Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I have completed both level 1 and level 2 and I have learned quite alot, but, I cannot yet claim that I speak or write the Italian language fluently. This is a good course, and worth the money if you are very serious about learning Italian, but it is only a good beginning. It will not teach you much about verb conjugation or how to build a proper Italian sentence. Italian is a tough language to learn for the English speaker and it requires a huge amount of study, and many different types of study sources. This course is probably the best of its type available, but as with all of them it can only take you so far.

Like the other reviewers, I find the program entertaining and far more enjoyable to use than your ordinary language study CD or books. However, after nearly completing the entire program, I find that I have not learned a lot of important vocabulary or how to really conjugate verbs. My biggest complaint with the program is its inclusion of esoteric vocabulary. For example, one of the sentences you learn is "The boy can speak because he is not underwater." True, you are learning "can speak" but that's really not something that's going to come in that handy. Other examples of strange vocabulary that gets too much attention: lieing down, bending forward, drying your hair, zippering close a jacket, tieing shoelaces. I'm very surprised at the kinds of vocabulary they have chosen to include.

On the plus side, one is much more likely to use this program every day than open a book or listen to CDs. So you will learn more just by virtue of hearing Italian every day. The repetition is good and after not too long when you get to Level 2, you will probably be amazed at how well you can understand complicated directions like "go three blocks past the school, turn right" etc.

I find that only use a few of the different types of exercises -- for example, I don't use the part that has you type in response to dictation-- but it's good that they have a bunch of options for you to choose from. The most useful, I think, is listening to the phrase and choosing the photo that is described. The least useful exercise mode is seeing the photo and then hearing four phrases before picking the correct one.

If you expect to be introduced to verb tenses as they are in a text book, then you'll be disappointed. You learn third person forms first and later they introduce first person.

In conjunction with some other language study, this is a useful program. Don't expect to be speaking fluently after level 2. My guess is that even Level 1 and Level 2 together would not get you as far as one year of a good college course.

One more note: Level two has some good vocabulary lessons at the end of the unit. You can use these lessons as you are doing Level one because they are just vocabulary quizes. (Nouns are grouped by subject: food, clothes, etc.) Level two also has a bunch of "humorous sketches" where the captions to cartoons are given and you are supposed to be able to figure out what the captions mean. There isn't enough preparation for this to seem doable at first, but probably after I study with another method and come back to it, it will seem less difficult. If it weren't for the vocabulary lessons in Level two, I would say that Level two is not really that helpful.

This review might be alittle hard on the product but I wasnt impressed. Expecting something revolutionary instead the lessons were kind of like going though High School again with one big exception. They dont give you a writen translation of what every thing means. Rossetta Stone focuses on pictures and the actual sounding out of words spoken. In the program you are presented a picture and in Italian a narrator tells you what is going on or what the picture is. However what he is saying is not directly translated in written words. Its up to you to figure out what he is saying based on what you see in the pictures. So pretty much you are not sure at times which words spoken are verbs or nouns. They do their best to single out the verbs in which they give you multiple pictures of ppl performing the same actions. However still its up to you to figure that out. Other than that its a great program. It forces you to pronounce italian with an italian accent using the pictures you see. You are able to write italian sentences using the same technique (still no english translation). I chose a language I already knew to try the program out. If I was a true beginner...I might have a hard time learning this language and I would by far not be fluent in it. Thats for sure.

This program is amazing. I was at a friends house and tried the demo CD. I have never taken any classes or tried to learn Italian before, but I had learned 50 words within 2 1/2 hours and it was a fun process! I did take 3 years of Spanish in junior high and found it to be a very frustrating process, because the way languages are taught in public schools is so artifical. This program teaches you a language just like you learned English. By showing you something and telling you what it is called. You are shown 4 pictures, the name for the object for the picture, and each box is highlighted as the word is said. Then you are quized as the pictures are shown in different sequences and the word is shown with the picture - so you automaticly start to learn to spell the word, and associate the word with the sound.
Then after you learn about 16 basic words like cat, dog, man, woman, girl, boy, teenager, adult, you are taught verbs. You are shown 4 pictures again with a man running, a woman running, a boy running, and a girl walking. Since you now know the words for man,woman,boy, and girl you automatically know the new words mean running and walking. Then you are introduced to the pural forms - you are shown pictures of two girls running, one girl running, one boy walking, and two boys walking. So you are learning to recognize the words running and walking, and learning the feminine and masculine forms of the singular and plural words at the same time. What is so amazing about this program is that you are learning the grammar painlessly - which is the thing that is so painful about learning any foreign language. All the while you continue to associate the words with the sounds. The complexity slowly builds as your vocabulary base rapidly builds up. The demo CD takes you through the first two lessons of level 1 - about 6 hours of training. The software keeps track of where you left off and keeps track of your mistakes, re-quizing you over and over until it knows you know the words and just haven't made lucky guesses. I can't wait until I can save enough money to buy the full program and be ready to understand Italian for my next trip to Italy!

My husband and I have been taking Italian for several months and were looking for something we could do at home that would enhance our classroom experience. The Rosetta Stone program is so much more than we ever expected. We easily spend an hour or two a day studying Italian. We wouldn't give up our live Italian instructor, but this program easily leads us through building language skills in a way that nothing else we've ever tried could. We also love the various ways of teaching, hearing, seeing, writing, reading, virtually all of the ways you need to learn any language. Since we're going to be permanently relocating to Italy next year, it's important for us to learn the language as quickly and efficiently as possible. Rosetta Stone provides all of the tools we need to do that.

While I've tried many different solutions for learning the italian language, this is by far the best. But you still have to be ready to work, because this is no simple task and this program gives you everything you need. You can have guided learning, do it on your own, and make tests afterward, all of which are tracked to help you see how you're doing.

I only recommend that you also get a good book on grammar, to help supplement what you're learning here, since it has a focus on recognition and not sentence structure or verb conjugation.

The Rosetta Stone application requires that the language CD be present in the harddrive, and it *continuously* spins up the CD disk while the program runs. This unfortunate design will quickly run down your laptop batteries, making this application unsuitable for travel. My repeated requests to Fairfield Technologies, the Rosetta Stone software company, to remedy this problem were declined. Considering the substantial price paid for this software, it should *behave* like software, and not a DVD. If the application could be installed and run like normal software, it would not uselessly drain you laptop batteries.