Features:  

Rosetta Stone does an excellent job of tracking progress and allowing you to customize your learning path. The program catalogs your scores in each lesson and helps you identify what kind of activities you need the most help in.

One of the things that hurt Rosetta Stone the most is a lack of PDA or MP3 player compatibility. Many other programs are offering this feature to help with learning away from home, but Rosetta Stone has nothing to offer there.

Fundamentals:  

One of Rosetta Stone's strong points is the ability to quickly build a person's Italian vocabulary. The program's image and word association feature is not only fun to use, but effective. The grammar sections may be frustrating for some people who prefer to be taught rules because the teaching cites no rules, instead teaching grammar through image-word association

Rosetta Stone Italian does an excellent job at helping develop your writing skills. Rosetta Stone Italian not only focuses on building your written vocabulary, but uses voice recognition software to help you build it verbally also. The speech recognition function of the program actually serves as one of the most important parts of the intuitive learning experience because you can practice what you know and get immediate feedback.

Ease of Use:  

Rosetta Stone is, without a doubt, the easiest program to use in this entire review. The layout is very simple, with individual lesson modules that focus on different skills and can be accessed from the menu screen. The lessons themselves are very intuitive; you simply choose the correct answer from a selection of pictures that match the words you are learning or saying. While the tutorial is very informative, we didn’t even need it to discover all of the features of Rosetta Stone.

Teaching Tools:  

Rosetta Stone relies heavily on a combination of audio and images to create the image-word association learning experience. It makes the learning process extremely simple and easy to follow, but it can also get repetitive.

One of the strongest features is the speech recognition system that allows you to practice pronunciation and get immediate feedback. The lessons start with pronouncing single words and eventually progress to entire phrases.

We were disappointed that Rosetta Stone didn’t provide an online chat or other web-based option to give users another venue in which to practice their newfound language skills. Video lessons would also be a good way to break up the repetitive nature of the lessons.

Word Tools:  

Rosetta Stone doesn’t have glossaries, dictionaries or grammar texts, but the program does such a good job at intuitive teaching that the word tools are largely unnecessary.

Tech Support:  

Fairfield Language Technologies offers some of the best customer support of any company we reviewed. There are FAQs and tutorials to help with navigation and basic problems. Although the user manual is very basic, the phone and email support options are both very useful and helpful.

Rosetta Stone has made language learning as simple as it could possibly be. Rosetta Stone may not have a lot of the tools other programs have, but it’s still an effective and intuitive way to learn Italian.