Rosetta Stone V3: Portuguese (Brazilian) Level 1-3 Set with Audio Companion [OLD VERSION]

by Rosetta Stone

Product Features

• Rosetta Stone teaches you a new language naturally, by getting you to think, live and breathe the language
• Innovative solutions get you speaking new words, right from the start
• Rosetta Stone moves forward only when you're ready--you drive the pace, you set the schedule
• With Rosetta Stone, you'll discover a foundation of key vocabulary that you'll use to build into a whole new language
• Audio Companion lets you take the Rosetta Stone experience anywhere: in the car, at the gym, or on-the-go

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B001AFFZB8
• Item model number: 22485
• Date first available at Amazon.com: June 9, 2008
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,165 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #81 in Software > Education & Reference > Foreign Languages > Spanish & Portuguese

Product Description

Amazon.com

Rosetta Stone Personal Edition contains everything you need to give the voice inside of you a new language. The method used recreates the natural way you learned your first language, revealing skills that you already have. This approach has won numerous awards, and has been adopted by countless organizations, schools and millions of users around the world. Join the language revolution today. Only with Rosetta Stone.

The comprehensive language-learning solution that fits your life.

Learn Naturally
Learn your next language the same way you learned your first language. Dynamic Immersion empowers you to see, hear and comprehend without translating or memorizing. You already have this ability. Rosetta Stone simply unlocks it.

Engage Interactively
Get feedback to move forward. You learn best by doing, and you'll apply what you've learned to get to the next step. Rosetta Stone adapts to your individual needs and skills, because you drive the program with your progress.

Speak Confidently
Start speaking immediately. From the very first lesson, you'll speak. You'll begin with essential basics, which form the building blocks of the language. Soon you'll create new sentences on your own, using words you've learned.

Have Fun
Best of all, Rosetta Stone is addictive. With every entertaining activity, you'll feel success. You'll want to use Rosetta Stone to have that next moment, that next breakthrough. So you'll keep using it, and you'll learn more!

That's language-learning success.
That's Rosetta Stone.

No translation or memorization required.

The most effective way to learn a new language is to be surrounded by it. When you were an infant, your parents taught you this way, by intuitively associating words with images. That's the ultimate language lab, but most language-learning programs completely ignore this.

Think about all of the ways you've tried to learn a language: classes at school, tapes and cassettes, even software that uses your native language as a base for your next one. What do they all have in common? Translation and memorization.

Instead of taking a "direct flight" from your brain to your new language, translation and memorization connects you to your old language. You always have to "fly" from your brain, to your native tongue ... and then translate what you've memorized to communicate.

That might work for a few words, but what happens when you get to a sentence or phrase? When you have to change tenses? You're going to make a lot of "connecting flights." That's why those other methods are so frustrating ... and why they fail.

Enter Dynamic Immersion.
This method encourages you to think like a baby. You'll pair words with vivid, real-life images and make connections between things you know and the new language. Soon, you'll be thinking in a new language, stringing words together into phrases that you create.

Innovative technology.
Rosetta Stone places this Dynamic Immersion method at the core of a suite of software that works with you to develop your skills. The simple, intuitive interface helps to keep you engaged in the solution, while advanced speech recognition technology makes certain that you're speaking correctly and accurately. Best of all, Rosetta Stone never leaves you behind. You'll only move forward when you're ready, when you've become comfortable and confident.

Communicate and connect with the world: Level 1, 2 & 3 Set.
Rosetta Stone Level 1, 2 & 3 Set will take you on a journey from the basics to a whole new level of sophistication. You'll build a foundation of fundamental vocabulary and essential language structure. You'll quickly gain the confidence to engage in social interactions. Say "hello" and "goodbye," arrange travel, order food, go shopping and more! From there, you'll share your ideas and opinions, express feelings and talk about your life, your interests and more. You'll discover a voice. In a new language.

Audio Companion
With Audio Companion, you'll enhance the Rosetta Stone experience wherever you go. You'll learn new skills on the computer, and then reinforce what you've learned with Audio Companion. Simply play the CDs on a stereo or download them to a MP3 Player. Each Audio Companion activity corresponds to a lesson in the Rosetta Stone software, so you can turn your travel time into productive language-learning time.

Inside the box, you'll find:

• Version 3 Personal Edition CD-ROM software for Levels 1, 2 & 3 (Windows/Mac)
• Headset microphone
• User's guide
• Audio Companion, a multiple-CD set to play or download to your MP3 player

Product Description

Foreign language learning with Rosetta Stone Portuguese Levels 1, 2&3 you connect with the world around you. With level one you begin learning fundamental vocabulary and essential language structure, from greetings and introductions to simple questions and their answers. Gain the confidence and enter the intermediate level where you will be able to talk about your environment; give and get directions, tell time, dine out with self-reliance, shop and enjoy basic social interactions. Taking what you’ve learned in Levels 1 and 2, we help you reach an advanced level of competence. This competence allows you to connect with the world around you. You will learn to share your ideas and opinions, express your feelings and talk about everyday life; your work, current events and much more. Now Rosetta Stone with Audio Companion allows the learner to take Rosetta Stone anywhere: in the car, the gym or on-the-go! What is Audio Companion? Audio Companion CDs are activities that correspond to the Rosetta Stone CD-ROM software lessons. The learner can listen to Audio Companion and practice what they’ve been learning on the computer, turning travel time into productive language learning time. Audio Companion lets the student access the power of Rosetta Stone lessons whenever and wherever they want, they can play the CD’s on a stereo, or download them to a MP3 player. It empowers the student and helps reinforce the lessons in any busy lifestyle!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Major Disappointment, November 29, 2008

By 

Van M. Claypool (Nashville, TN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rosetta Stone V3: Portuguese (Brazilian) Level 1-3 Set with Audio Companion [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

Note: The product I purchased did not include the "Audio Companion", but the product had all 3 levels.

The product's long suit is pronunciation. The computer analysis was good at getting the pronunciation better.

However, I consider the course nearly a waste of time and money. (Based on the company's reputation, I assume other products are better.)

As an alternative, I recommend Sonia Althoff's Portuguese (both the book and the CD) as the best product to get off the ground. (It is only available on her web site: http://www.sonia-portuguese.com/index.htm.)

For more advanced work, I recommend "Brasil!: Língua e Cultura". ("Brasil!" may be overwhelming for beginners.)

The amount of vocabulary in Rosetta Stone was low. I learned basic words in the very first screen of Sonia's CD and the very first page of Brasil! that never were presented in any of the 3 levels of Rosetta Stone.

Rosetta Stone made no attempt in English to explain how Portuguese grammar works. Due to the number of verb tenses (over 30), the rules for regular conjugations, the large numbers of exception patterns (mainly for the basic present tense), and the significant numbers of exceptions (again mainly for the present tense) that fit no pattern, I stayed paralyzed by inability to figure out what the rules were.

I also was mystified by the complex pronoun rules (pronouns of all things!) -- especially the contractions of prepositions with pronouns and the rules for appending pronouns to verbs.

The program bogged down my (admittedly older) computer. (There were times when I first bought the program when the program would crash. Then a fix came out and the program no longer crashed, but ran slower.)

Finally, when I finally finished all the lessons, I decided I wanted to cruise the written exercises to transcribe some of the useful examples for my notes. I discovered I could only review one exercise and the program would crash. Tech support claimed I had a corrupted progress database. Based on the timing of the problem starting, I am dubious.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars INCREDIBLE!!!, January 19, 2009

By 

C. Hendricks (Somewhere, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rosetta Stone V3: Portuguese (Brazilian) Level 1-3 Set with Audio Companion [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

I had 2 yrs. spanish in high school, and a 40 hour (tutored) refresher course while stationed in Honduras. I've had tutored classes in Italian, Croatian, Finnish, and Japanese.

After 1 week of daily study with Rosetta Stone Portuguese (Brazilian), I speak and more easily remember the Portugese language THAN any previously studied language I had. I used books, CD's, etc. for the previous languages, BUT NOTHING works for me like this product. I WILL be ordering other languages, by Rosetta Stone, as time goes by.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A Lazy approach that is Not for the serious language learner, April 18, 2010

By 

TonyT - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rosetta Stone V3: Portuguese (Brazilian) Level 1-3 Set with Audio Companion [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

Rosetta Stone claim that the best way to learn a language is the way native speakers learn their first language as children, omitting the obvious problem that children have about 15 years of 24 hour immersion in their native language and that children's brains are specifically geared to picking up language quickly, a skill that the brain loses once reaching adulthood.

The Rosetta Stone support rep informed me over the phone that upon completing level 3, I would be at the level of a university student of the Portuguese language. I was skeptical yet curious, I figured if it is this expensive there must be something good about it. Upon finishing the courses and memorizing all of the vocab, I found that I could say a handful of phrases (such as "the boy is in the house") but was still clueless about forming my own complex sentences because I had not been taught any grammatical rules. It is ridiculous to suggest that Level 3 is the equivalent of a university level, university students will no doubt be reading and commenting on works of Portuguese Literature, not simply saying "the boy is in the house"!

Rosetta Stone uses pictures instead of translations, i.e. instead of telling you that the `cavalo' means `horse', they just show you a picture of a horse. Whilst this undoubtedly saves them money because they do not need to produce separate versions for users of different native languages, it makes things that much harder for the user because you then have to interpret the pictures and determine which part of the phrase refers to the picture. For example, when the software introduces the verb "to have", it was always accompanied by a picture of a cat: "I have a cat", over and over again! This leaves the user bewildered as to whether the word for "Eu tenho" means "I have" or "a cat". Granted this is a simple example, but nowhere in the software are sentences broken down word by word. The pictures used are clearly universal stock photos that they use for all their different language software, for example there are pictures of Japanese people eating sushi, but no pictures of Brazilians playing football on the beach. If I am paying half a grand, you would think they would at least provide culture specific imagery for that language!

There was no early lesson on the numbers, numbers were thrown in at random, so that you might learn the number 4 at one stage but would not come across the numbers 3 and 5 until much later.

Also the audio recognition was very inaccurate, you could say the word into the speaker totally wrong and it would still come back saying you were correct. I had some fun with this, saying completely different words and it would still say I got them right.

What many adult language learner's fail to accept is that learning a new language takes a huge amount of dedication. It's about memorizing the rules of grammar, and then memorizing heaps of word lists. That is the only way to truly learn a new language! You are kidding yourself if you think you can just pick up a copy of Rosetta Stone and then just sit back and listen and then *poof* you have picked up a foreign language.

At least with a more traditional language learning method, you will learn the basics of grammar and can then begin to form your own sentences, and that is a solid foundation on which to build. And the traditional methods cost about 1/10th of the price of Rosetta Stone.