Rating: 
Summary: Not helpful for me
Review: Like another user before me, I checked out the free Mandarin demo on the Rosetta website. It was quite a fiasco as I was completely lost after two or three lessons. You learn to identify certain things by looking at them, but I don't find this helpful at all, partly because of the incompetence of the photographer. Very often the men and women looked like each other and the boys and girls did as well, so if you ask me to click on "the boy is riding a horse" and the picture is shot from about 20 feet away, is it any surprise that I would be confused? And to worsen things as the lessons went on, there was no English explanation of any parts of speech. In lesson 1, you learn that "yi ge nan hai er" refers to a boy. I would GUESS that the "nan" part refers to the boy, but is it "this is a boy" or "that is a boy" or "it is a boy" that the rest of the sentence means? For all I know, it could mean "the boy is standing" or "the boy is smiling," how at all am I expected to decipher something like this??? I don't recommend this unless you already know a bit of Chinese and you just want to drill yourself or something. Otherwise give it a pass and try some Pimsleur or something.
Rating: 
Summary: fun, but not that efficient for the price
Review: This course is a nice, gentle introduction to Chinese and it is fun. You see four pictures on the screen and hear an accompanying word or phrase. Each section has ten of these four-picture sets. There is no explanation or translation in English. You have to figure out from the picture what they new word or phrase means. Sometimes it takes a while to figure out what it means, but with a little patience, you do figure it out and it sticks with you. Some of the pictures are a bit unclear, but in general they are good. The audio is also good and the course is user friendly. Once you think you have learned a section you can take a quiz.
On the whole, however, I think there are better courses out there. This one is very expensive and doesn't really take you very far. While it does teach a lot of vocabulary and things like comparatives and location, you don't really learn to say anything you would want to when visiting China. You learn to say "The taxi is red" or "The taxi has two windows" which are good things to learn. But you don't learn to say "Where can I find a taxi?" or "How long does it take to get to X?"
If you want a slow and easy introduction to listening and speaking, the Pimsleur introductory course is much cheaper (although the full Pimsleur courses are quite expensive.)Once you have finished the Pimsleur introduction, something like Ultimate Mandarin Basic course works well.
Rosetta Stone is good for learning Chinese characters. It doesn't actually teach them, but an accompanying booklet has the script for everything on the CDs (no pinyin or English, just the Chinese). It's a bit of a struggle, but you really can learn to recognize the characters using this program.
Rating:
Summary: Decent intro to spoken language, not useful for reading
Review: This is a useful program for getting a basic sense of the sound of the Chinese language. It's based on the immersion model of foreign language learning, which means lots of repetition, visual cues, and no English translations. (You're supposed to make the association between sounds and pictures intuitively.) This makes sense in principle, as it's a bit like the way children learn a first language.But if you're interested in learning to read Chinese or understand how the characters work, this won't get you very far, in part because the program doesn't include a Chinese-English dictionary. For this, you might be better off with a good Chinese language textbook and a Chinese text reader / dictionary software package like Clavis Sinica. If you want a lesson-based program, though, with tutorials, tests, drills, and lots of pictures, this might be worth trying out, at least in the demo version.
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