Rosetta Stone Spanish

Rosetta Stone is a sprawling multimedia language-learning product, one whose marketing has been so effective that it is the first thing most people hearing of this website ask me about. Although Rosetta Stone can be fun initially—in part because it is so polished and pretty that it just kind of makes you feel good—I haven’t yet been able to find people who have actually finished the program and felt they could communicate effectively because of it.

For Spanish, Rosetta Stone offers five levels of their TOTALe product, which also includes online “Studio sessions” with a native Spanish speaker.

I didn’t spend much time with Rosetta Stone Spanish, because my skills in that language were already advanced, but I have used their products extensively for other languages. Overall I regard Rosetta Stone as mildly amusing but ineffective, a point of view I detail in a December 2011 blog entry.

If you want a language-learning product that is not too mentally taxing and you like to be on a computer, you might enjoy it for a while. But if any of the following describe you, I would look elsewhere:

• You really want to learn to speak Spanish.
• You want to understand the grammar.
• You don’t like sitting at your computer clicking things.
• You don’t like wasting money.

Pimsleur, for example, is a far superior option for Spanish.