A review of Rosetta Stone's online version

ZD Net talks about Rosetta Stone online.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=10299

$1000 is pretty steep and I still doubt that it can actually take you from beginner to intermediate to advanced.

Plus, as far as I’m aware, you can’t freeze your usage during that one year period. Once the one year is up you’ve got to pay another $999 to keep going.

Hopefully one day we’ll see LingQ mentioned as an alternative on other websites (in this article, there was Livemocha, BabalaH, Palabea, Busuu and Learn10).

Steve,

You should invite of the author of that piece to come and learn a language here on LingQ for one year. He can then tell us if forking out $999 for Rosetta Stone is such a good deal.

$1000? Hahahaha. Considering RS is one of the popular self-study language resources out there, this doesn’t do much to dispel the false notion that language learning is an expensive undertaking. Dear god, who will be bought in by this?

the Rosetta stone goal is to earn money- teaching you something is a slight side effect

Before coming to LingQ I used loads of other methods, Rosetta Stone being one of them. Just let me say other than a Picture Dictionary it isnt a really good program.

Rosetta Stone is all the “survival language learning” that is with learning a language in a school or tutoring session, but without the physical teacher. I have a copy of Rosetta Stone. I constantly use it to practice, but it isn’t engaging at all. I agree with Eze. Excellent study tool, but not to be used as a stand-alone teaching program.

LingQ, however, is different in the sense that you will definitely get a lot more human interaction and immersion. You can do everything that you can do in Rosetta Stone on LingQ and then some. With Rosetta Stone, you get bits and pieces, but on LingQ, you will obtain mountains of continuous information. 15 minute conversations hold a lot more weight than one-word sound bites and a picture.

The creators of Rosetta Stone say the “no translation” approach is better. It can be, but LingQ shows what you can do with a dictionary-based learning system. Sure, it gets boring every now and again, but language learning is a long process. The more effort you put into it, the better you will feel when you say your first full sentence and strike up conversation in your target language. :slight_smile:

Thanks for this insight, Steve. I’ve often wondered about Rosetta Stone and the article pretty much correlate with my feelings as well. I’ve been on the fence whether or not to obtain a paid Lingq subscription, but it seems clear to me that I will. I am adamant about becoming fluent in Russian with 1 year (Nov. 2015), so I better stop looking around and just do it the Lingq way!

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