Rosetta Stone: Learn Languages 4+

Fast and engaging way to learn, especially for beginner and intermediate learners

I’ve used Rosetta Stone off and on for years now. When I first traveled to China, I had powered through level 1 mandarin a few months before the trip and everyone I met said my accident was SO good, even though my vocabulary was still at beginner level. Still, I had the skills and confidence to try living and socializing in China. I attribute Rosetta Stone with this early success. Since then, I’ve gone on to study mandarin in graduate school and in a semester in China, and I still use mandarin level 4-5 to brush up on my skills. The combination of engaging visuals, plus authentic chinese audio and the option to use real Chinese characters plus pinyin (written Chinese for English speakers) also gave me confidence jumping into the wild world of written characters.

Once you get to advanced language levels, you will definitely want to supplement Rosetta Stone with advanced book learning (think formal classroom textbooks) and plenty of conversation with real speakers, but even then Rosetta is still useful for brushing up on key vocabulary with good visuals. Especially for the beginner and intermediate learner, I can’t speak highly enough if Rosetta Stone. If I could suggest one improvement, bring back the games and make more of them!! This was a fun way to keep learning the language when maybe I was too brain-drained after work to do a full lesson.

Rosetta Stone is tops!

I wanted to wait several months before writing a review. I have now been studying Hebrew for six months with Rosetta Stone. I bought the year-long program, and I am on track for a one-year completion. I think you get a lot out of it if you put a lot into it. I study every day. The program is amazing! I had tried another program that was teaching me to transliterate into English first. It was slow and I wasn’t learning much because my eyes always went to the English transliteration rather than the Hebrew letters. I also tried a sample lesson with another company that used only audio as the “best way” to learn a language. I realized I am a visual learner, so just listening to audio did not work for me. But now with Rosetta Stone, I am reading the words in the Hebrew alphabet and understanding what I am reading. I awake in the middle of the night with Hebrew words and phrases running through my mind. The pictures are enjoyable, and help me to understand words and phrases. My vocabulary is amazing! I think my pronunciation is getting better and better as well. It is such a natural and fun way of learning. Right now, I am studying the past tense, and I thought it would be difficult, but I am understanding it just fine. When I get through with Hebrew, I may learn another language through Rosetta Stone just for fun!

App is a little frustrating & confusing layout

I enjoy the app, but it has an odd setup. I want to redo some of my old lesson plans on the Home tab, but see no option to do so. I’ve been out of the app for a bit, so wanted to redo the older lessons as a refresher but when I click on it, it only shows my previous score. It also says I’m on week 3 but then in the plan overview, it says only week 1 is completed. Perhaps I can redo on the Learn tab, but locating the lessons I did on the Home tab is impossible. It doesn’t line up at all, so I have no idea where to find the specific lesson I wanted to redo. Also, the pronunciation /story read back parts are the most frustrating. I love reading and hearing the stories in German. It is a nice idea, but most times the speech recognition doesn’t work properly. I’m clearing saying the words correctly, but it keeps marking it as wrong. I’m not sure why. It’ll say it’s wrong, then I will say it the same way and it’s right. Often times it doesn’t seem to pick up that I said anything, so I’ll have to say it twice. Sometimes I find myself shouting at my phone in frustration having to repeat myself 5 times for it to register. Just now I disabled the microphone at this section, because it was just too offputting. It also crashes & signs you out a lot if you go outside the app for a translation (since they don’t offer it in the app)
I purchased the lifetime membership, so if these issues get fixed I will come back and update my rating.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for providing the feedback. We're currently working on improvements to the issues to the speech engine. We're gathering as much detail as we can to find solutions to these issues. An uninstall & reinstall may help temporarily. We do not have an option to reset all of your progress at once. However, we do have the option to reset an individual lesson. To reset an individual lesson: Go back to a lesson you'd like to restart, but before entering the lesson, you should be at a screen that shows your current score, correct/incorrect count, etc. You should also have a ""Reset"" option depicted by two arrows going in a circle. Tap this icon to reset the progress for that lesson. The same steps can be followed for any other lessons you'd like to restart. Your plan will reflect a different completion of the lessons vs the Explore all content which will show you all the lessons the subscription includes, however if you need help please contact our product support team at https://support.rosettastone.com/s/contactsupport?language=en_US to better assist you. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.