Customer Reviews

Rosetta Stone V3: Russian Level 1-3 Set with Audio Companion [OLD VERSION]

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

 

 

I wholeheartedly agree with others who describe this as a great advanced program for learning Russian. I had already completed Pimsleur Russian levels 1, 2, and 3, and I also had some experience with the Cyrillic alphabet. Without these fundamentals, I seriously don't know how you could get through the first lesson of Rosetta Stone. There is zero explanation of the alphabet, and you can't rely solely on repetitive patterns to associate spelling with sound for the simple reason that Russian words bend and break spelling rules just like English words do. So it would be extremely frustrating to start with this program as your first introduction to the Russian language. That said, if you do have the basics already, this program will accelerate your learning like nothing else...and it's FUN. You certainly don't have to exercise a lot of self discipline to get through the lessons consistently.

Rosetta Stone Russian levels 1,2, and 3 is a tremendous adjunct to the study of this language. However, I would NOT recommend it unless you have considerable background and knowledge of Russian already, as it moves rapidly from one concept and many new words without any explanation in English (and often the accompanying pictures are not completely explanatory). I've already mastered Pimsleur's Russian I, II, and III (90 30-minute lessons), plus another Russian course with 40 lessons, and still I find myself in the English-Russian dictionary a half-dozen times at each Rosetta Stone session. It's this small a number because I already know some 4,000 words in Russian. I don't know how anyone with less background functions at all in the Rosetta Stone course. That being said, once a person has a background similar to mine, the course is hugely helpful in building speech proficiency, mastery of grammar, and expanding one's vocabulary. I would not recommend the course for one's first exposure to the Russian language, as it would have to be a formula for extreme frustration. For me, it's been extremely profitable and enjoyable.

I've used Rosetta Stone Russian Version 3 and was quite happy with the results. I bought the course one month before departing to Azerbaijan (the Caucasus); during that month I completed Level 1. Upon arrival in Baku, I was able to use Russian effectively in practical day-to-day situations (taxi, restaurants, light conversation at cafes, museum tours, in the hotel, and at stores). Since returning from Azerbaijan I have continued the course (Level 2) and now can understand much Russian news broadcasting (television and radio) as well as read and understand some of the sections in the Russian-language newspapers. I'll be returning to Azerbaijan in summer 2009, and completing Rosetta Stone Version 3 Russian will ensure my success speaking, listening, reading, and writing Russian. Though results may vary for some users, for me it has been a stunning success. I recommend the course wholeheartedly.

Unfortunately, I have to say that Rosetta stone is not as good as its ads. I am a Russian language teacher and from my own experience and feedback from my students I can say that you can be very disappointed in this product if you are going to learn the language using only this software. It is simply does not work this way! Although if you are going to use it as an addition to other sources or/and Russian classes with a teacher/tutor this can help. I decided to express my opinion about it because I see that people spend a lot of money for the product that does not meet their expectations! This software does not work for adults. You will not find grammar explanations that is essential for learning, especially Russian. I admit that you can gain some vocabulary using Rosetta stone but in order to communicate and build sentences it is not enough. Save your money!

Rosetta Stone Russian Levels 1, 2 & 3 vs. Pimsleur Comprehensive Russian Levels I, II & III

I've completed these courses, and thought it would be useful to compare them and offer some general suggestions for learning Russian.
Overview: These courses are a serious attempt to start you on the road to learning Russian. You may be surprised to discover how little overlap there is between Rosetta and Pimsleur in the vocabulary words covered. Even though both require considerable work from the learner, they only scrape the surface of the Russian language. If you want to learn a few phrases to help you on vacation, buy instead a phrase book intended for travelers.
Bottom line: If you can afford only one course, buy Rosetta Stone, but it will likely be an uphill, sometimes discouraging struggle that I suspect many soon give up. I've outlined a more comfortable strategy below:
First: Study "Teach Yourself Beginner's Russian Script", an excellent, inexpensive little book that will ease you into reading and writing Russian Cyrillic script, and also introduce some useful vocabulary.
Second: Study Pimsleur Comprehensive Russian I, II & III.
Third: Study Rosetta Stone 1, 2 & 3.
If you study at least 30 minutes daily and learn at the same pace as me, these first three steps will take six months to a year, by which time you'll have a limited ability to converse on everyday topics, but also a good grounding for beginning the serious work of learning Russian. The more Russian you know, the easier acquiring more knowledge becomes.
Discussion: Language courses cost money to create and market, and the makers want to get their money back, but I wonder if their misleading advertising isn't counterproductive. How many learners give up after the first few lessons when they experience real difficulty with the material? The advertising for Rosetta and Pimsleur misleads buyers about what the courses do and how they do it. These courses are not "easy," and they're only "fun" if your idea of fun is applying yourself to some serious thinking, studying and memorizing. Pimsleur and Rosetta are also careful not to define just how much "Russian" you'll learn; from the advertising you'd think that after a few weeks' study you'd be prattling away in Russian to native speakers! If you start learning Russian as an adult, it's the work of a lifetime--the more you learn, the more you'll realize there remains to learn.
I recommend starting with "Teach Yourself Beginner's Russian Script" because it addresses one of the major shortcomings of both Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur: Neither teaches you to handwrite Russian. Rosetta tries to teach you to print Russian on a Russian keyboard, but printed and written Russian are somewhat different. Also, the writing component of Russian Stone is one of the two most problematic components of the program. (More about that below.)
Pimsleur: The three Pimsleur levels total 90 30-minute audio lessons. Speakers introduce you to Russian vocabulary and phrases, and you are prompted to repeat what you hear and are sometimes asked to generate phrases from what you've already learned. I recommend Pimsleur because it will soon have you speaking quite a lot of everyday Russian with a good accent, even though you won't be able to sustain a conversation.
Today's college language texts are fond of proclaiming their ability to meet the needs of all kinds of learning styles: there are visual learners, auditory learners, digital mechanical learners, oral mechanical learners, and kinesthetic learners. Pimsleur would seem to be woefully old-fashioned, since it addresses only auditory learning. (There are three small booklets with examples of printed Russian, but the examples don't track the audio lessons.) I wrote down each new word as it was introduced, and I counted a vocabulary of approximately 540 words, not counting word variations such as noun and verb endings.
I'm very much a visual and digital mechanical learner, and I soon got frustrated not being able to visualize or spell the phrases I was learning, so I bought two excellent inexpensive books: "Oxford Russian Grammar and Verbs" is a 250-page grammar summary that's helpful in identifying word endings (Russian nouns are declined and verbs are conjugated). I also bought "Oxford Beginner's Russian Dictionary," a 340-pager that contains helpful logical clusters of words and information (Colors; Days, months and dates) as well as standard alphabetized entries with examples of words used in phrases and sentences. For three times the cost, you can buy Kenneth Katzner's more definitive 1,090-page English-Russian, Russian-English dictionary (it's actually American English).
Interlude: After I finished Pimsleur I enrolled in an Elementary Russian course at City College in San Francisco that met for three and a half hours one night a week. The Russian-born instructor and the textbook (Golosa) were excellent. I learned new material not covered by Pimsleur starting with the first lesson, but my Pimsleur background made the course much easier for me than for most of the other students, especially in pronouncing the language. Halfway through the course I began to feel that I was showing off in class and that the instructor was favoring me, so I decided to drop the course and focus on Rosetta Stone. The instructor suggested I switch to the next level class, but I couldn't rearrange my work schedule.
Wakeup Call: Three weeks into the City College course I spent ten days in Moscow (my third visit in five years), and learned just how little Russian Pimsleur had taught me. If I'd relied on my Pimsleur knowledge, I'd have been able to order nothing but Chicken Kiev for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I could ask for a specific book in a bookstore, but most of the time in stores and restaurants I resorted to pointing and miming.
Rosetta Stone: Rosetta is a computer program on CD-ROMs, and has lots of bells and whistles. It obviously cost a fortune to create and produce, and the makers work hard at getting their money back with TV advertising and mall boutiques (which I've never seen do any business). The lessons employ multiple choice pretty colored pictures to guide you to the right answers. There are reading, listening, speaking and writing components to the lessons.
The good and bad news about Rosetta is closely linked to the multiple choice format. It's addictive to be reinforced for getting a right answer, then immediately prompted to answer the next question. The immediate feedback pushes you forward in the lessons. The bad news is that you quickly learn to look for the cues that allow you to choose the right answer, rather than studying the Russian language you see or hear. Thus, if you're asked to choose from among pictures of a man, woman, boy or girl, and you hear the word for man, you don't have to study the rest of the sentence to pick the right answer. In any case, words and phrases are flashed so quickly on the screen that you rarely have a chance to study them. Rosetta teaches you to recognize material, rather than forcing you to produce it.
The two most problematic components are the speaking and writing tasks. Rosetta includes a microphone and voice recognition software, but it doesn't work well. I chose moderate accuracy as my goal, but time and again was frustrated by the shortcomings of the software. The longer the sentence I was asked to produce, the more likely that Rosetta marked me correct, even when I was speaking garbage. But time and again I was graded wrong pronouncing simple words such as "Please" and "Thank you." I learned to cheat the program by pronouncing words and phrases with rising intonation, as if I were asking a question, and by pronouncing the words the way they are spelled rather than the way Russians (and the Rosetta speakers) really speak them.
I challenge any learner with no previous knowledge of Russian to succeed at the writing component of Rosetta. From the earliest lessons of Level One you are prompted to spell words you've seen previously for just seconds when they were flashed on the screen at the end of an exercise. Russian vowels, especially at the end of sentences, don't sound the way they're written. Even with my previous knowledge of Russian, I was often stumped to figure out the right spelling in the writing exercises. By Level Two, I started skipping these exercises. (If you want to use Rosetta to learn to write Russian, my best suggestion is that you buy "5000 Russian Words with all their inflected forms," published by Slavica. Even there you won't find all the word endings you need to write the Rosetta exercises.)
Good luck learning Russian!

The newest version of Rosetta Stone Russian is a complete "redo." The learning design and course structure, the approach, and organization of the new version makes this tool indispensable to anyone who really wants to learn to speak Russian. The courses are now multidimensional in that they take you through logical exercises in listening, reading, writing, grammar instruction, and pronunciation that reinforce all of the concepts presented in a given lesson. This repetition in different contexts drives the learning concepts deep into one's brain and makes the language stick. Where other versions simply unloaded you into mindless dull-plodding through sometime bizarrely useless sentences (like "The boy wearing pants throws the rake"), here the concepts consistently build upon each other in very useful ways. Immediately, the mind begins to apply the concepts to similar expressions and the new language begins to make sense, almost as if it is an extension of the native tongue. This tool is a major ticket to learning to speak and understand Russian and, more important, to understanding how the language works so you can apply its concepts to virtually any situation.

It is truely amazing that you can just start learning the language from the first minute you use the product. I blew through set #1 quickly, realized that maybe I didn't absorb very much, and went back through again. I think this is the way to go, there is something to be said for the repetition and its easy and fun.

Here are some problems with this method:

I couldn't imagine learning the Cyrillic alphabet from this program. I had a little knowledge of Cyrillic before I started. I'd suggest doing that before you start the program, its easier than it looks.

You need a good English-Russian dictionary on hand. Sometimes they introduce a concept and you have no idea what they're getting at. Other times you take a wrong guess at what the new word means. Try figuring out "Her Flower", "Our Flower", "Your Flower" in aother language from some pictures of people holding flowers and pointing at each other. Your only clues are subtle hints in a 2" picture. It is helpful to just look the word up.

Grammar. Russian has 6 cases for the nouns. This means the ending of the nouns change based on grammar in the sentence. This concept is just ignored (at least in set #1). It can be very confusing because sometimes you think you have two different words, but they are really the same word in two different cases. For now, I am clueless as to what forces the noun into a particular case. PLUS: I have a feeling that the real grammar is much more complex than what I have illustrated here. I think the noun changes the verb and there are declanations etc etc. I'm thinking of stopping the program and learning this elsewhere before I continue. It is a stumbling block because you can't speak Russian without a working knowledge of it.

The other alternative is to ignore it and hope I just pick it up in Set 2 or 3. There is something to be said for not having this information crammed into your head as a set of grammar rules. You do seem to retain it longer if you figure it out a little at a time.

Overall, I am happy with the product. I really would not have made it this far by studying any other method. I think I will follow through and finish sets 2 and 3. I wish they had this when I was younger, I'd be speaking 5 different languages by now.

Before I begin this is my fourth language to learn. I speak German, Spanish, and Korean(all Asian languages are level four - the hardest to learn)

I purchased this program in hopes of learning some Russian. Instead I have to put up with very poor directions and goals. In every lesson/step there is zero description of what it is you are suppose to do. For example you finally figure out they are talking about the tense/verb/adverb/adjective/gender/singular/plural only after you have made a fool of yourself missing most of them. Only after you figure out what is going on do you finally grasp what is expected of you....Duh! Trying to teach me something without stating the objective of the lesson!!!!!!!!! Additionally there are no lists/tables/flashcards of vocabulary for you to review and practice just vocabulary. The same holds true with grammar. Additionally after you have gone through their presentation of new vocabulary you will in the middle of the lesson and have a new word thrown at you. Fine but don't you think it should be defined first? If you miss a single one you have to repeat the whole frame to 'pass' it. Also after you progress far enough which comes around Level 1 Unit 3 you will begin to be annoyed by the adaptive reviews. While they are needed you don't need three of them thrown at you at once. It breaks the learning chain of the lesson you are on. One at a time between lessons would be better.

After much frustration I purchased the book "Russian Course A Complete Course For Beginners." In the first 40 pages it explained what Rosetta Stone could or would not. While there is no audio with this book I strongly suggest you get it so you have a clue as to what is going on in Rosetta Stone and buy an English-Russian-English Dictionary as well. You will save yourself some pain by doing this. Also do searches on the Internet using "learn Russian" and you will find excellent help such as MasterRussian, Livemocha, RussianPod101 (EXCELLENT), etc.

Also Rosetta Stone locks up and hangs my computer. You will wait for something to happen and after 10 to 20 minutes you are still looking at the same screen. This program does this often. If you have to use task manager to kill the program process or reboot your computer to unfreeze this mess then it will, and I repeat, will lose any idea of where it was at and you may find yourself going back as many as four lessons because this junk cannot remember where it was and therefore has unchecked everything you have done in the previous steps on the home screen where it does track your progress. Additionally, even after you have finished a lesson Rosetta Stone will not mark it as completed. So you go back and redo it and it just goes though the lesson with everything already answered and then marks you as finished. How nice!!! My laptop handles high end Graphics like Autocad just fine so therefore it is not my computer. I am very frustrated that this program advertises itself as the best when I would not give it for free to my worst enemy - Seriously.


Also you can be in the middle of a lesson, thinking your computer has hung, when in fact what is really going on is that Rosetta Stone is going into adaptive recall of previous material learned without telling you in the middle of your current lesson!!!!!!!

Also some of the native speakers in the program and especially on the Audio Companion mp3 files speak way too fast to clearly understand what is said. It seems Rosetta Stone forgot they are talking to a student trying to learn Russian not a fluent Russian speaking individual.

Save your money and lower your stress level. Buy something else. Also trying to address these issues with them is unproductive since they do not respond to emails and calling them is impossible from Afghanistan when you are out of sync because of being almost 12 hours ahead of them...so no one to answer the phone and no they will not return my calls to an overseas phone.

If you like getting something of value for your money DO NOT buy this software.

Steve

Edit (Update) I have continued using this to see if it did get better. Today was the final straw. It is going back for a refund. This program simply cannot remember where it is at. Today it went back 3 lessons despite the homepage showing them done and no it was not adaptive recall. I got that as well but again with three of them in a row before being allowed to do any lessons. But the straw that broke the camel's back was the 8 different grammar constructions shown in under 5 seconds!!!! This is not the first instance of such rapidity in showing grammar cases. Now if your teacher in school did this do you think they really expect the students to learn this new grammar? Would not the teacher explain the different cases and their use before doing any exercises where you apply the new grammar rules? Well this product doesn't even do this. Instead you are thrown right into application without an understanding of usage. I guess they expect you to keep doing the same frame(s)over and over again until you have rote memorization without any understanding which in fact is the case....you see something often enough you memorize like Pavlov's Dog. Bottom line if I caught a teacher instructing my child the way Rosetta Stone does the teacher, principle and I would have a very long discussion and most likely my child is going somewhere else where she can learn. Also for what this product is it is grossly overpriced.

Bottom Line: Having finished all of Level 1 you will be able to count from 1 to 20, say things like `shoes too small', `shoes to little', identify twelve colors, hello, goodbye, girl, boy, man, woman, coat, pants, etc. Do not for a second think you will even be able to say `Hello my name is xxxx. What is your name?' Level One does not do this. For this Rosetta Stone charges the better part of $200. RussianPod101 and the others I mentioned above are less expensive or outright free. But do buy a good Russian-English dictionary here at Amazon....the Oxford one is excellent and for American English also get the one by Kenneth Katzner here at Amazon as well.

A friend bought the Russian-language Rosetta Stone. He is very persistent, so he went through the entire course, thoroughly and patiently. Now the results are in! And since I am a native Russian speaker, here is my assessment:

He does not understand Russian even when I speak slowly using simple words and constructs, and when he is trying to say something in Russian, it's all gibberish. He can say short phrases such as "A woman on a horse" or "A boy is under the ball" but nothing beyond that - I am guessing that those are the phrases in the software.

Money and time wasted.

I was pleased with the simplicity to use the software. There are a couple of drawbacks. First, it crashes periodically on my older Mac running 10.4 (G4 chip). It also takes longer to install that I would have expected, but it is a large program. And lastly, the peel and stick Cyrillic letters for the keyboard are clear with black lettering. We have black keys on our keyboard. These are useless for our keyboard without requiring the purchase of a new keyboard.

As for the teaching itself, great! Fantastic! Easy to follow, easy to do, complete and total immersion. My 11 year old is racing through it.

Do not buy just level 1 or just levels 1 & 2. Spend the whole amount and get all three levels. You'll go through them all so quickly that you will wish you had them all. I am glad I purchased all three levels.