Has anyone tried rosetta stone and found it really worked?

I can’t say enough about Rosetta Stone. I have the Russian one, and I have learned more using this software than I did in 9 years of Russian in school. It is pricey, but no more than you’d pay for one semester at a university. It is a great program, but you have to commit to it. You have to devote time every day to it, otherwise you won’t be getting the full benefit of the program. I haven’t used mine in a while, and I’m going to have to go back a few lessons to catch up.

Also, if you don’t know any Italian, I’d recommend getting an Italian/English dictionary so you can look up words you don’t know.

I tried it .. and it’s like with other language learning programmes, books, audio tapes .. if you want to learn a language in a day, it’s not going to work out. No matter how much they advertise the efficiency, language learning is a years-long activity, and not a mintue-long.

i tried the japanese package.
all i can say is, trying to learn a language like a small child learns its native langue does not work for me.
i could speak some senteces but i did not really know which word meant what.

RS promises on their website “Learn naturally and start speaking immediately—without translation or memorization.” This sounds to me far fetched.

By the way, great sendup of the RS ads you see in the back pages of magazines in The New Yorker a couple of months ago: “Mi Chiamo Stan”: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2009/04/13/090413sh_shouts_frazier.

I love RS I bought the Hindi version because at work I work with mostly Hindi speaking people. It has helped me understand the things they talk about and has assisted me in various communications with them. After you get thru about half of the first level it is good to practice with others in real conversation. There are some online language exchange programs that are great for doing that if you don’t have Italian speakers around you.

In my college, we have a “Language lab”, for which we have to get 16 hours logged throughout the semester for a foreign language class. In it we can watch foreign flicks, do language homework, and use a slightly modified Rosetta Stone (The teachers cherrypick certain exercises to follow their course a bit better).

There is absolutely no way that I could use that Rosetta Stone as my primary source of learning a language. It doesn’t teach you grammar, it doesn’t teach you how to arrive at a sentence, it just says the sentence. It may work for others but that doesn’t work for me, I NEED to know how you get to the end result.

It’s wonderful as a secondary source, to solidify what you’ve learned in class. It was great for practicing pronunciation, and it was wonderful being able to hear a few other native(or, at least, very good) speakers of the language, and it helped boost my vocabulary. But it didn’t teach structure, grammar, etc.

I’m a linguistics major, speak spanish at an advanced level, and generally spend tons of time around other language geeks. Basically everyone I know who claims they learned a language by Rosetta alone is way more lacking in skills than they are aware of. Rosetta tries to teach you in a childlike manner, but language acquisition doesn’t work that way once you are past a threshold.

Check this out too:
http://www.fluther.com/disc/33127/is-rosetta-stone-a-good-way-to-learn-a-language/

and multiple other similar threads here

I’ve been using it for a few months now for learning Italian… and I have to say that it feels like I’m missing something. Thus I’ve been trying to augment my learning with sites in Italian and I’m currently looking for a good reader to supplement my efforts. It’s nice… but expensive…