Rosetta Stone Spanish Review: Great for Beginners but Not Serious Learners
Rosetta Stone is the blue and yellow language learning program that nearly everyone knows. It’s so well-known that it actually appears higher in Google search results than its arguably more important namesake (the physical Rosetta Stone).
I decided to give it a try and “learn” my own native language in three days. This post is the result of my experiment—a native Spanish teacher’s honest review of the Rosetta Stone Spanish program.
Back in the late 1980s, Allen Stoltzfus dreamed of a more effective way to learn languages. He teamed up with his brother-in-law, John Fairfield, to make that dream come true.
Rosetta Stone got its start in 1992 in the days of CD-ROM. The company went global in 2003 and was officially named after its main product in 2006.
The program uses a combination of native audio and images that get you immersed in the language while teaching you vocabulary and grammar in a natural way, just like a child would learn. It’s available for many different languages, including common ones like Spanish, as well as more unusual ones such as Irish and Tagalog.
Rosetta Stone uses the spaced repetition system as the core of its program and teaches you Spanish through practice instead of making you learn grammar rules.
Your choice will depend on your learning goals, travel plans and interests.
As you narrow down which regional variation you want to focus on, you may need to sign up for an additional, more specific language learning program. Especially if your goal is to communicate with Latin Americans, you’ll find that there’s a wide variety of accents and dialects to get familiar with. Using a wide range of learning materials helps train your ear to understand these differences with greater ease.
Choose Your Level and Study Goal
Next, you have to choose your Spanish level and your goal for learning Spanish.
There are three available levels (Beginner, Intermediate and Proficient), as well as four study goals (Travel, Family, Work and Basics & Beyond).
After you’ve set up your level and goal, you’ll be redirected to your Spanish language course. Here, you’ll be able to see the whole overview of the course divided into weeks:
How Does the Rosetta Stone Spanish Course Work?
Course Layout and Content
Both Castilian and Latin American Spanish have five levels. Each level has 20 units (themes) and four core lessons per unit.
Every lesson contains different sections such as grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation—these skills are always taught with immersion-based matching exercises and spaced repetition exercises.
I started my learning experiment by choosing the Latin American accent at the beginner level, and I selected “work” as my goal.
The overview of my course included the learning plan divided into weeks, with the specific topics I’d learn by completing all the lessons.
Video player for learners like you
Interactive subtitles: click any word to see detailed examples and explanations
Some of the topics included in my beginner course for work were basic sentences, meeting people, colors and sizes, clothes, family and staying in a hotel, just to name a few.
I could also access any given week individually and check out the lesson plan for each day.
Core Lessons
The course includes four core lessons (30-minute lessons that introduce you to the vocabulary and structures you’ll cover in the next few lessons).
The purpose of these is to boost your mental association of the Spanish word with the actual object (and not with the English word).
Core lessons start by showing you pictures along with native audio of the Spanish word describing what’s in the photo. As seen in the image above, this will help you see something like a picture of balls with the number 18 and think dieciocho pelotas, not “18 balls in Spanish is dieciocho pelotas.”
The learning process in Rosetta Stone is further enhanced by various vocabulary drills. These can include multiple-choice, mix-and-match and even speaking questions using high-quality voice recognition technology.
Eventually, you’ll start getting new vocabulary words in context within sentences. What this will teach you is how you can learn just by looking at how an unfamiliar term is used within a phrase.
Doing these practice drills is pretty helpful for sticking new vocabulary into your memory. While other ways of learning vocab might seem faster, it does take longer to learn how to think in a new language, which is the whole idea of the program.
Lesson Exercises
Each core lesson has around 3-15 exercises, and they usually range from 5-10 minutes long. Overall, you can expect to spend around an hour or so on your daily lessons.
Master words through quizzes with context
Learn words in the context of sentences
Swipe left or right to see more examples from other videos
These are the exercises included in my lesson plan for the fourth day of the third week of my course:
As you can see, there are different sections devoted to vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar. Other examples of exercises include writing, speaking, reading, milestone and review.
The great thing about these exercises is that they help make your Spanish learning quite well-rounded. This is important because fluency involves being good at a lot of different things.
While Rosetta Stone by itself won’t get you to that point, it can help you build important skills that will take you far, even when using other resources or native-level content.
The pronunciation exercises and tools help make sure you’re saying everything right. If you’re a beginner, it’s important to learn early on the correct pronunciation rather than having to unlearn the wrong way later on, especially because many platforms don’t help directly with accent improvement.
Rosetta Stone’s Bonus Features
Apart from the course, Rosetta Stone offers an array of bonus features to complement your Spanish learning.
These features are located in the “Explore All Content” tab. They are:
Live Lessons: You can book private lessons with language tutors using this feature. You can take unlimited classes as long as you have an active subscription.
On-Demand Videos: A collection of short clips that include language tips, vocabulary and grammar explanations. Some videos also cover slang words or cultural tidbits. This aspect can help you tailor your learning to suit your needs.
Stories: This section has a collection of short interactive stories. It’s divided into 20 units, and each unit includes three parts: Read, Listen and Speak. The nice part about these is that you can listen to a native speaker read the stories and then record yourself doing the same.
Phrasebooks: These are eight phrasebooks on topics such as meeting people, being polite, getting around and shopping, among others. Each topic includes several flashcards with which you can practice listening and speaking. Think of this feature as your emergency backup plan when going abroad to a Spanish-speaking country.
Audio Companion: This is where you can download the audio of your Spanish course to listen to it offline. Busy learners will especially appreciate the ability to learn during their commute.
Alphabet: Here, you can learn the sound of Spanish letters and listen to words containing them. Getting this kind of foundation will help your reading in Spanish progress, something which Rosetta Stone generally doesn’t help you with.
What Are the Pros of Using Rosetta Stone to Learn Spanish?
State-of-the-art Speech Recognition Software
Rosetta Stone’s speech recognition software (called TruAccent) is powerful and impressive.
It was designed to compare what you say to how a native speaker would say it, and it gives you immediate feedback on your pronunciation, making you repeat the words and sentences until you get them right.
Stop memorizing words. Start building sentences.
FluentU builds you up, so you can build sentences on your own
Start with multiple-choice questions and advance through sentence building to producing your own output
Go from understanding to speaking in a natural progression.
The software will allow for small pronunciation errors as long as they’re not too blatant. Additionally, if you’re trying to say a sentence, it’ll tell you the words you got right and the ones you need to work on.
Native Spanish Audio
All the audio it includes has been recorded by native speakers. The quality of the recordings is superb, including the ones in the Stories section.
This is especially useful in language programs such as Rosetta Stone since the lack of translations, grammar explanations and resources like video clips can make you struggle to remember what you learn.
With SRS, Rosetta Stone ensures that you hear content at optimized intervals and actually remember it.
Lots of Practice
Rosetta Stone’s method is very practical. Everything you learn comes in the form of exercises, so you can be sure you’ll be getting your Spanish language practice from the very beginning.
Excellent Bonus Resources
As you saw earlier, Rosetta Stone includes several bonus resources to practice your Spanish even further. Some of these resources are actually included in the courses (like the phrasebooks and Stories), but others can be of help if you need more listening practice or you want to hire a private tutor, for example.
What Are the Cons of Using Rosetta Stone to Learn Spanish?
Immersion is also acquiring a language naturally with the help of different types of resources. It’s listening to conversations and watching native speakers move, behave and interact with each other. It’s having a bit of everything and being able to practice all the aspects of a language.
Accurate, detailed word explanations made for you
Images, examples, video examples, and tips
Covering all the tricky edge cases, eg.: phrases, idioms, collocations, and separable verbs
No reliance on volunteers or open source dictionaries
100,000+ hours spent by FluentU's team to create and maintain
Unfortunately, Rosetta Stone Spanish doesn’t give you that kind of immersion, and I doubt any student can become truly fluent in Spanish by only using this method.
Not Useful for All Levels (You Won’t Reach the Advanced Level)
Rosetta Stone has a very big flaw: It’s only useful if you’re a beginner or a lower-intermediate student.
The content of the courses can be a good introduction to Spanish for people who haven’t studied the language before or just want to learn a few expressions before going on vacation, but if you’re really serious about learning Spanish, you need to use something else. Even the Proficient level is basically just a review course for intermediate students.
Rosetta Stone doesn’t have any explicit grammar instruction despite some of its lessons being called “Grammar.”
The program will try to teach you grammar concepts by repeating words and sentences and working on them, but that can only work until you reach a certain point on your learning path. By omitting the grammar instruction, Rosetta Stone cuts your learning off at the intermediate level, at best.
No Writing or Conversation Practice
Despite having one of the best speech recognition systems on the planet, Rosetta Stone fails to include any kind of real conversation practice in its courses.
You can talk to the AI all you want and repeat words and phrases till you die of boredom, but that will never substitute speaking to a native Spanish speaker.
Hi, I'm Alan!
I became obsessed with learning Chinese, Japanese, and Korean in 2001, and managed to get good
enough to work professionally in those languages as a management consultant.
Babbel focuses on conversational Spanish by teaching you the most important words and grammar points you’ll hear 24/7. The topics can get pretty deep and each lesson contains a mock conversation.
You can choose your course by level or by topic, such as grammar, countries and traditions, specials and words and sentences.
The Spanish program has six level courses from A1 beginner to C1 advanced, making it much more in-depth than Rosetta Stone and ideal for serious learners who want high proficiency.
Other sites use scripted content. FluentU uses a natural approach that helps you ease into the Spanish language and culture over time. You’ll learn Spanish as it’s actually spoken by real people.
FluentU has a wide variety of videos topics, as you can see here:
FluentU brings native videos within reach with interactive transcripts. You can tap on any word to look it up instantly. Every definition has examples that have been written to help you understand how the word is used.
Plus, if you see an interesting word you don’t know, you can add it to a vocab list.
Review a complete interactive transcript under the Dialogue tab, and find words and phrases listed under Vocab.
Learn all the vocabulary in any video with FluentU’s robust learning engine. Swipe left or right to see more examples of the word you’re on.
The best part is that FluentU keeps track of the vocabulary that you’re learning, and gives you extra practice with difficult words. It'll even remind you when it’s time to review what you’ve learned. Every learner has a truly personalized experience, even if they’re studying with the same video.
Conclusion: Is Rosetta Stone a Good Method to Learn Spanish?
If you’re a beginner looking to learn the foundations of Spanish, I recommend Rosetta Stone. Or if you’re trying to reach a slightly conversational level before a trip to a Spanish-speaking country. It all comes down to your level of Spanish, your needs and your goals.
Warming up with Rosetta Stone can help you decide if you really want to learn Spanish and get some basic knowledge of the language before you start using other more comprehensive methods.
But if you want to be fluent in Spanish, sound like a native speaker or ace the DELE exam, you’re better off getting a good Spanish textbook or subscribing to a more well-rounded program like FluentU.
If your Spanish level is B2 or above, Rosetta Stone is probably not a good match for you. So opt for other methods that can challenge you and bring you closer to fluency.
The truth is that I personally wouldn’t use Rosetta Stone if I were to start learning a new language seriously. I also wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who wishes to reach an advanced level with a single program, simply because it’s not set up to do that.
That said, Rosetta Stone is a fun program with many excellent features that learners can enjoy. Either way, you can give Rosetta Stone a try with their free trial and draw your own conclusions.
Enter your e-mail address to get your free PDF!
We hate SPAM and promise to keep your email address safe
It was designed to compare what you say to how a native speaker would say it, and it gives you immediate feedback on your pronunciation, making you repeat the words and sentences until you get them right.
