Rosetta Stone

It's a rushed, cheaply made application. Its content is from the early 2000. The devs didn't even bother testing the lessons. You will learn something, but you got to learn to accept the issues this application has. Speech recognition is rather unprofessional - sometimes it doesn't understand you, it refuses to register certain characters, sometimes you can just say random things and it accepts it 100%. When you're wrong, it will not tell you why so you have to try your luck again. When you begin learning, with one type of activity you have no idea what is needed to be done - nothing tells you. The pictures are sometimes very uninformative and confusing. YOU are punished for it. Sometimes you are presented with a microscopic picture and you have to match it with gigantic words... Sometimes you are presented with pictures with lots of microscopic text... In case of complex languages, like Russian, the application does not teach you why certain words have to be used together, leaving you guessing. Writing exercise is very poor and definitely doesn't just take 5 minutes. The application does not have any translation function. After some period the application defaults some of its settings.

This is a true American quality product.

For the love of god, look for something else first!

Good product for learning a new language, it takes a good approach and as previous comments say, it is not worth the large amount of money they ask for.

This is a great product.

However, tech support is not the greatest. I think even Microsoft Tech Support is better than them. If your computer crashes, or you uninstall Rosetta Stone without prior deactivation, you will not be able to reactivate (it said that the software was already installed on another computer), and you have to contact tech support with proof of purchase. The problem is that some people, like me, don't have the proof of purchase anymore. Even to deactivate prior to uninstalling, you have to contact tech support, which is still a big pain.

The software is not smart like Adobe products or Windows products. If you re-install and active one of these vendors products on the same machine, they KNOW ITS THE SAME MACHINE! Some other software will allow you to log in to a site and deactivate a computer from there so you can reactivate it in a few simple clicks. Rosetta Stone, although smart enough to teach you a language, is not smart enough to remember where you are learning it from.

This is not worth $500, not with this crap. What a rip-off.