Learn Italian: Rosetta Stone Italian - Level 1-5 Set

Okay, so I'm not fluent or anything, and I'm only on level one of five. I don't know yet how well I'll be able to converse with people at the end of this program. I am doing this right, though, with great motivation to learn Italian, and I believe I can offer some useful information to those considering the Rosetta Stone program as a PART of their language learning process.I give this five stars based on what Rosetta Stone is intended for, not some independent rating based on some fantasy or educational philosophy. If you take this or other five star reviews to mean Rosetta Stone will easily make you fluent without any other outside learning, you are misunderstanding what Rosetta Stone can do for you.With the disclaimers out of the way, here's my review.The Rosetta Stone program is a wonderful introduction to a language. It teaches you vocabulary, pronunciation, spelling, and along the way you absorb some grammar as well. It builds up your confidence and keeps you motivated. Those last two things are very important. Rosetta Stone does not teach you Italian culture, or Italy-specific words. Rosetta Stone does not teach you how to conjugate verbs, though you will be conjugating verbs without realizing that's what you're doing along the way. You will never see translations into or from English on anything. You will be presented with pictures, text, and audio, and need to speak, type, and choose pictures or text to complete each exercise. Each exercise repeats words and concepts from before, but does so in a slightly different way, which trains your brain quite effectively and you will learn the material with excellent recall later. You will learn to listen, speak, read, and spell.The ease at which I have learned the vocabulary in the program was really quite surprising. I can recall words and sentences readily, because the multi-format repetition used in Rosetta Stone burns it into your brain. At the end of a session, I have a headache and I'm hungry. I can feel my brain burning up calories and moving neurons around. To me, this is a great sign (and a sign to take a break so I don't burn out). When I later need to use some aspect of what I've learned before and it comes to me instantly, I can see the results quite clearly. What I've learned so far has no real usefulness to a tourist, at least so far, but if all I wanted to do was ask where the bathroom was, or buy train tickets, I'd just memorize a phrase book. They are a lot cheaper than Rosetta Stone, and if push comes to shove I can take it with me and point at phrases in the book to convey my meaning. What I want is to truly know the language.Rosetta Stone alone is not going to make you fluent. I have a long ways to go with the program, but I'm pretty sure I can say that. The fact is, Rosetta Stone is very, very good at getting you to memorize things, without making it seem like you're memorizing things. But that memorization only goes so far, even if it's perfectly designed to make sure you can think and speak in Italian without having to pause and translate back and forth with your native tongue. Rosetta Stone is fun, it uses a variety of techniques to utilize all your learning "vectors", and it's great at motivating you to stick with it. But if you really want to learn a new language, you need to do more than sit in front of a computer running Rosetta Stone.Think about how long it took you to learn your first language. You spent years as a baby and toddler, babbling away with constant corrections from your parents and perhaps siblings. As you get older and go to school, they formally teach you new words and some basic grammar concepts, more and more as you go along. You watched television and movies. You read books and had spontaneous conversations all throughout the day for years. You had spelling bees and gave oral book reports. You're still learning the language, too, learning new words all the time. Ort, bezoar, merism, fugacious, inveigh, erotema, anacoenosis, apotheosis, bedizen, meretricious.Rosetta Stone is something you turn on, use for half an hour to a couple hours at a stretch, and then turn it off again. See the difference? Even if it was perfect at teaching you a language as a baby learns his first language, it's not hard to see how it can't possibly get you to native speaker fluency.Rosetta Stone is really quite excellent as the core structure of your curriculum, but you need more than just Rosetta Stone in your curriculum. Doing a lesson a day, for 80 days, you can complete the five levels in the Rosetta Stone program and have a fairly large vocabulary, and understand quite a bit of the language. In fact, I recommend doing just that, because it will keep you working on it every day, making clear progress, and build up your confidence and vocabulary. But that can't be all you do to learn Italian.When you're not at the computer, practice your vocabulary on the world around you. Narrate your life as you live it, in Italian. Don't translate what you want to say, just stick to the Italian in your thoughts and words. Try forming sentences that you weren't directly taught in Rosetta Stone, but know how to do anyway because you've picked up on some grammar. Listen to the audio CDs included for the section you're working on now, as well as all the older ones. Practice your pronunciation, and listen carefully to the nuance. The Rosetta Stone audio is top quality, so take advantage of it. Get a grammar book (I highly recommend, as other reviewers have, Essential Italian Grammar by Olga Ragusa) and read it. Flip through it again often, focusing on the areas you're currently learning in Rosetta Stone. Get a nice big thick English/Italian dictionary (I use Webster's New World Italian Dictionary). If, as you narrate your life in Italian, you come across a thing or action you haven't learned yet, look it up in your dictionary and add it to your vocabulary. You might want to get a "mini" dictionary as well, that is easier to carry with you. Get a phrase book too, I like Rick Steves' Italian Phrase Book & Dictionary. Learn some new phrases, in addition to the ones Rosetta Stone teaches you, but really learn them. What words do you already recognize from a different context? What clues on grammar can you identify? What words can you take from those sentences and use in others of your own creation?Oh wait, but there's more. Call up your cable company and subscribe to to an Italian language channel. Where I am, I can get Rai Italia. Watch some game shows, and some cultural programming. Pick up some simple books in the Italian language, and try to read them without using your dictionary. You'll be surprised how much you can figure out from the context of what you already know. See if you can rent or buy some foreign films in Italian, and don't use the subtitles.Learning a foreign language is hard. Rosetta Stone will give you the best possible start, but you need to put in some hard work outside of the program and don't expect it to do everything for you. Rosetta Stone gives you simple and clear Italian to allow you to effectively communicate your ideas. Real Italian is often mumbled, spoken quickly, or said in thick regional accents. It's filled with slang. The sooner you're exposed to it, the sooner you can start to understand Italian as you're likely to encounter it on a tour of Italy. Use Rosetta Stone for all its worth, which I would argue is considerable, but don't only use Rosetta Stone. Before you even feel confident, you should start talking to native speakers. Find out if there's a language club in your area. Talk to random Italians on Skype, or native Italian speakers in your community. Visit Italian language web forums or chat rooms on a subject you're interested in. There's a lot you can do for free or very cheap to supplement your Rosetta Stone learning experience. Don't be a passive learner, go out and be active with your Italian as much and as early as possible. Practice what you learn from Rosetta Stone, and don't ever be satisfied with what Rosetta Stone teaches you.I recommend Rosetta Stone as the core of a language learning curriculum, but it's only one part of it.Okay, that was a long review, but some quick addressing of Rosetta Stone's most common criticisms.1) Price. It's expensive, yes, but you get what you pay for. The pictures are all high quality and quite clear in what concepts they are conveying. The extensive research into language learning Rosetta Stone does is quite evident in the program. You are also paying for their huge marketing campaigns, of course. But I've done some research on credit hour pricing at local colleges, and you should too. Rosetta Stone is not so expensive after all, and I could never really learn a foreign language in a formal classroom, anyway.2) Repetitive/boring. It's certainly repetitive, but I wouldn't exactly say it's boring. Look, you get out of this what you put into it. If you don't find this interesting, why are you learning Italian anyway? When the program is repetitive, I know it's because the more repetitions I get on something, especially in Rosetta Stone's case where the repetitions are often in different formats, I know I'm going to retain it better. I don't mind in the slightest, because I want to learn Italian, and I enjoy learning Italian.3) Too easy. It's true you can figure things out much of the time by process of elimination. I would argue that's not exactly a bad thing, since you're still absorbing the language this way, and the whole idea is the pictures are unambiguous. More to the point, you can cheat at this if you want to, but you're only cheating yourself. Don't just hit the answer quickly because it's the last picture left on the page, or a particular noun only applies to one image. Read the full sentence, or look over all the pictures, and do it right.4) No conjugation tables. This one is certainly valid. As I said above, you should get yourself a grammar book if you really want to learn Italian. Rosetta Stone won't make it completely obvious what's going on with various conjugations and quirks of Italian grammar. Rosetta Stone will still present you with grammatically correct sentences that you can and may instinctually figure out over time. Grammar lessons aren't total immersion, though, to be clear.

My wife and I are having fun learning before our vacation. The microphone that came with it was not functional however! Luckily we had another laying around.My wife took Latin in high school and I was a minor in Spanish. Now we are learning Italian together. I really like how it teaches you the language using photos and the microphone. It is very intuitive and super fun.This has worked on both a Windows 7 and a Windows 10 computer for us. The installation was easy. We did not use the online subscription that came with this. We preferred to gather around the computer and use a web cam as a mic so that we both can listen and take turns speaking.I like how we can have separate accounts so that we each can progress at our own rate. Sometimes I sneak in an extra lesson before my wife so that I can show off the next time we learn together!

I am close to the end of Level Five now, so I feel I've had enough exposure to this product to be able to write an informed review on it.Two of the most major fundamental elements of learning a language are vocabulary and grammar. Rosetta Stone (at least the Italian version) does all teaching through showing and not telling, through giving you examples with photographs to show what the object is. That's awesome for vocabulary, and on that front this program succeeds.On grammar, on the other hand, it fails miserably. At the risk of sounding pedantic, a family member once told me that one of the greatest disgraces in language learning is to for one go through a year or two, and after all that, still not be able to conjugate a single verb. That's honestly where I am with this program (I cannot conjugate "to be" or "to have" or any other verb fully, for example); because Rosetta doesn't "tell" you how to conjugate, but only "shows" you through examples, you have to learn by accumulating from experience what the proper first person singular is, what the proper third person plural is, etc for a verb. It comes off as scattershot in my opinion really; granted, yes, I know Rosetta is going for a "realistic" experience, one which a person would have if learning the language from "the real world" and not in a classroom. All the same, I honestly wouldn't mind seeing a conjugation tree or two in this program nonetheless. I understand one can learn more directly through tutoring, but really the program itself, to be effective, should do a good enough job the first time around in teaching or at least conveying the knowledge of grammar without the need for a tutorThe two kinds of lessons that infuriate me the most are Reading and Writing, and for two reasons. Number One, the testing reaches the point of brokenness. For Reading, it's easy enough for most of the way when you just have to match sentences with photographs. Then, in later units, some slides demand that you multiple-choice-ily construct entire sentences, blank after blank after blank, by clicking on the correct words, with no cues for several blanks at a time. This includes small articles, reflexive pronouns, and other words as well. (And even though the sentences are repeated from other exercises, like Speaking and Grammar, I don't memorize them word for word between exercises, as I'm sure no one else does either). This leads me to the Number Two reason for my frustration (in terms of Reading and Writing alike): the grading also basically reaches the point of brokenness. Get just ONE of those little blanks wrong, and the whole thing is wrong--no partial credit at all. This is equally maddening in the Writing segments here, where not only the testing can be considered broken through sporadic difficulty, but the grading is insanely unforgiving there too. In one segment, I misspelled ONE WORD, writing "diritto" instead of "dritto," and my final grade was a 94%. For ONE MISSPELLING. Everything else was perfect (mind you, it was like the third time through I was doing the exercise). Same thing happened to me just this evening with spelling a word as "chimicha" instead of "chimica," and the final grade was a 94% because that one misspelling. Make three tiny mistakes like that, and they prompt you to do the exercise again.Now, you don't HAVE to do the exercise in question again, but the point is this: while I'm NOT a perfectionist, I AM a completionist. I of course don't need to get 100% on each exercise; however, as repetitive as they all can be, I would like to have officially completed every exercise, with a check mark on each circle showing completion. It's just that, with certain sections like Reading and Writing, the difficulty gets sucker-punch sporadic (after having slogged through insultingly easy sections like Vocabulary and Listening), such that the easier exercises can bore you to tears, while the harder ones can make you feel like an idiot because the broken dynamic of, once again for instance, having to construct a sentence blank for blank with, on many occasions, no cues as to what the correct word in a given blank should be, and no partial credit margin for error.