Should I Use Rosetta Stone to Learn Spanish?

~ Clarissa

This is a question I get asked so often both by the readers of this blog and people I meet in real life that I decided to answer it here.

In my opinion of a person who has been teaching foreign languages for over 21 years and somebody who speaks two foreign languages on a daily basis, the answer is absolutely not. I consider Rosetta Stone to be a complete waste of time and money.

I love computers as much as the next person but the sad truth of the matter is that you cannot learn a language by staring at a computer screen. Rosetta Stone’s method is gimmicky but offers very little substance. I’d understand it if people bought it to learn Ukrainian, for example, because finding a native speaker of Ukrainian in most parts of the US is very hard. You can find a Spanish-speaking buddy, however, in most regions of this country.

If you need suggestions on how to learn to speak Spanish, here is a post I wrote about this.

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Published by Clarissa

9 thoughts on “Should I Use Rosetta Stone to Learn Spanish?”

  1. Ah. So my impression of RS was right. I tried it on several occasions and found it very tedious to work with and the effort/results ratio was abysmal. And this is coming from someone who’s patient enough to stick to things for quite a while.
    And you know the worst part is that they just use the same application with different language files. This means that, whatever language you use, the exact same photos and scenarios are presented. So learning anything about the people who speak the language, let alone their culture, is completely non existent.
    Basically, the most important part – communication – is just omitted.

    Even if you can’t meet native speakers, I’m sure there are better programs or books than this.

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  2. I am so rusty in French and pathetic in self-taught Italian that I probably have no business commenting. I like contemporary newspapers and magazines, even comix (Asterix) and blogs, in the target language. No, these aren’t literary. Chances are, you the novice have enough information about the newspaper article topic to decipher the article with a little help from a dictionary. I used to listen to Francophone CBC programs when I lived closer to the border.

    If I wanted to pick up some conversational Spanish, I might subscribe to cable and watch telenovelas (TV without guilt!) as well as tackle the local Spanish-speaking colleagues.

    I have dealt with grad. students and residents with language programs, and love advising the gearheads to watch one of the soaps or some recurring TV program on a regular basis.

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  3. I’ve tried Rosetta Stone Japanese and somewhat agree. I think the only reason I was able to keep up with it as well as I did is because I’ve actually taken Japanese classes in the past so it was more recall and relearn than learn from scratch. But goodness it was so tedious that I lost focus. That being said unlike other languages watching Japanese tv to learn it is NOT a good idea. Translating Japanese to English is not a pretty task and often things are lost in translation (so if you’re thinking about watching anime to learn Japanese, DON’T)

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  4. Rosetta doesn’t do much more than getting yu big toe wet. But for some people who have close to crippling language anxiety, people who are convinced they can never do anything in some other language, this can be huge.

    It does have one very useful feature. For tone languages if you use the microphone function it will map out visually how well you are pronouncing the tones as you speak them. With consonants you can coach soemone how to set their tongue or lips, with vowels you can tell them how ot shape the oral cavity, which is pretty hard sometimes, but tones are even less tangible than vowels and it can just get hopeless. I tried this with the Vietnamese version. I know Mandarin and Mandarin tones are easy. Cantonese tones are really diffenrnet, but still not that big a problem. Viet tones have always defeated me. But with this visual mapping, at least I could see how far off I was. There are lots of Vietnamese speakers around, but no one has ever been able to help much.

    But there approach would completely useless for a truly exotic grammatical structure such as you find in Navajo or a Salish language

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  5. SO COMPLETELY agree. I spent a summer as an intern in the US State Department. Their diplomats spend 1-2 years studying with the Rosetta Stone program (or a program exactly the same with a different name) before they go to a country with a language they cannot speak. I was working in a country with a language I am fluent in. Though they spent AT LEAST a year being paid to study the language full-time, the diplomats and other staff were absolutely incomprehensible. I mean, as incomprehensible as Americans who know no Spanish pretending to speak it by saying “andale al house-o” and things like that. It was incredibly embarrassing to watch my country represented this way.

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  6. Rosetta stone is a scam for all I concerned. It moves abysmally slow and has nothing even close to adequate in terms of grammar or pronunciation. Luckily I didn’t pay for it. Thank you pirate hub!

    Now I am in spanish 101 at Cornell which goes at a blistering speed – I love it!

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