Review: Rosetta Stone 3 education software

Rosetta Stone claims total immersion in a language, but is that just jumping in at the deep end?

Language tutorial software tries to do more than teach by rote as its audio cassette predecessors did.

Rosetta Stone, in that vein, is supposed to be fully interactive, taking input from mouse, keyboard and the supplied headset and using speech recognition to assess your attempts at pronunciation.

Now in version 3, Rosetta Stone can teach any of 30 languages, from French and Russian to Tagalog and Welsh. They’re available in three different levels, starting with individual words and progressing up to a good conversation. We tested a pack which combines levels 1 and 2.

The teaching technique is heavily based around pictures, showing people, places and situations. To these are attached words or phrases, used in a variety of ways. You may have to select the correct caption for a picture, or pick a picture which fits a foreign language phrase. The screens are very clearly designed and the words and phrases are spoken by native speakers.

A headset is provided and this comes into play in the pronunciation sections, where the user repeats what’s said. We were suspicious of the accuracy of speech recognition for learning a language and tried some pretty ropey Franglais pronunciations, several of which were accepted without question, but it can pick out some mispronunciations.

There are no instructions in English - in fact, no instructions at all - so you have to work out the logic of what the program wants you to do at each stage. While Rosetta Stone does well to slowly increase complexity, there are a few places where its not clear what you should do next. It’s frustrating to be penalised for not understanding the program’s method rather than for making a language mistake.

There’s some repetition between screens from the main module in a unit and those in the individual grammar, pronunciation and writing modules. While we can see the advantage of emphasising aspects of sentence structure or speech, it does mean you can get a high score simply by remembering which answers went with which questions from before. The program swaps the pictures round to try to stop this, but the repetition doesn’t always help improve understanding.

The idea of offering no translations during teaching is commonly used in face-to-face language tuition, but you get much more feedback from a human tutor.

Rosetta Stone is generally well thought-out, but we have a few reservations about the level of intuition required to learn a fresh language from scratch.

Vista compatible: Yes