This review concentrates on Rosetta Turkish, but it also tries to highlight features of Rosetta Stone/Totale (= RS) that are relevant to other languages. If you want to learn a foreign language but can't attend a good class at a good university that requires you to do a lot of work, then you should consider investing in Rosetta Stone, provided you avail yourself of some of the other resources mentioned below. If Amazon allowed split stars, I would have given this product 3 1/2 stars. In general RS accomplishes what it sets out to do, providing a thoughtfully designed, self-enclosed, portable computer- and internet-based language learning resource. However, know its limitations before you buy it. I have the impression that some users of RS think that it is a quasi-magical gimmick that delivers language competence through painless, passive osmosis.
That is naive. While RS does function like a self-enclosed system, one cannot rely on it for all pedagogical needs.
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You must supplement RS with other materials if you are to gain more than survival-level competence in the language. This means also investing your time in the exercises, practice, and frustration required by those other materials. Another limitation--remember that RS emphasizes patterns--is the self-imposed restriction in RS to clear, well-pronounced, sanitized, well-behaved expressions that are so different from the incomplete, error-laden, rapidly spoken fragments of real speech. Best army bases overseas.
Even if you absorb RS perfectly, you may be shell-shocked when you try to engage in a real conversation in Turkish. More on this below. The strengths of RS include: It tries to use an immersive approach combining pictures, simple social situations, and oral and written responses, and thus it admits no language except the target language. This is challenging, and it illustrates why you must resort to outside explanations occasionally, but it has the advantage of making you work actively.
(The same approach is used in the Totale studio sessions, where you are also confined to the target language.) Another plus of the overall RS system is that you can set your own pace; the machine is as patient as you need it to be. I expect this is a real boon for those students with tin ears and tied tongues who are discouraged or inhibited by live classes.
The program is portable and, if you buy the permanent disc version, it lasts indefinitely. There are flexible options for more than one host computer, so you can learn on your desktop and your laptop concurrently.
RS shows much thought in its organization of the grammatical topics and the construction of the situations. RS is much much more than a repetition of key phrases and responses. There are limited but still useful tools for recording yourself and listening to your accent. Included for free during a limited time and available for money after that are the live target-language-only sessions with native speakers that are conducted over the internet. In my experience these involve one or zero extra students and they can be quite effective in demonstrating how much you are not learning by RS alone--I don't mean that sarcastically: they bring you down to earth out of the greenhouse environment of RS. I did not elect to continue with the sessions after my freebie expired, but I would recommend that others consider doing so. Some problems with the studio sessions: Because you are limited to 12 sessions over as many weeks, you use up your 'free' quota relatively early in your learning, even if you move rapidly; if you move slowly you may get little benefit.
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