Rosetta Stone Italian Level 1 & 2 Personal Edition

Rating:
Summary: This is a good start
Review: I have completed both level 1 and level 2 and I have learned quite alot, but, I cannot yet claim that I speak or write the Italian language fluently. This is a good course, and worth the money if you are very serious about learning Italian, but it is only a good beginning. It will not teach you much about verb conjugation or how to build a proper Italian sentence. Italian is a tough language to learn for the English speaker and it requires a huge amount of study, and many different types of study sources. This course is probably the best of its type available, but as with all of them it can only take you so far.

Rating:
Summary: Awesome Learning Tool!
Review: I have had some knowledge of the Italian language so I am not a total beginner, but pretty close to it. The reason I purchased this software is that I found myself loosing the little knowledge I had. How this program works is through picture recognition along with coinciding speech. For an example they will show you a picture of a bird in different sequences such as: flying, swimming, and the color of the bird etc... They also show people doing similar actions. By picture recognition, repetitive patterns, and hearing the words, you do learn the language. The pictures do build in a methodical way and eventually you do learn to form the words, and then into sentences. But, there is no explanation in the how and why the grammar works. The word "the" is different in Italian with respect to masculine, feminine, plural, and the program does not explain this aspect of the language. You learn merely by rote imitation. This indeed is how a child learns to speak a language. A nice feature to this software is that the native speaker does speak in a slow pronunciation, in some parts of the program you can really slow the speakers voice down and hear every syllable. The program allows you to record your voice so you can hear your progress. Learning in this way is fun and I do not find my mind wandering.

Rating:
Summary: Great but will not stand alone
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Helpful for Learing Italian
Review: 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.