One important note about Rosetta Stone is that it used to have a policy of absolutely no English or translations in the software. Other times you simply match by clicking the correspondin image.

Sometimes you have to speak the word / sentence, and the software will evaluate how well you performed. I jumped on to test the Swedish and Spanish versions.Īs they graciously give you a 3-day free trial, I didn't have to donate any money to Rosetta Stone to produce this review today, phew!īut, unfortunately that's where my joy stopped as I was met with an instant flashback to 15 years ago.

The following courses only made it to version 2 of Rosetta Stone, and is currently not offered for sale anywhere: Rosetta Stone is available in 27+ languages, with the following 24 of them available with the new online subscription model: Which languages can you learn with Rosetta Stone? Let's jump in and see exactly how Rosetta Stone looks today.

We're now in 2020, so the last time Rosetta Stone was awarded any recognition was 4+ years ago.īut, a well-renowned company, with a lot of income and lots of language experts can surely improve their offer from 28 years ago? If you take a look at the Rosetta Stone Wiki page, and the company wiki page you'll see a long list of awards:īut, notice one thing: The last one was received in 2014, and the latest awards were received based on app design, user's choice, and general user experience evaluations, none of the awards since 2011 praised the actual educational content. Since then there has been a lot of developments in software, technology, and education and Rosetta Stone has slowly faded into the shadows of other big language learning companies like Duolingo. Not long after, there wasn't many Americans who hadn't heard of Rosetta Stone, and for many years this was the ONLY language learning method/software/solution that anyone had heard of. Unfortunately, in 1984 when he got the idea to use computers to aid in language learning, the computer was simply not powerful enough to even show images to the user, which is why Rosetta Stone wasn't publicly released and available until 1992 when CD-ROMs had become mainstream and capable of storing larger amounts of data.ĭue to its first-mover advantage, and the initial success of making language learning abundandently available Rosetta Stone became a huge company, which allowed it to pour millions of dollars into advertising.

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