Rosetta Stone Italian Reviewer's Comments

Rosetta Stone Italian received the “TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award” in our review of Italian language software because it has the ability to simplify language learning more than any other program we reviewed. Rosetta Stone doesn’t teach a single grammar rule or give a vocabulary list to memorize. Instead, the program creates an immersion environment where you learn by associating words with images, much in the same way you learned English as a small child. This image-word association method increases retention and makes the learning process much more intuitive.

You may have noticed in the side-by-side comparison that Rosetta Stone doesn’t have as many tools as many of the other programs, but the ones it has are used to the fullest extent. Rosetta Stone took a lot of the bells and whistles out of language programs and distilled the process of learning Italian down to the necessities. Surprisingly, this process works extremely well.

Rosetta Stone also has an excellent speech recognition system that further improves the learning process. It’s easy to get feedback on accent and pronunciation and improve your ability to speak as well as understand.

Rosetta Stone didn’t make it into the top slot in our review because a few word tools could make the program a little more comprehensive, and there is no compatibility with portable media.

Rosetta Stone Italian Screenshots. Click for more
       


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.

Summary:  

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.