Rosetta Stone V2: Italian Level 1-2 [OLD VERSION]

by Fairfield Language Technologies

Product Features

• This powerful 2-CD set of learning tools will adapt to your personal needs and impart a strong foundation in a new language
• With this award-winning method used by NASA and the Peace Corps, you'll learn the way children do -- by associating words and phrases with the world around you
• Participate in over 200 lessons where you'll interact with fluent Italian speakers to build speaking & vocabulary skills
• Get a full tutorial in speaking and syntax skills
• Graphical speech recognition displays your voiceprint and compares it to native speaker to help improve pronunciation

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000077DD4
• Item model number: 230-12
• Date first available at Amazon.com: October 14, 2002
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,447 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #10 in Software > Education & Reference > Foreign Languages > Italian

Product Description

Amazon.com

Looking for an effective way to get lasting language skills? Rosetta Stone's unique learning approach is designed to get you there, with faster results and a deeper understanding and mastery of the language. With Rosetta Stone, you will learn Italian the way you learned your own native language, without translation or memorization.

Develop your skills in four key areas...

Reading. View larger.

Speaking. View larger.

Writing. View larger.

Listening. View larger.

Native speakers, real-life images, speech recognition and fully interactive software teach you like you learned your first language -- naturally. The Rosetta Stone Italian Level 1 and 2 set combines the content found in Level 1 and Level 2 to take you from no knowledge of the language to advanced proficiency -- in one easy purchase.

Rosetta Stone is self-contained and intuitive to use. There are no complicated lists to memorize or handbooks to read. With Dynamic Immersion, you can start learning immediately. Join NASA, Fortune 500 executives, U.S. diplomats and millions of learners worldwide in discovering the fastest way to learn Italian.

And what exactly is Dynamic Immersion? Studies show that learning exclusively in the new language -- without translation as a crutch -- is crucial if you want to communicate. Grammar drills and rote memorization never develop this skill. Dynamic Immersion helps you think in the new language and quickly develops the language skills and structures you need to for everyday communication. Rosetta Stone teaches Italian through a step-by-step sequence of carefully structured Dynamic Immersion lessons. New words become associated with familiar objects, actions, and ideas. Words build to phrases and sentences in a systematic progression.

The Dynamic Immersion method reconnects people to the language skills they used successfully to master their first language. With Rosetta Stone, you start from a position of strength -- your own strength. First, Rosetta Stone allows you to learn through context. The software presents a carefully chosen selection of four images and asks you to select the image that matches the written text and the voices of native speakers. Building on the knowledge you've already gained and your intuitive grasp of the meaning of each picture, you make a choice. There's absolutely no translation or memorization to hold you back, so you start making progress immediately.

Next, Rosetta Stone offers immediate reinforcement. The very second you complete a task, the software provides feedback. Speak a word and our unique voiceprint technology automatically rates your pronunciation. Connect an image with a phrase and you'll immediately learn if your choice was correct. Complete a set of exercises and you'll instantly know how well you did. With Rosetta Stone, you always know where you stand. Recognizing that dynamic immersion is a continuous process, Rosetta Stone also employs a systematic sequence that gradually incorporates new words, phrases, and more complex grammar as it reinforces existing learning. As a result, your understanding of your new language grows naturally.

Levels 1 and 2 includes more than 8,000 real-life images and phrases in 210 lessons, as well and an average of 450 hours of instruction depending on your learning style. Rosetta Stone also incorporates a balanced curriculum including listening comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing, as well as speech recognition for accent perfection. The program's systematic structure teaches vocabulary and grammar naturally, without lists and drills, and there are previews, exercises, and tests for every lesson with automated tutorials.

Rosetta Stone's lessons will quickly get you up to speed on a wide range of language topics, including directions; affirmative and negative verb forms; food, eating, and drinking; family relationships; direct objects; telling time; shapes, colors and locations; greetings and conversations; travel, transportation, and transactions; shopping and dining; and much, much more.

Product Description

Rosetta Stone Italian Level I & II opens up a new world to you by teaching you how to communicate with a new culture! Reviews and testing features help identify weak points and work harder on them Comes with illustrated User's Guides and Curriculum Text books Ages 6 & up

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

373 of 377 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great but will not stand alone, November 22, 2004

By 

M. Pizzullo "Sonuvspam" (Trenton NJ) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Rosetta Stone V2: Italian Level 1-2 [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

I haven't gotten that far in it but I'm far enough to see the strengths and weaknesses. On the plus side, what I did learn is really well ingrained. The picture/word association really works - I find when I see something in my daily life that I have seen in the rosetta stone program, the italian word just pops into my head on it's own. There is no "translation" process like you ordinarily go through with language tapes. On the downside, anything that does not show well in a photograph doesn't fit the mechanics of the course. Words like "who, what, where, why, how" greetings "hello, goodbye" abstract nouns like "love, wisdom, pain, happiness, etc) subjective adjectives like "pretty, kind, cold, risky, etc.)and many verbs like "to know, think, want, wish, prefer, etc" and relative modifiers (more, most, least, -er, -est) are important parts of daily conversation and just don't fit the image/word association method. I think this is barrier to total fluency by the rosetta stone method. However, it's a great vocabulary builder, boasting 40,000 words by completion of the course. Not all the words will be useful in coversation, for example the word given for a car is L'autimobile when the common usage word is maccina. Both are correct, but it's like saying automobile instead of car in america. It's also great for reading skills, which is something not everyone is interested in but most cd courses are weak in if you want that. Language mechanics are not explained at all at any time. It's worth the money and an excellent supplement to other courses but will not stand alone, especially if you want tourist italian. If you actually want a full command of the language it's indispensible.

As to other courses to use this along with, Pimsleur is also expensive but worth every penny. The two go great together and each succeeds where the other fails. Pimsleur is entirely verbal, with almost no written material (brief reading exercises, nothing to write home about) and is better suited to tourists. It works much harder on accent and speaking skills, and an english speaker explains nuances of the language in english, so you can understand it. It has a limited vocabulary but succeeds at giving you a grasp of how to form sentences and actually use the language creatively.

Both Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone suffer from the lack of explanatory text and for this I'd recommend Ultimate Italian by living language. Each of the two volumes contain a 450 page textbook to fill in whatever gaps you have left after Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone get done with you. The included CD's can't hurt, but if you bought the whole pimsleur and both rosetta stones like I did, you're now into it for over 1000 dollars, and can save about 80 bucks by buying just the books. You really wont need the CD's if you already have Pimlseur and Rosetta stone. That money is better spent on a good dictionary, phrasebook and guide to slang and colloquialisms. I recommend Street Italian and webster's.

If you buy all this, expect to drop about 1200 bucks on everything. That's about the tuition and textbook for two semesters at community college but you'll have alot more to work with if you do it this way. You get out of it what you put into it, but don't expect to actually be speaking italian from a 101/102 class. Unless you're applying those credits towards a degree college classes are basically a waste of time and money for purposes of learning to speak the language.

96 of 98 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Helpful for Learing Italian, October 29, 2004

By 

Laura De Giorgio "hypnotherapist" (Canada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rosetta Stone V2: Italian Level 1-2 [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

This will not work for you as the first or only program for learning Italian. It is great as a supplement to other methods of learning Italian. The method is entirely intuitive - there is no English anywhere, so you may also want to have a dictionary and a grammar book.

I have found Rosetta Stone language programs most useful for reviewing the information I have learned elsewhere, for brushing up on languages I haven't used for a while, and for expanding vocabulary.

It may not be the best choice for total beginners, but you can learn a lot by associating words and expressions with the images and occasional mini videos. I do consider it definitely a worthwhile purchase.

84 of 87 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome Learning Tool!, February 20, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Rosetta Stone V2: Italian Level 1-2 [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

I have had some knowledge of the Italian language so I am not a total beginner, but pretty close to it. The reason I purchased this software is that I found myself loosing the little knowledge I had. How this program works is through picture recognition along with coinciding speech. For an example they will show you a picture of a bird in different sequences such as: flying, swimming, and the color of the bird etc... They also show people doing similar actions. By picture recognition, repetitive patterns, and hearing the words, you do learn the language. The pictures do build in a methodical way and eventually you do learn to form the words, and then into sentences. But, there is no explanation in the how and why the grammar works. The word "the" is different in Italian with respect to masculine, feminine, plural, and the program does not explain this aspect of the language. You learn merely by rote imitation. This indeed is how a child learns to speak a language. A nice feature to this software is that the native speaker does speak in a slow pronunciation, in some parts of the program you can really slow the speakers voice down and hear every syllable. The program allows you to record your voice so you can hear your progress. Learning in this way is fun and I do not find my mind wandering.