Rosetta Stone Version 3

My review of Rosetta Stone 2 wasn't very positive. I thought it was a reasonably well designed program, yes, but nowhere near worth the hype or the price tag. Now I have tried out Rosetta Stone 3, and I feel quite differently about it. While it still follows the somewhat controversial total immersion method (no English), I would liken the experience of Rosetta Stone 2 to being dropped into a foreign country and trying to figure things out, albeit with ideal context clues. Rosetta Stone 3 is like being dropped into the same situation, but with a native speaker, who, although they don't speak any English, is trying to help you and teach you the language. No, the program doesn't actually use role-playing like that, but that's sort of how it feels. In Rosetta Stone 2, you were on your own. In Rosetta Stone 3, the software is teaching you.

In addition, Version 3 teaches the written language, and is much better at testing pronunciation (although it's still a computer program... so... :() and tasks other than listening comprehension. The variety of exercises is much better.

Above: This exercise teaches you to spell using the Japanese syllabary, Hiragana.

While there is still no cultural content to speak of, Version 3 at least seems to acknowledge that languages are different. While so far I have only tried the Japanese version, many aspects of it seem tailored to teaching Japanese, as opposed to any language (and by that we mean, ideal for Germanic/Romance languages, less good for others).


Above: This exercise, which asks you to differentiate between the three writing systems used in Japanese, is clearly unique to the Japanese Version.

One area in which this differentiation between languages has actually regressed from Version 2 -3 is in the pictures. Version 2 had at least two different photo sets for Asian and Western languages, so most of the pictures in the Japanese version were taken in Japan. In Version 3, Japanese pictures are enough of a minority that I suspect they use the same photos for all languages. Still, I can't bring myself to complain much about this. While there is only one set of pictures, they are much nicer than in Version 2. The quality is high enough that you never find yourself wondering whether a character is a boy or a girl, and the variety is impressive. At times, Version 2 looked like it was creatively picking pictures from stock photos to represent the words - Version 3 very obviously planned and took many of the pictures expressly for the purpose of teaching the language.

Above: Version 2 might have contented itself with showing bigger and smaller flowers in stock-like photographs. The magnifying glass over the 'small flowers' and the girl standing behind the 'big flowers' makes it obvious that Version 3 took each picture precisely for it's function in the software.


Above: Version 2 showed different colours of cars. Version 3 shows close ups so tight that you know they're talking about the colour itself.

The user can also moderate the difficulty to a greater extent than in Version 2. You can determine how strictly your pronunciation is graded, and you can pick between using Romanji (Japanese spelled with our alphabet: much easier, but less authentic), Hiragana, Kanji, and Kanji with Furigana. Including Kanji with Furigana was a nice thought on the part of the designers, but in actuality it makes everything so small that it's not worth bothering with.

Above: In this exercise, you can read the Kanji, or click on the green speaker icon to hear how the sentence is sounded out, depending on whether you want to learn to read the language, or just understand it.

In conclusion, I find Rosetta Stone 3 to be a very well made computer based language learning program - perhaps approaching the best such a program can possibly be. Version 3 addresses many of the shortcomings of Version 2, making it worthy of the hype and the price tag. However, the fact that it is a computer program, and that it follows the 'total immersion' learning philosophy, means it is still quite a challenge for those who, without any linguistic background, would learn a language using ONLY Rosetta Stone software. Ideally, users would have a teacher, or a dictionary and a grammar book, as supplements.