Personal Edition CD-ROM software for the relevant Level
- USB Headset with a microphone
- A user’s guide
- A multiple-CD set to play or download to your MP3 player
Cost $229 for each of the five levels - and you end up with five headsets!
Level II
At this level you learn about navigating your surroundings in Spanish. Such topics as giving or receiving directions, telling the time, eating out, and some basic socialising are included.
Level III
In this level the aim is for you to gain the ability to express your ideas, talk about everyday life and work and more.
Level IV
Here Rosetta Stone Spanish aims to teach you about more complex social situations. A greater level of conversational skills on a variety of topics is included at this level
Level V
Level V includes games to refine crucial communication skills around topics such as culture and entertainment, the marketplace and government.
Once you are a Rosetta Stone Spanish registered user "Shared Talk" is available to you. This is a large online practice environment where you can practice your language skills with other students.
Awards
Rosetta is the recipient of a number of awards. These include:
- Cathy Duffy 100 Top Picks for Homeschool Curriculum 2005
- Homeschooling Parent Magazine, Homeschool Stamp of Approval for Foreign Language
2004–2006
- Award-Winning Curriculum, Practical Homeschooling Reader Award,1st Place in Foreign Language Category. 2002–2008
- The Old Schoolhouse, Excellence in Education Award for Foreign Language, 2004-2008
Rosetta Stone Spanish Consumer Complaints & Comments
User comment in the form of testimonials should only represent one component in your assessment of any product.
Nevertheless such feedback can be an indicator of quality and many people look for them. Therefore Spanish Lessons Online has done some of that legwork for you. In this case we selected Amazon.com as a rich source of presumably genuine user feedback on Rosetta Stone Spanish Products available there.
So here they are...
Some things you should think about before you buy this expensive program. Learning a new language while fun is also very time consuming. The person taking the course needs to be motivated to continue because this isn't a 2 week course but a learning system and will take you a year working every day to become fluent enough to actually use the language. …
I did quite a bit of research to find a program I could really learn the language at home on my own schedule. This is the best program I found. The program teaches you how to understand, speak, read and write the language. It is done all in Spanish through pictures. You are shown a picture and you are expected to respond in Spanish. The voice recognition decides if you are speaking it correctly and does not continue until you do. I have been working with it for 5 months now and really enjoy it.
What else do you need besides the course? Well, I would suggest a good Spanish/English dictionary. Sometimes it is hard to tell exactly what is shown in the picture.
Gary P, Amazon.com 2009
By simply going thru (sic) the exercises your will develop the numerous skills required to know and use a new language. You are simultaneously learning the vocabulary and grammar as well as learning to hear and speak Spanish.
J.Grice, Amazon.com 2008
More feedback on Rosetta Stone Spanish
All in all, we love the product, but find the customer support to be severely lacking.
I purchased this product for myself and kids to learn Spanish over the summer. We have not had a good experience with phone support. After several calls, we are still unable to resolve a simple issue with product activation.
Cougar, Amazon.com 2008
I'm surprised at the poor reviews. Apparently, the packaging issue has been resolved, as my discs were not glued to the box. That aside, I LOVE this program! ... at the end of each little section, I am joyfully surprised at what I'm actually retaining. This program is great!
J Bell 2008
This is way overpriced for what you get and the software development is years behind. The versions don't change much, so you might save some money by purchasing an older version.
My real problem is that my laptop's DVD drive won't read the CD needed to run the application after the install. This is worthless now to me. My laptop is a year old.
This is the second time this has happened, the first time I had similar problems with the disc/install. Rosetta tries so hard to copy protect their discs, that it makes them unreadable by some drive manufacturers.
BP, Sep 26, Amazon.com 2009
Cost
Simple maths tells us that five times $229 equals $1,145. Rosetta Spanish has various price packages Where you can buy any combination of one to five levels.
Still, the full five level set will cost you $999.
Six month no-risk money-back guarantee when you buy CD-ROM products direct from Rosetta Stone.
Recommendation
Spanish lessons online is only giving you a description of the Rosetta Stone Spanish product based on researching many sources on the Internet. We know that Rosetta's Dynamic Immersion Approach appears to be based on active association between sound, image and practice.
There are other Spanish-language products which do this too, including online language games, memory aids and support. Rocket Spanish and Synergy Spanish are two of them. These courses are priced much cheaper than Rosetta Stone Spanish is, and are available instantly online. Of course they do not have the speech recognition software that Rosetta has but it seems that there may be some problems with their software based on some Amazon.com consumer comments.We were surprised by the mixed feedback in these user comments for this well-known language course brand. We have just given you a few here and suggest you go to Amazon.com yourself to see the full range of comments if you are considering Rosetta Spanish. Main problems seem to be the software itself and support, while the language program itself is often rated highly.
Overall Spanish lessons online feels that if you want to Try a Rosetta Stone Spanish you must consider compiling a list of hard questions, ring their customer support, and then decide what is the best way to learn Spanish based on their answers.
If we could have rated this program on its language content alone we may have rated it higher than the two stars we have given it for now.
You can try this free introductory Spanish online course here.
No waiting for shipping and instantly useable.
Have you used this product?
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