5 stars (Easy Italian) - My husband and I have been taking Italian for several months and were looking for something we could do at home that would enhance our classroom experience. The Rosetta Stone program is so much more than we ever expected. We easily spend an hour or two a day studying Italian. We wouldn't give up our live Italian instructor, but this program easily leads us through building language skills in a way that nothing else we've ever tried could. We also love the various ways of teaching, hearing, seeing, writing, reading, virtually all of the ways you need to learn any language. Since we're going to be permanently relocating to Italy next year, it's important for us to learn the language as quickly and efficiently as possible. Rosetta Stone provides all of the tools we need to do that.
4 stars (Great but will not stand alone) - I haven't gotten that far in it but I'm far enough to see the strengths and weaknesses. On the plus side, what I did learn is really well ingrained. The picture/word association really works - I find when I see something in my daily life that I have seen in the rosetta stone program, the italian word just pops into my head on it's own. There is no "translation" process like you ordinarily go through with language tapes. On the downside, anything that does not show well in a photograph doesn't fit the mechanics of the course. Words like "who, what, where, why, how" greetings "hello, goodbye" abstract nouns like "love, wisdom, pain, happiness, etc) subjective adjectives like "pretty, kind, cold, risky, etc.)and many verbs like "to know, think, want, wish, prefer, etc" and relative modifiers (more, most, least, -er, -est) are important parts of daily conversation and just don't fit the image/word association method. I think this is barrier to total fluency by the rosetta stone method. However, it's a great vocabulary builder, boasting 40,000 words by completion of the course. Not all the words will be useful in coversation, for example the word given for a car is L'autimobile when the common usage word is maccina. Both are correct, but it's like saying automobile instead of car in america. It's also great for reading skills, which is something not everyone is interested in but most cd courses are weak in if you want that. Language mechanics are not explained at all at any time. It's worth the money and an excellent supplement to other courses but will not stand alone, especially if you want tourist italian. If you actually want a full command of the language it's indispensible.
As to other courses to use this along with, Pimsleur is also expensive but worth every penny. The two go great together and each succeeds where the other fails. Pimsleur is entirely verbal, with almost no written material (brief reading exercises, nothing to write home about) and is better suited to tourists. It works much harder on accent and speaking skills, and an english speaker explains nuances of the language in english, so you can understand it. It has a limited vocabulary but succeeds at giving you a grasp of how to form sentences and actually use the language creatively.
Both Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone suffer from the lack of explanatory text and for this I'd recommend Ultimate Italian by living language. Each of the two volumes contain a 450 page textbook to fill in whatever gaps you have left after Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone get done with you. The included CD's can't hurt, but if you bought the whole pimsleur and both rosetta stones like I did, you're now into it for over 1000 dollars, and can save about 80 bucks by buying just the books. You really wont need the CD's if you already have Pimlseur and Rosetta stone. That money is better spent on a good dictionary, phrasebook and guide to slang and colloquialisms. I recommend Street Italian and webster's.
If you buy all this, expect to drop about 1200 bucks on everything. That's about the tuition and textbook for two semesters at community college but you'll have alot more to work with if you do it this way. You get out of it what you put into it, but don't expect to actually be speaking italian from a 101/102 class. Unless you're applying those credits towards a degree college classes are basically a waste of time and money for purposes of learning to speak the language.
5 stars (Helpful for Learing Italian) - This will not work for you as the first or only program for learning Italian. It is great as a supplement to other methods of learning Italian. The method is entirely intuitive - there is no English anywhere, so you may also want to have a dictionary and a grammar book.
I have found Rosetta Stone language programs most useful for reviewing the information I have learned elsewhere, for brushing up on languages I haven't used for a while, and for expanding vocabulary.
It may not be the best choice for total beginners, but you can learn a lot by associating words and expressions with the images and occasional mini videos. I do consider it definitely a worthwhile purchase.
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