In this article, we will be taking an in-depth look at the Rosetta Stone Spanish Course, looking at the features, the aims, and letting you know exactly what we thought. This is not something that everyone can get on board with. Their teaching style is certainly a little different from traditional classroom-style learning – the focus is pure language immersion. That said, they have been met with some criticism. Rosetta Stone’s courses are a very popular choice for language learners all over the world. The Spanish courses are just one of many other languages available to learn through Rosetta Stone. Later, they moved to online, cloud-based services for teaching. Rosetta Stone started by teaching languages via CD-Rom. Since the company formed in 1992, it has gone from strength to strength. The money spent on these group sessions would be better spent elsewhere on one-on-one tutoring on websites such as italki, which is both affordable and fully flexible to your time schedule and learning needs.If you have ever taken an interest in learning a language then it is highly likely that you have heard of Rosetta Stone. The tutor follows a strict schedule set by the company and doesn’t have a huge amount of freedom to tailor the lessons to you, limiting you to the slow pace of the program and the needs of the other students. The classes last only 25 minutes and the teacher guides you through different games and exercises (not too different from the course itself). However, given the amount of alternative online programs do exactly the same thing or better (and for a fraction of the price), we feel it’s grossly overpriced.Įven the additional coaching calls are not all they’re made up to be – they are not private classes as the promotional videos suggest but rather group classes with several other students. If you consider a traditional classroom course or a single semester of university, both of which could cost upwards of $1000, then it is comparatively quite affordable.
Simply being exposed to the script in context is not going to cut it.
And regarding the script, it’s very unlikely that you will effectively learn how to read and write Arabic or Chinese without any instruction whatsoever. Whilst the audio is very clear, there’s no advice on how to actually make those sounds correctly, like you find in other programs. Likewise, you’ll find nothing on pronunciation. Without any prior knowledge of the language you are likely to spend most of the lessons very confused, with nothing getting properly explained. The provided ‘context’ is simply not enough to be able to work out the complex verb forms and tenses, especially for languages that are completely different to English like Japanese or Urdu. A line or two in some places would have made a massive difference, but instead you are left grasping in the dark, often with unanswered questions. The program introduces many new concepts and phrases without explaining any of how the language works, it’s intrinsic rules or structures. It’s very difficult to pick up grammar using only Rosetta Stone.