Rosetta Stone success stories?

Conveniently, a friend of mine had this as a FB status early today: “I’ve been using Livemocha for over a year and really enjoy it. It is the best free online program available for language learning. Don’t buy Rosetta Stone! This is better and most of the material is free!”

I used both pimsleur and rosetta stone to learn French before I moved to Paris. If you want to build vocabulary, Rosetta Stone works really well, but for conversational language skills, Pimsleur is unmatched.

He was a poor American farm boy.. She was an Italian model.

@janbb
lol4rl

I used Pimsleur for Swahili and liked it. From what I’ve heard about Rosetta Stone, it sounds like it is cheaper to move to some countries and learn the language by real experience than to buy their products.

Another person commented on my friend’s link, saying “Livemocha? For sure I recommend it! Beyond it being the best website for language learning, you also may to be lucky and meet someone very special marking on your assignments. ;)”

Sounds like the difference is real people.

Livemocha is really great, community powered, with real exchanges, a lot of people on it, and yes, nice surprises can happen to you, guess why I’m moving to China in 3 months ? ;)

I never tried Rosette nor Pimsleur, but learning with someone real is in my own opinion a better experience, with a real feedback, comments and real advices or mental way to remember things.

Okay, that is the feeling I got too. @benandrewdrew After lesson 1 of Rosetta Stone, I could describe every object in the house in size, color, what it is & where it is. As for being able to piece together a sentence to converse with someone, I was very limited. I’ll check out Pimsleur & see if I can work it into Rosetta Stone lessons.

I tried to learn Italian through it… it blows. I barely learned anything, and what I did learn I can’t remember any of it now, a year later.

I tried to learn Spanish through it, but I just didn’t keep up with it. We still own it, but I haven’t picked it up since my last failed attempt several years ago.

I understand what the program is trying to use, as it is appealing to both auditory and visual learner.

I think if you followed along with it daily (or as often as you can) you’ll get acquainted with the language and maybe be able to understand some phrases and words.