How would you rate Rosetta Stone for language learning effectiveness? They have a 3-payment lifetime deal. Is it worth 3 payments of $60 each?
0/10, complete waste of money.
Iāve used it in the past. I didnāt find it helpful and gave up.
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Hi, GreenGuy33!
HereĀ“s a comprehensive review by Brian from āAlllanguageResourcesā:
Maybe this is of interest to you in your decision making.
Have a nice day
Peter
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Why do you say you didnāt find it helpful azayra?
RussianInput, why do you say Rosetta Stone is a ācomplete waste of moneyā?
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Because itās useless and leads to zero language acquisition.
When āuselessā also costs tonnes of money when you can get all the content you will ever need online for free, then itās a waste of money.
I thought it very slow and boring to be honest. Admittedly, this was 10 years ago. It felt similar to what duolingo is now. If I would go for that kind of learning system, I would probably opt for pimsleur instead (which in concept is similar, except itās only audio/speaking).
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@RussianInput, āuselessā would be more meaningful if you described in what ways it is useless.
It cannot possibly lead to zero language acquisition because the words appear in the target language permitting people to learn them. Hence there is in fact some language acquisition.
It could, of course, still be useless. In what ways is it useless from your perspective?
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Yeah, no itās just useless.
Itās a pity you are so inarticulate.
You can write in your mother tongue if you wish.
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Rosetta Stone gets pretty low ratings from most of the online language community because it seems to land at the perfect crossroads of what we donāt like. Rote learning, memorization, ānot-funā and surprisingly expensive for what it is. It was developed at a time when a lot of the current online methods were not readily available and Rosetta Stone was pushed pretty heavily in US bookstores back in the day when books stores were a thing in the US, because it was owned by a major publishing house if Iām not mistaken (I forgot which one) This strong arm marketing actually resulted in pushing out some of the better methods from those stores. I remember a day when Assimil packages were readily available at Barnes and Noble, but a few years later, they were no longer around replaced by a heavy rack occupied by US āBig 3.ā Rosetta, Living Language, and Primsleaur ā all 3 of them subpar compared to Assimil.
Can you learn a language with Rosetta Stone? Yes. Any method you spend time with will teach you the language.
Are there a lot of better, smarter, faster, more fun, more thought out alternatives out there? Absolutely, 100 percent, yes! Rosetta Stone is really a āUse in case youāre on a desert island and itās the only form of engaging in a foreign languageā type of method in my opinion.
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It did help me acquire a good amount of French vocabulary back in 2005-7, but itĀ“s way inferior to LingQ. It does end up teaching you vocabulary over time but very little understanding of how long sentences or texts are formed and it is hard to get to the next level by using it. The only thing that is really great about it is how you can still use it even if you are really exhausted to the point that you canĀ“t make sense of any texts you read etc.
I still remember being extremely happy with it during that time and itĀ“s still waaaaaay better than taking some language course. You can certainly get quite a lot out of using Rosetta Stone along with some books that teach the language, simple texts etc. - but then again why not just use LingQ?
I found it very slow and boring as well tbh. I remember trying it on the universityās computers and it was very weird, even the design was if I remember correctly. Not very intuitive. Also I heard about the price afterwards and I was shocked lol.
Though, it is probably way better than Duolingo. Iāve never been able to make major progress on this one and itās a very slow and unefficient way of learning vocabulary. The only useful feature theyāve implemented recently, in my opinion, is the Duolingo stories -although only available in a few languages- Still, Iāve always found it odd that Duolingo had an expensive premium option, itās just not worth it.