Customer Reviews

Rosetta Stone V3: Italian Level 1 with Audio Companion [OLD VERSION]

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

 

 

I am an American native speaker, was a Spanish major in college, lived in Madrid for about a year and a half and am (well, WAS) fluent in Spanish. I love Italy and have faked my way through Italian trips with my Spanish for years. And then my husband ordered Rosetta Stone. It's wonderful! I'd heard about it for years, but had no idea that this system was so intuitively exciting. It's more fun than playing Freecell, or other addictive games on the computer!

The system (an immersion approach, with picture recognition and hearing native speakers) is so natural, I couldn't believe it. I've done about half the first level and I find myself out on a walk and making up fun-sounding little italian phrases and sentences in my head. The teaching system is logical, gradual, progressive, challenging, exciting, quickly paced, never boring, and plain fun. I love the tapes for the car. My husband and I are both using it and we both love it.

There are several negative reviews for the Rosetta Stone software (here and on the level 1&2 software), none of which I find substantial. The first here complains, in essence, that you can't steal the software and give it away to your friends! That's fine with me. It's licensed for one computer, but you can have lots of users using that one machine. If you're honest and respect intellectual property rights, that won't be an issue for you.

A second negative review asserts that there isn't much material for level one. First, if you want to buy more levels at the same time, you can get levels 2 & 3 for a reduced price. If you're pretty clear that you want to learn Italian, you might want to start with at least 2 levels. (Amazon has the other packaging options, too.) Second, I suppose you could zoom through all the lessons in level 1 in a couple of weeks, but it's possible that the person who went through the lessons very quickly is skimming over all sorts of built in layers. The software adjusts for increased subtlety in pronunciation & layered appropriation of grammatical structure. Review is critical to the learning process - learning language is like learning to play an instrument. The practice layers available on the software are impressive. This software is constructed as if it were written by Bach! There's a LOT here, even if you just buy the first level and not one of the packaged versions.

The final critique is that the set-up is difficult for MAC users. I have a two iMACS (and am a 25 year PC user who just switched, so I'm completely PC oriented) and have just installed it on one of my machines. The installation was easy, flawless and the software works beautifully. The person who complained had a very sophisticated system and had trouble with some of his intricate settings. I am an Apple neophyte and trust me, for those of us with plug-and-play systems, this is a plug-and-play program. MAC users - don't worry!

Final word: Get the software and start having fun. It's truly amazing stuff.

I thought Rosetta Stone was all hype. After trying Berlitz (huge disappointment), I decided to give it a try. It is remarkably intuitive, progresses very logically and, most important, is a lot of fun. I normally hate getting on the computer when i get home (after being on one all day), but I look forward to doing 30 minutes of Rosetta Stone.

After toiling through over a hundred lessons (I have levels one and two) it gradually dawned on me that we were NEVER going to get to shopping or sightseeing sentences...at least, not in a specific way. That's a disappointment, because I have a lot more use for "Does this come in other colors?" or "Where is a store that sells hairbrushes?" than I do for such memorable statements as "The little girl is putting on her skates" or "One tree is pink and the other is green; it is spring."
I think if I were moving to Italy to live, discussing whether the swimmer is getting out of the pool and such topics might have a little more relevance, but I'm a tourist. I need tourist language. Sadly, this ain't it.

I have found this product easy to install and use. Installation and set up were straightforward. For me, RosettaStone's language learning technique, immersion, is effective. I am trying to gain a basic understanding of Italian and the ability to listen and speak simply. If you take all the instruction seriously, don't guess without some attempt to understand, and speak most of what is said (even when not asked to), I think you can learn a lot using the RosettaStone method and software.

I purchased Rosetta Stone in advance of a trip to Italy I was planning. I'm the stereotypical American in the sense that I sometimes think the world starts and ends with US English, but at the same time I worried about traveling places where finding English-speakers might be difficult. While I have a great mind for math, science and so on, languages have always been difficult for me.

I'm happy to say that I found the software easy to install and run on my modest Dell laptop. Ten minutes after opening the box, I was up and running with no surprises. The product is fairly lean and ran well without cluttering my disk with tens of gigabytes of data the way some other applications do.

The approach is "immersion" style - you start learning words and phrases immediately. Although I'm no wizard at languages, I picked up the first few lessons quickly, and then built up steam as my confidence grew. Within about 30 days, I felt like I could hold my own with some very basic vocabulary. The Italian comments in The Godfather even started to make sense. I don't know whether there are better solutions out there, but I know that if I had used a more traditional approach, I probably would have never done it. Now, mostly in my spare time over the course of several weeks, I've managed to pick up the beginnings of a new language. In my book, that's worth four stars.

Only negatives I might cite are that the user experience feels a little dated to me - hasn't kept up with the look and feel of today's systems. That, and for the type of software you'll probably just use once, the price seems a bit high. I also think it might be the sort of thing you run in your Web browser "software as a service" style, rather than traditional software you install and run on your PC. If Intuit can do this with Turbo Tax, no doubt Rosetta Stone can, too.

To the comments of another reviewer complaining about not being able to resell the software on eBay, realize that a lot of software companies aren't really selling you the software per se - they're selling you a specific and limited license to use their software, and only under certain conditions. Many of these licenses prohibit transferring the software, which means you can't resell it on eBay or anywhere else. I haven't read the terms and conditions of the Rosetta license in detail, however if you agreed to these terms (typically using the software implies consent), then there's nothing wrong with Rosetta Stone enforcing the agreement. Microsoft and many other vendors do similar things, registering software to a specific user and/or computer. Moral of the story is to read the license. Of course, that's not easy to do before purchasing the software, so perhaps Amazon should consider posting software license terms and conditions online so customers can make an informed decision prior to purchasing.

Otherwise, I think Rosetta Stone is uniquely valuable if you need to learn a language quickly. Highly recommended.

Well -- I finally had talked my wife into buying the Italian level one software for our trip to Italy. I have tried to unsuccessfully install the software on three of our computers at home, only to run into issues that are the software, not the computer on each one. I have spent 6 hours on support (computer only, they are closed on weekends for support). While they were helpful, at the end of the day, we could not get it installed. Very frustrating. I dont know how they keep this scam up, but this is getting shipped back ASAP. terrible experience.

BEWARE! If you buy this product you can never resell it. Never return it. Never upgrade it. You better love it. Because you're stuck with it. I purchased version 2 a year ago and wanted to upgrade to 3 so I thought I'd sell my version 2. Rosetta Stone cancelled my eBay auction and threatened LEGAL action for attempting to resell an original legitimate in the box version of their product. They will only let you return it for 6 months and ONLY if you bought it directly from them (sorry Amazon) and there are NO upgrades. Basically, I'm out $500. Though I would never ever consider buying another Rosetta Stone product, where the customer is always wrong. BEWARE of this company.

It's too elementary. I was expecting more help with speaking Italian for traveling purposes. Too expensive for what I'm getting out of it.

This was more expensive that we would like but my daughter (14) loved it. Actually the whole family tried it and enjoyed it. I think we will buy the next two levels soon.

Foreign languages have always fascinated me. However, I often have trouble learning them. In high school I took three years of Spanish, and left the class knowing only how to say "My name is..." and "I don't speak much Spanish." My high school teachers were phenomenal, and they knew the language well, but I simply could not learn in such an environment. Memorizing lists of vocabulary words taught me very little, if anything at all, and I would simply regurgitate the words and forget them when I know longer needed them for a quiz. When I decided I wanted to learn Italian, I knew that a typically classroom setting would only be a waste of money. That's when I decided to try Rosetta Stone and the results have been amazing. Granted, I still have a tendency to forget some words and phrases, but i now know roughly as much Italian as I do Spanish and I've only done about half of the program.