Rosetta Stone V3: Italian, Level 1

I bought to learn for a trip. I have done 2 lesson plans and am retaining everything thus far. I love the way the program works.

I am an American native speaker, was a Spanish major in college, lived in Madrid for about a year and a half and am (well, WAS) fluent in Spanish. I love Italy and have faked my way through Italian trips with my spanish for years. And then my husband ordered Rosetta Stone. It's wonderful! I'd heard about it for years, but had no idea that this system was so intuitively exciting. It's more fun than playing Freecell, or other addictive games on the computer!

The system (an immersion approach, with picture recognition and hearing native speakers) is so natural, I couldn't believe it. I've done about half the first level and I find myself out on a walk and making up fun-sounding little italian phrases and sentences in my head. The teaching system is logical, gradual, progressive, challenging, exciting, quickly paces, never boring, and plain fun. I love the tapes for the car. My husband and I are both using it and we both love it.

There are two negative reviews (here and on the level 1&2 software), both of which I find insubstantial. The one here complains, in essence, that you can't steal the software and give it away to your friends! That's fine with me. It's licensed for one computer, but you can have lots of users using that one machine. If you're honest and respect intellectual property rights, that won't be an issue for you.

The second negative review asserts that the set-up is difficult for MAC users. I have a two iMACS (and am a 25 year PC user who just switched, so I'm completely PC oriented) and have just installed it on one of my machines. The installation was easy, flawless and the software works beautifully. The person who complained had a very sophisticated system and had trouble with some of his intricate settings. I am an Apple neophyte and trust me, for those of us with plug-and-play systems, this is a plug-and-play program. MAC users - don't worry! Get the software and start having fun.

This was my big Christmas gift this year and I noticed that the rating of it is only 2 stars, primarily because it does not allow the user to copy it and install it in a variety of PCs or to share with friends. Fair enough... but what about the program as a way to learn the language?

1) The most important element for me is that the immersion method is a fun way to learn; instead of being given translations of words or phrases, you "discover" the language, just like a baby discovers language.

2) This game like approach, of looking at alternatives and guessing and slowly building up your skills, keeps me coming back for more, which I think is an important step towards making progress and learning the language.

3) The actual software installed very smoothly and easily and the USB headset/microphone has been very useful and without problems (I was worried about drivers and incompatibilities, but there have been no issues). It has some fairly powerful speech recognition capabilities and it is very good at giving me feedback on my pronunciation of Italian. Again, I had fairly low expectations in this area and I was very pleasantly surprised that it all works as advertised.

To supplement the software, I have also gotten a dictionary and a couple of books on grammar and I make occasional use of AltaVista's Babelfish translation. Depending on how you learn, you may or may not need additional resources such as these, but I find as an engineer, that in addition to the immersion method I like the handholding of some structure and rules provided by a bit of grammar/syntax on the side.

All in all, I'm very happy with this software and I highly recommend it.

This product is sold as licensed software. Users will NOT be able to load it onto more than one computer. This aspect of the product is not clear from the blurbing on the Rosetta Stone website. It is a "single-user" product.
Don't think that you can share this with friends, or that it is appropriate for a lending collection.