Rosetta Stone
 

Has anybody used it? Did you like it? I just threw down $300 for the Spanish 1 & 2.

Wow, you can get it a lot cheaper than that on Ebay. I bought it for $180, and that included 1, 2, and 3. They weren't illegal copies either. :o

Anyway, I really like it, when I take the time to use it. It sticks with you. Make sure you have a microphone, so you can practice your pronounciation.... and be prepared to say "un avioneta" about a million times. *LOL*

I also have NO background with Spanish. I took 4 years of French in HS and College. So at times I'd get confused because they are both kind of similar.

My husband took a look at the demo version when my dad was looking at buying it and he says it's pretty good as far as pronunciation and accuracy of translation. I don't think by #2 you're getting much in to syntax/colloquialisms yet, so I'm not sure about that.

I think I remember one of my friends buying it and saying it was pretty good.

I teach Spanish and ESOL and we have the English-learning version at school. It's great!

I'm really glad you posted this topic PiKA.

I've been wanting to ask the same thing. I'm trying to learn Spanish because I think it would be beneficial for my job. I have one CD set (Learn in your Car series -- I listen to it at work w/ headphones... ) but it seems to be travel-oriented. Like it mostly consists of questions/nouns that you would use when traveling to a Spanish-speaking country.

I've seen the ads for Rosetta Stone in airplane magazines, but it's a nice chunk of change to throw down, so I'd like to hear more experiences with the program.

Does it take a long time to pick up? How long would current users recommend using it per day or week to pick it up?

My husband uses languages for work--and has said that Rosetta Stone comes highly recommended by lots of his colleagues. If you want to try it out, he said that he found some languages at the library.

Does it help you roll your R's? I cant do that to save my life :(

R-r-r-r-uffles have r-r-r-r-idges :)

My BA is in Spanish Lit, so I have not used Rosetta Stone or any similar products. But I would just like to advocate that if you use any of those study materials that you also read as much as possible in Spanish.

Once you get through a few audio sessions, check out a newspaper, children's book or some other written material that will tend to have predominantly basic and commonly used Spanish words- and just start reading. Keep a dictionary at hand and look up every single word you do not understand.

It will be very slow going, but the payoff comes fairly quickly.

OK, I just went through a massive advanced training with Rosetta Stone. They taught us Russian since no one there knew any. I was really impressed! The rep said they have sales all the time; he must have meant on their website.

I'd be seriously interested in the Russian or the German one. I only took one year of Russian - the only person in the class who hadn't taken 3+ years of it prior! - and can only say some basic words, and write about the same. I've never taken German, but have known enough German speakers to have picked up a bit.

So, on a scale of 1-10, how do you all rate Rosetta Stone?

I haven't used it long enough to find out the negatives but I'll let you know later if there are any. The rep said that their program is especially strong for beginners. I'd like to do the program in some language totally unrelated to Spanish; I took Portuguese in grad school and it was hard because I was a Spanish speaker and the 2 are so close.

Vietnamese might be fun, or Korean. As I mentioned before on GC, the only thing I currently know how to say in Korean is (courtesy of my brother) "My butt hurts."