I have been "learning" Russian using Rosetta stone for over a year. I put in about an hour a day. My big complaint with Rosetta stone is that you have to guess what the words mean. There is no translation of anything. Not even the books that come with it. HAY if I could read Russian I would not need your course. You see pictures and then can see the russian text and hear the word(S). But what item in the picture are they talking about? Ok at first there is one word - like "dog" but when you progress there may be 10 to 15 words. They never tell you any grammer rules so suddenly the word you thought you knew is spelled entirely different..why?.. be cause it is past tense or HE said it not you? They simple make you guess. Maybe the guide book could be in a language you can read and at least be of some help? You will not learn much with just this course. Remember when you asked mom - what does this word mean? Well get use to "look it up in the dictionary" and also buy a Russia - English grammer book.
Aug 04, 2009 Rating
Rosetta Stone OK to a point by: Sydney Wayman
My wife and I used Rosetta stone to learn conversational Russian before our 3 week trip to Russia. I had a difficult time with the CD's, but my wife used a real person Language interpretation software called Codetalker to build her verbal proficiency.
Codetalker Technologies makes the application for Blackberry. You can even schedule time with a real person interpreter on the drive to work.
Codetalker+Rosetta Stone=Fast Learning.
Besides, Codetalker was a great help in Russia and other European countries.
Sep 21, 2008 Rating
DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT by: Anonymous
I wanted to learn Japanese, and seeing as my friend bought the Rosetta Stone for it, I decided that that would be a great way to try it.
How wrong I was!
Since no conjugations are laid out, one is totally tripped up when past and future tenses are (fleetingly) introduced. And because Japanese has three different verbs for "to be," what with a textbook lesson could have been an obvious distinction between the three turned into something extremely confusing. What one gets is a Frankenstein of learning: a few words here, a verb there, a useless phrase thrown in. Furthermore, the form of the verb used is odd-- the word for drink is "nomimasu" but they use drinking-- "nonde" which renders you unable to look up the word in a dictionary because the stem is modified for that tense. Instead of simply writing "The boy drinks" they write "The boy is drinking," which makes sense, but again renders you helpless when you wish to look up the word.
One would argue that if they put explanatory notes in it would limit their product to one language, but as this is a LANGUAGE LEARNING PROGRAM, they should have no problem translating those helpful explanations, right? And they really are necessary.
For anyone else wishing to learn Japanese, I would recommend the extremely helpful and easy to understand Japanese for Busy People text book, which is illustrated with things clearly explained and also comes with a CD for you to hear. It is moderately priced. I hear that the textbook Genki is also good.
Because you only guess the meaning of the words, it is very easy to get confused. You are left with no understanding of sentence structure or grammar, or of particles ESSENTIAL to make Japanese sentences. Idioms serve only to screw you up because you are already teetering on the edge of uncomprehension.
Furthermore, there are typos! In Japanese, the long o sound is either spelled as 'ou' or o with a line over it. But Rosetta Stone uses 'oo'! This will screw you up if you wish to learn the reading! Also, there is not enough emphasis on actually being able to read in any one of the three types of characters because it's so tempting to use the Romanized letters as a crutch. Nowhere is there laid out what character corresponds to what sound. And if you're trying to learn kanji, where one character goes for one word, you can just forget it!
