Rosetta Stone V3 Russian Level 1-3 Set with Audio Companion OLD VERSION

When it comes to learning a language this program proves that immerssion is the best way to learn. My wife and I are now in Russia most of the year and this program helps us keep fresh and keep learning the language when we are in the States. It is the next best thing to being in the country with the native people. We use it one hour a day and love it. We are learning fast. We recommend it. Read more

Before I begin this is my fourth language to learn. I speak German, Spanish, and Korean(all Asian languages are level four - the hardest to learn) I purchased this program in hopes of learning some Russian. Instead I have to put up with very poor directions and goals. In every lesson/step there is zero description of what it is you are suppose to do. For example you finally figure out they are talking about the tense/verb/adverb/adjective/gender/singular/plural only after you have made a fool of yourself missing most of them. Only after you figure out what is going on do you finally grasp what is expected of you....Duh! Trying to teach me something without stating the objective of the lesson!!!!!!!!! Additionally there are no lists/tables/flashcards of vocabulary for you to review and practice just vocabulary. The same holds true with grammar. Additionally after you have gone through their presentation of new vocabulary you will in the middle of the lesson and have a new word thrown at you. Fine but don't you think it should be defined first? If you miss a single one you have to repeat the whole frame to 'pass' it. Also after you progress far enough which comes around Level 1 Unit 3 you will begin to be annoyed by the adaptive reviews. While they are needed you don't need three of them thrown at you at once. It breaks the learning chain of the lesson you are on. One at a time between lessons would be better. After much frustration I purchased the book "Russian Course A Complete Course For Beginners." In the first 40 pages it explained what Rosetta Stone could or would not. While there is no audio with this book I strongly suggest you get it so you have a clue as to what is going on in Rosetta Stone and buy an English-Russian-English Dictionary as well. You will save yourself some pain by doing this. Also do searches on the Internet using "learn Russian" and you will find excellent help such as MasterRussian, Livemocha, RussianPod101 (EXCELLENT), etc. Also Rosetta Stone locks up and hangs my computer. You will wait for something to happen and after 10 to 20 minutes you are still looking at the same screen. This program does this often. If you have to use task manager to kill the program process or reboot your computer to unfreeze this mess then it will, and I repeat, will lose any idea of where it was at and you may find yourself going back as many as four lessons because this junk cannot remember where it was and therefore has unchecked everything you have done in the previous steps on the home screen where it does track your progress. Additionally, even after you have finished a lesson Rosetta Stone will not mark it as completed. So you go back and redo it and it just goes though the lesson with everything already answered and then marks you as finished. How nice!!! My laptop handles high end Graphics like Autocad just fine so therefore it is not my computer. I am very frustrated that this program advertises itself as the best when I would not give it for free to my worst enemy - Seriously. Also you can be in the middle of a lesson, thinking your computer has hung, when in fact what is really going on is that Rosetta Stone is going into adaptive recall of previous material learned without telling you in the middle of your current lesson!!!!!!! Also some of the native speakers in the program and especially on the Audio Companion mp3 files speak way too fast to clearly understand what is said. It seems Rosetta Stone forgot they are talking to a student trying to learn Russian not a fluent Russian speaking individual. Save your money and lower your stress level. Buy something else. Also trying to address these issues with them is unproductive since they do not respond to emails and calling them is impossible from Afghanistan when you are out of sync because of being almost 12 hours ahead of them...so no one to answer the phone and no they will not return my calls to an overseas phone. If you like getting something of value for your money DO NOT buy this software. Steve Edit (Update) I have continued using this to see if it did get better. Today was the final straw. It is going back for a refund. This program simply cannot remember where it is at. Today it went back 3 lessons despite the homepage showing them done and no it was not adaptive recall. I got that as well but again with three of them in a row before being allowed to do any lessons. But the straw that broke the camel's back was the 8 different grammar constructions shown in under 5 seconds!!!! This is not the first instance of such rapidity in showing grammar cases. Now if your teacher in school did this do you think they really expect the students to learn this new grammar? Would not the teacher explain the different cases and their use before doing any exercises where you apply the new grammar rules? Well this product doesn't even do this. Instead you are thrown right into application without an understanding of usage. I guess they expect you to keep doing the same frame(s)over and over again until you have rote memorization without any understanding which in fact is the case....you see something often enough you memorize like Pavlov's Dog. Bottom line if I caught a teacher instructing my child the way Rosetta Stone does the teacher, principle and I would have a very long discussion and most likely my child is going somewhere else where she can learn. Also for what this product is it is grossly overpriced. Bottom Line: Having finished all of Level 1 you will be able to count from 1 to 20, say things like `shoes too small', `shoes to little', identify twelve colors, hello, goodbye, girl, boy, man, woman, coat, pants, etc. Do not for a second think you will even be able to say `Hello my name is xxxx. What is your name?' Level One does not do this. For this Rosetta Stone charges the better part of $200. RussianPod101 and the others I mentioned above are less expensive or outright free. But do buy a good Russian-English dictionary here at Amazon....the Oxford one is excellent and for American English also get the one by Kenneth Katzner here at Amazon as well. Read more

Unfortunately, I have to say that Rosetta stone is not as good as its ads. I am a Russian language teacher and from my own experience and feedback from my students I can say that you can be very disappointed in this product if you are going to learn the language using only this software. It is simply does not work this way! Although if you are going to use it as an addition to other sources or/and Russian classes with a teacher/tutor this can help. I decided to express my opinion about it because I see that people spend a lot of money for the product that does not meet their expectations! This software does not work for adults. You will not find grammar explanations that is essential for learning, especially Russian. I admit that you can gain some vocabulary using Rosetta stone but in order to communicate and build sentences it is not enough. Save your money! Read more

This programme is very thorough, but at the price I would have expected it to be a little more user friendly. It is a bit 'in the deep end' which I understand is the basis of the Rosetta Stone business model (the immersion approach). But for me the deep end was pretty deep ! I would suggest you just consider alternate education approaches at this price point before just jumping in. Read more

Rosetta Stone Russian Levels 1, 2 & 3 vs. Pimsleur Comprehensive Russian Levels I, II & III I've completed these courses, and thought it would be useful to compare them and offer some general suggestions for learning Russian. Overview: These courses are a serious attempt to start you on the road to learning Russian. You may be surprised to discover how little overlap there is between Rosetta and Pimsleur in the vocabulary words covered. Even though both require considerable work from the learner, they only scrape the surface of the Russian language. If you want to learn a few phrases to help you on vacation, buy instead a phrase book intended for travelers. Bottom line: If you can afford only one course, buy Rosetta Stone, but it will likely be an uphill, sometimes discouraging struggle that I suspect many soon give up. I've outlined a more comfortable strategy below: First: Study "Teach Yourself Beginner's Russian Script", an excellent, inexpensive little book that will ease you into reading and writing Russian Cyrillic script, and also introduce some useful vocabulary. Second: Study Pimsleur Comprehensive Russian I, II & III. Third: Study Rosetta Stone 1, 2 & 3. If you study at least 30 minutes daily and learn at the same pace as me, these first three steps will take six months to a year, by which time you'll have a limited ability to converse on everyday topics, but also a good grounding for beginning the serious work of learning Russian. The more Russian you know, the easier acquiring more knowledge becomes. Discussion: Language courses cost money to create and market, and the makers want to get their money back, but I wonder if their misleading advertising isn't counterproductive. How many learners give up after the first few lessons when they experience real difficulty with the material? The advertising for Rosetta and Pimsleur misleads buyers about what the courses do and how they do it. These courses are not "easy," and they're only "fun" if your idea of fun is applying yourself to some serious thinking, studying and memorizing. Pimsleur and Rosetta are also careful not to define just how much "Russian" you'll learn; from the advertising you'd think that after a few weeks' study you'd be prattling away in Russian to native speakers! If you start learning Russian as an adult, it's the work of a lifetime--the more you learn, the more you'll realize there remains to learn. I recommend starting with "Teach Yourself Beginner's Russian Script" because it addresses one of the major shortcomings of both Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur: Neither teaches you to handwrite Russian. Rosetta tries to teach you to print Russian on a Russian keyboard, but printed and written Russian are somewhat different. Also, the writing component of Russian Stone is one of the two most problematic components of the program. (More about that below.) Pimsleur: The three Pimsleur levels total 90 30-minute audio lessons. Speakers introduce you to Russian vocabulary and phrases, and you are prompted to repeat what you hear and are sometimes asked to generate phrases from what you've already learned. I recommend Pimsleur because it will soon have you speaking quite a lot of everyday Russian with a good accent, even though you won't be able to sustain a conversation. Today's college language texts are fond of proclaiming their ability to meet the needs of all kinds of learning styles: there are visual learners, auditory learners, digital mechanical learners, oral mechanical learners, and kinesthetic learners. Pimsleur would seem to be woefully old-fashioned, since it addresses only auditory learning. (There are three small booklets with examples of printed Russian, but the examples don't track the audio lessons.) I wrote down each new word as it was introduced, and I counted a vocabulary of approximately 540 words, not counting word variations such as noun and verb endings. I'm very much a visual and digital mechanical learner, and I soon got frustrated not being able to visualize or spell the phrases I was learning, so I bought two excellent inexpensive books: "Oxford Russian Grammar and Verbs" is a 250-page grammar summary that's helpful in identifying word endings (Russian nouns are declined and verbs are conjugated). I also bought "Oxford Beginner's Russian Dictionary," a 340-pager that contains helpful logical clusters of words and information (Colors; Days, months and dates) as well as standard alphabetized entries with examples of words used in phrases and sentences. For three times the cost, you can buy Kenneth Katzner's more definitive 1,090-page English-Russian, Russian-English dictionary (it's actually American English). Interlude: After I finished Pimsleur I enrolled in an Elementary Russian course at City College in San Francisco that met for three and a half hours one night a week. The Russian-born instructor and the textbook (Golosa) were excellent. I learned new material not covered by Pimsleur starting with the first lesson, but my Pimsleur background made the course much easier for me than for most of the other students, especially in pronouncing the language. Halfway through the course I began to feel that I was showing off in class and that the instructor was favoring me, so I decided to drop the course and focus on Rosetta Stone. The instructor suggested I switch to the next level class, but I couldn't rearrange my work schedule. Wakeup Call: Three weeks into the City College course I spent ten days in Moscow (my third visit in five years), and learned just how little Russian Pimsleur had taught me. If I'd relied on my Pimsleur knowledge, I'd have been able to order nothing but Chicken Kiev for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I could ask for a specific book in a bookstore, but most of the time in stores and restaurants I resorted to pointing and miming. Rosetta Stone: Rosetta is a computer program on CD-ROMs, and has lots of bells and whistles. It obviously cost a fortune to create and produce, and the makers work hard at getting their money back with TV advertising and mall boutiques (which I've never seen do any business). The lessons employ multiple choice pretty colored pictures to guide you to the right answers. There are reading, listening, speaking and writing components to the lessons. The good and bad news about Rosetta is closely linked to the multiple choice format. It's addictive to be reinforced for getting a right answer, then immediately prompted to answer the next question. The immediate feedback pushes you forward in the lessons. The bad news is that you quickly learn to look for the cues that allow you to choose the right answer, rather than studying the Russian language you see or hear. Thus, if you're asked to choose from among pictures of a man, woman, boy or girl, and you hear the word for man, you don't have to study the rest of the sentence to pick the right answer. In any case, words and phrases are flashed so quickly on the screen that you rarely have a chance to study them. Rosetta teaches you to recognize material, rather than forcing you to produce it. The two most problematic components are the speaking and writing tasks. Rosetta includes a microphone and voice recognition software, but it doesn't work well. I chose moderate accuracy as my goal, but time and again was frustrated by the shortcomings of the software. The longer the sentence I was asked to produce, the more likely that Rosetta marked me correct, even when I was speaking garbage. But time and again I was graded wrong pronouncing simple words such as "Please" and "Thank you." I learned to cheat the program by pronouncing words and phrases with rising intonation, as if I were asking a question, and by pronouncing the words the way they are spelled rather than the way Russians (and the Rosetta speakers) really speak them. I challenge any learner with no previous knowledge of Russian to succeed at the writing component of Rosetta. From the earliest lessons of Level One you are prompted to spell words you've seen previously for just seconds when they were flashed on the screen at the end of an exercise. Russian vowels, especially at the end of sentences, don't sound the way they're written. Even with my previous knowledge of Russian, I was often stumped to figure out the right spelling in the writing exercises. By Level Two, I started skipping these exercises. (If you want to use Rosetta to learn to write Russian, my best suggestion is that you buy "5000 Russian Words with all their inflected forms," published by Slavica. Even there you won't find all the word endings you need to write the Rosetta exercises.) Good luck learning Russian! Read more

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