An honest, detailed review

by David Bankson
(Houston, Texas)

I rate the program 5 out of 5 stars. It's fantastic and is a great supplement with other language-learning methods.

My father, who moved to Chile a couple of months ago, has been using Rosetta Stone for Latin American Spanish for about 3 months or so, and I've been using it for a couple of weeks. Together we have figured out a few things regarding this program.

One is that you can't expect to make sentences during the first unit of the program. So many people use Rosetta Stone expecting to have conversations immediately, and it doesn't work that way. You have to be patient, make sure you pay attention to what you're doing, and eventually things will fall into place in your mind naturally.

And sure, the program makes it where you can easily be lazy at it, but nobody said the program is forces you to be self motivated. If you really want to learn the language, you won't be lazy and just sit there guessing at stuff, that would be pointless, and really, who is planning on spending $500+ just to randomly guess?

Another is that this program is a PERFECT accompaniment with a real Spanish language course. You CAN learn to speak the language if you go through all three courses, but with an actual class to attend, you will pick up the language at a speed you never thought was actually possible. My father is actually taking 4 hours of Spanish in Chile every day right now, and this is his opinion. He found verb conjugation confusing since there's no english to explain little things like when to use "soy" verses "estoy" (both of which mean "i am" in different contexts). Personally, I don't find that to be too confusing, if you just continue the program then eventually, from all the different pictures you see, you end up saying "Ohhh THAT'S what that means!" It's my opinion that that is the strongest part of this program, that you don't just have answers fed to you like "dog=perro", but instead you just have to use your intuition, just like when you learned your first language in life.