Reviews of Rosetta Stone English (American) Level 1-5 Set

Rosetta Stone English (American) Level 1-5 Set

by Rosetta Stone
Platform: Windows Vista / 7 / XP, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

Our Method - Recreate the natural way you learned your first language and reveal skills that you already have using Dynamic Immersion. This award-winning method has been adopted by countless organizations, schools and millions of users around the world.

Learn Naturally: Discover how to speak, read, write, and understand--all without translating or memorizing. Our award-winning solution recreates how you learned your first language, unlocking your natural abilities.

Speak Confidently: Perfect your pronunciation with speech-recognition technology. Gain the confidence in your new voice as you practice with other learners in our exclusive online community and participate in online sessions coached by native tutors.

Immerse Yourself: Be surrounded by your new language. From core lessons to online sessions, Rosetta Stone gets you engaged and interacting with others.

Stay Motivated: Experience accomplishment with each moment of achievement; with dedicated success agents you will never lose sight of your language-learning goals.

Your Natural Ability. Awakened. Natural Discovery - Learning your first language is as natural as smiling. Effortless. Rewarding. Every step in Rosetta Stone feels like that. Clear, compelling images appear precisely, in juxtaposition, conveying meaning. Intuitively, you just know what it means...Buy Now!, Save $270 (36%) down from $479 with free shipping from $749!

Rosseta Stone English level 1-5 Set, March 26, 2011

By Lyz
This review is from: Rosetta Stone English (American) Level 1-5 Set (CD-ROM)

It's amazing, si no aprendo con este curso, me doy por vencida, es super super, uno empieza y no quiere para de estudiar, Habia escuchado muchos elogios y ahora lo entiendo, LO RECOMIENDO AMPLIAMENTE.


A great program for enhancing English fluency. But it still helps to crack a book, conjugate a few verbs, and study..., March 18, 2011

By APC Reviews "APC Reviews" (USA)
This review is from: Rosetta Stone English (American) Level 1-5 Set (CD-ROM)

Writing a review of Rosetta Stone English is problematic because, of course, the review is being written in English for an English language web site, for a product intended for persons who do not, as of yet, speak fluent English. That said, and assuming that a English speaking friend or Google Translate is helping someone read this, one might ask: Will using Rosetta Stone English allow you to say "I am amazed that I am able to speak fluent American accented English after using this program for only a few weeks! I will now go to America and speak with the Americans there as though I was born in California"?

Probably not. It is, however, a very useful and well thought out program.

The Rosetta Stone line of language products all share the same basic design and interface. The key to the Rosetta Stone system is the presentation of word and action associations, influenced by context. This simulates the sort of cues that one would parse and process in speaking any language, even your own native language. Normally, you don't think about this as you speak your own language. But it's one of the hardest things to simulate outside of dealing with a second language in its own country and having the chance to deal with real life situations involving speakers of the second language.

Each screen is accompanied by a phrase, spoken out loud by a native speaker in the program, and four slightly different picture scenes that require you to pick the one that the sentence is referring to. Beginning at a very basic level -- such as "the boy is under the tree" (in whatever language) with four pictures of a boy next to, under, in the limbs of and cutting down the tree -- your proficiency improves as you move through these basic cues to more advanced and complex speaking and contexts. By the end of the program you are dealing with fairly complex situations, sentences and associations.

The program also allows you to repeat the phrase and, using the supplied microphone, match and score your own pronunciation against the supplied sample. You can also test your ability to properly write out a second language by spelling out and typing the phrase, although the work arounds for using a US English QWERTY keyboard with the special characters and distinct keyboard layouts used by different languages can be awkward. There are several variations on all the visual, verbal and textual tests.

The most important question one must answer when considering this product is: will it, as the advertising suggests, be a magic gateway to language learning that is all you need? The answers is: sort of.

First, this is an expensive product. Make no mistake, when you pay for a heavily advertised product like this that you are, in part, paying the cost of the extensive advertising that brought it to your attention and put you in a mind to buy it.

Second, although Rosetta Stone is an extremely well thought out and useful system for review, practice, improving reaction times to prompts in other languages, and gaining fluency through exposure to variable contexts, it is not a complete language course.

I have purchased a load of different language courses for languages that I have wanted to study on my own, and I can say, at least for me, that using at least two or more different packages that compliment, reinforce and overlap with each other is always better than trying to learn everything with only the logic and pattern of one single course. Besides, you really do need to learn grammar and other parts of the subject that cannot really be covered by, or communicated well by, a single program, even one as well thought out as Rosetta Stone.

At some point you really do have to crack a book and do some regular studying and learning, even though Rosetta Stone strongly implies that you can be speaking away in a second language with nothing more than some time in front of your laptop.

Conclusion: whatever language you are wanting to study, seriously consider Rosetta Stone. But also seriously consider buying a Pimsleur and a Living Language course to go along with it, and seriously contemplate the very un-Rosetta Stone-ish subject of studying verb conjugation rules, grammar, usage and verb tables.

All together you will stand a much better chance of gaining real fluency, and not just the ability to distinguish if the boy is in, under or besides he tree, or if all of the people, two of the people, the two men or the three women in the picture are eating steak or drinking wine. It's all good, but no one product or course can do it all.



HIGHLY RECOMMENDED FOR CHILDREN, April 4, 2011

By ! MR. KNOW IT ALL ;-b "DR SHOCK" (TRI STATE AREA)
This review is from: Rosetta Stone English (American) Level 1-5 Set (CD-ROM)

GUEST REVIEWER ! MRS KNOW IT ALL ;b

I know the English language, but even if you were born in the U.S., you may still not know the English (American) language. I would highly recommend this product for small children with the help from their parents. Your kids will excel in English classes, just by learning how to speak/write the English language properly. Rosetta Stone is the best language software you can find. It is fabulous, you have a lot of fun while learning and the material is presented in a very thorough manner with plenty of visuals, audio, and aids. Another bonus is the added interactive feature and immersion, along with on-line help and tracking your progress. The microphone also allows you to have immediate feedback as to whether you are pronouncing the words correctly. I highly recommend this product for individuals with small children. This product will take you from the basics and further beyond.


Great teaching methodology, March 30, 2011

By James Beswick (USA)
This review is from: Rosetta Stone English (American) Level 1-5 Set (CD-ROM)

I received this from Vine, but since I already speaking English as a first language, I gave to a friend of a friend who has practically no usable English. He's been using the product for about 4-6 weeks now and there's an appreciable improvement in both the sentence construction and accent. The course itself is massive, and there's enough to material to spend 3-6 months at an hour or so a day.

The Rosetta Stone method may not be for everyone, since there's a lack of formal grammar training and it makes no attempt to explain anything in the speaker's native language (it works by matching pictures with words and phrases). But from what I can see, if you practice regularly and follow the exercises, there's no doubt that you can significantly improve your conversational and basic writing abilities in the language very quickly.


Rosetta is pricey for a reason - it works!, May 15, 2011

By S. Harrison (Clements, CA United States)
This review is from: Rosetta Stone English (American) Level 1-5 Set (CD-ROM)

My daughter had great results with Rosetta Stone Chinese when she was living in China. When it came time for her to study another language, French, she tried the Fluenz software, because it was cheaper.* She was very disappointed because she found Fluenz to be much less useful and intuitive than Rosetta Stone. (There is no need to go into the mechanics of Rosetta Stone here, as other reviewers have explained it very nicely. In particular, see P. Mann's review, and ABC Reviews.)

Based on my daughter's experiences with language software, I jumped all over the opportunity to grab Rosetta Stone English for evaluation by her partner, whom she met in China. No - he's not Chinese. He's a French-speaking Swiss national. They met teaching at an international studies university in Xi'an.

My daughter's sweetie, Dr. X, speaks heavily accented English. He learned basic English comprehension as a kid by watching the Muppet Show. (His Sam the Eagle impression is awesome.) But alas, the Muppet Show did not offer feedback on his general English pronunciation. His goal in using Rosetta Stone was to make himself more understandable to native American English speakers, and increase his English vocabulary. He was incredibly excited to have the opportunity to try out the software.

Alas, his studies with Rosetta Stone were cut short when his backpack was stolen from under the table in a coffee shop. As a measure of his satisfaction with the product, even though he lost his brand new backpack, his new camera, some books and other items of value, the thing that upset him the most was the loss of the Rosetta Stone CD.

I realize that this review is short on specifics and does not do much more than relay the general positive impression that Dr. X had of Rosetta Stone English. He felt that a very valuable tool had been taken away from him when it was stolen. The fact that he had only had it a short time, and had already found it to be very effective does speak to the quality of the product.

Bottom line - based on the experiences of my daughter and her partner, the Rosetta Stone system is highly effective, and highly recommended.


* Rosetta Stone has restructured their pricing since Fluenz was purchased. At this writing, Fluenz French Level 1 and Rosetta Stone French Level 1 are almost the same price. I just purchased the Rosetta Stone French Level 1 to send to my daughter in Switzerland, since she wasn't too impressed with Fluenz.


Working Wonders for Wanda, May 7, 2011

By Maggie Mae (Reno, Nevada)
This review is from: Rosetta Stone English (American) Level 1-5 Set (CD-ROM)

Rosetta Stone calls their language method Dynamic Immersion. Vocabulary is introduced to you through pictures and word associations and the grammar is introduced the same way along with more pictures. The program also works on your pronunciation skills with their system of speech recognition. You listen to words and phrases and write them down or practice staying them. The program also focuses on sounds common to the language you're learning, further improving how you sound when you speak.

The program is very easy to use and it's very intuitive. I like the way the program shows you some images and lets you figure out which picture goes with what you're hearing. It's pretty easy and it seems to burn the words and phrases into your memory.

There are three main parts to Rosetta Stone Totale, The Course, Rosetta Studio and Rosetta World. After you finish a unit Rosetta lets you schedule a studio session, where you can interact with a live person in English.

Okay, you guessed it, I already speak English, so why am I reviewing this. Well, my cousin Wanda, she doesn't speak it so well. She's been staying with me for the last three months. She's an Italian speaker and living in America is a big change for her and this program has sort of helped ease her into her new language. Legally, she's American, but her parents divorced when she was a child and her mother took her back to Rome, where she grew up. Wanda wants to live here now and with my help and Rosetta Stone's she'll be speaking English like a native in no time.

Rosetta Stone tries to assimilate immersion, but they can't, not really, because when you're totally immersed in a culture you can only speak your new language. If you want to eat in a restaurant, go to the movies, buy groceries, you have to do it in your new language. But, if you are really totally immersed as my cousin is and you have a dedicated helper like me, then Rosetta Stone can work wonders and it's doing so for Wanda...Buy Now!, Save $270 (36%) down from $479 with free shipping from $749!