To consider buying Rosetta Stone software?

[Fishpond]

It looks like a miracle. But is it too good to be true? I am about 80% fluent in Spanish but would love to learn another language, just have no resources here in my small American town.

Yanbu. It is great, you should get it. My ds and his gf have it, and I used hers one afternoon. It was easy and a lot of fun. I only played on it, but ds's gf has used it to learn some languages for traveling to India and Japan.
She loves it.

I have Rosetta Stone; it's really excellent.

DS uses it for school homework. It's really good and seems quite fun.

I haven't used it myself but a lot of the other foreigners I've met here (in Sweden) have and I've never heard it talked about in any way other than positive.

To me (as a student) it looks incredibly expensive for what you get. I've only tried the free trial though. There are loads of good free resources online these days, I'd go for those first.

What language do you want to learn? www.livemocha.com covers many common languages, it has structured courses, and you can also communicate with native speakers on there, ask them for help, make friends. Most stuff on it is available for free.

For meeting native speakers to chat to informally, try www.sharedtalk.com

For an excellent online dictionary, with forums discussing the usage of phrases and idioms, try www.wordreference.com.

There'll probably also be language-specific sites, youtube channels and podcasts all free if you hunt around.

my work pays for it and i used it in conjunction with lessons to learn basic mandarin

it's highly rated but won't get you fluent on its own

I got Rosetta Stone through a groupon deal and they're really good IMO

i use pimsleur, i find that really good, i can put it on the ipod and listen while i walk the dogs

This is my first ever post and I made an account for the sole reason of suggesting you do NOT drop hundreds of pounds on this overpriced program! Look, Rosetta Stone is great as a little vocabulary trainer once you have some groundwork in the language. I would have only good things to say if it were advertised as a £30 vocab trainer.

However, that is NOT what they claim. They claim this hundreds-of-pounds program can make you learn a language, make you fluent. It absolutely can't.

I recommend Livemocha website which is the same thing, except without the rip-off prices. I also recommend Pimsleur, although also vastly overpriced, it is most likely available from your local library.

By all means borrow it or trial it, but please, don't buy it because more than likely it will languish on your shelf a couple of weeks into the new year. My credentials, 10 years of linguistics study and having used the main products on the market extensively, including Rosetta Stone.

Like many others above are saying, Rosetta Stone costs way too much -- $100's if you want one language, $1,000's if you want all of them.

Google around and look for free alternatives. They're out there, and they're usually just as good, like earthfluent.com , for example.

Sadly Livemocha seems to have been closed - was re-directed to rosetta stone.

I like Duolingo for the basics of some languages. The app is fun, I'm using it to learn Russian after 3 years long-forgotten study 10 years ago and it's quite good. It's not going to make you fluent but as a start it will be okay.

For fluency I'd go for a tutor.

I've heard good things about Babbel too though they only seem to do European languages.