Learning languages with RosettaStone?

My mother doesn’t speak a word of Spanish, while I have a background of four years in high school, three in college and some general speaking experience. I have looked at the beginning Spanish program she bought from Rosetta and I found it kind of neat, a good way to brush up on things I may have forgotten, but I wouldn’t recommend it for not having any previous exposure to a language.

Having said that, we all learn differently. Rosetta is not for me. You may find otherwise.

I haven’t had any experience with the program but for some amount of time I had a friend who was learning Arabic with the program; he liked it a lot, saying that the way it pushed you in was affective and that he was picking it up quickly.

I really hate the UI. It’s pretty confusing and it looks like it was made in the 90’s. That being said it does have in interesting approach to teaching a new language. I tried learning italian and it start off with teaching me random words and things with no relation to each other.

When I was taking German at college, we had to use Rosetta Stone. It was a great way to really solidify the things you learned in class, and a great way to add more words to your vocabulary, and it was nice hearing presumably native-speakers speak the language.
But it never really got into lessons on how to construct sentences, nor grammar. So all you could really do is repeat the sentences it gave you.
Certainly some of it you can simply figure it out, (e.g. if it gave you Me llamo XYZ, and Te llamas ZYX, etc) but when you were dealing with dative, genitive, accusative, and you were dealing with past verbs, and present verbs, it’s kind of weird. You just kind of had to assume things meant certain things.

So, I found it to be an excellent secondary source of knowledge. But primary? Not for me. You may feel otherwise though.

There are plenty of free resources similar to Rosetta Stone, though. I used a website called livemocha.com, you may want to try that out. There’s a whole community behind it, and you can end up submitting written/spoken (if you have a mic) things to be reviewed by other people. They definitely do have a Spanish program, as well as other languages (I used this for a tertiary source of German knowledge while taking German classes).
Some languages, such as Dutch, are comprised entirely from submissions by the community. So you will hear so many different people saying the words, it’s amazing.

I’ve never seen a home-study foreign language course that actually works. Although I have not tried Rosetta Stone, I suspect it is the same “listen & repeat” junk that all other courses are based on.

I bought all three levels of Japanese for my son. That’s what he wanted for his 17th birthday. Have at it, I say. He plans to take Japanese in college and teach English in Japan. Go figure.

What about Fluenz? It came up a lot in my research, and it seems great for the more adult speaker who wants to learn grammar.

Search Fluther.com. This has been discussed over and over again. Someone just asked about this like three days ago. Ugh.

@Sarcasm That’s great. Another GA. Hopefully this works for me.