Rosetta Stone Review

Thursday, January 23rd

2025 Language Learning Program Reviews

Rosetta Stone

• Pricing starts from $47.97 for 3 months with options for 12 months and Lifetime subscriptions
• Access to all language programs with a Lifetime subscription
• Offers 23 different languages
• Provides a 3-day free trial of one language
• Available on web, iOS, Android
• Offers an alphabet study section for languages with non-Latin characters
• Features interactive stories to help improve reading comprehension

Rosetta Stone is one of the biggest names in language learning software, having been around since the 90s. In addition to American and British English, Rosetta Stone teaches 23 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Persian, Polish, Portuguese), Russian, Spanish (both Latin American and European), Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish, and Vietnamese. It's available on virtually every operating system and personal device. Despite its fame, Rosetta Stone makes the bottom of our list. Stick with us to find out why you should save your money.

Plans starting from $47.97

Whatever language you choose, Rosetta's prices are the same. For 3 months, you'll pay $47.97. For 12 months, it's $126. A Lifetime Subscription gives you access to all Rosetta Stone language programs and costs $199. Unfortunately, there's no 1-month option, but you can get a one-time 3-day free trial of one language in exchange for your email address.

Brief placement test

When you've chosen a language and started your trial, you'll take a short quiz about your current level and your goals that results in a "game plan” - which makes it sound like a regimented study plan, but actually just applies a filter for the lessons you've indicated you're most interested in and takes you to your dashboard. Here, you'll select your course from the level you were placed in. For instance, our options for Greek were: "Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening”; "Reading, Writing, Speaking, Listening - Extended”; "Reading and Writing”; and "Speaking and Listening”.

"Immersion” means a disadvantage here

When it comes to learning a new language, we'd say we're pretty comfortable hanging out at the steepest peak of the learning curve. But with Rosetta Stone, no matter what language program we've chosen, we've always been overwhelmed and annoyed from the first lesson. It turns out that Rosetta Stone's promises of "immersion” and guarantees to teach you the way children learn means throwing new vocabulary words, sentences, and even non-Latin characters at you with no explanation or translation. It's your job to match a given audio sample with the corresponding image and repeat what you hear into a microphone. While it's possible to muddle through and eventually deduce that "Το κορίτσι πίνει” means "the girl drinks” in Greek, there's no reason you should have to spend so long on such basic vocabulary. Your first language is a valuable tool that can be used to acquire a second language more quickly than you learned your first (after all, you were probably in elementary school before you could have complex conversations), but Rosetta Stone's claims to immersion rely solely on denying you this tool.

Study the alphabet separately

When learning languages like Greek or Arabic written with different letters than the Latin alphabet, it's really important to spend time studying each letter's appearance and what it sounds like alone and in combination with other letters. Fortunately, the "Explore All” tab typically contains an "Alphabet” section where you can hear the name of each letter, read it in example vocabulary words, and listen to what it sounds like when it appears in those words.

Stories are too hard for beginners and intermediate learners

Also in the "Explore All” tab, you'll find Stories, which are meant to help you improve your reading comprehension through short, interactive stories. However, these won't be of much help to you until you've completed a lot of lessons and have gained a basic grasp on the language in question. Because no translations are given, ever, it's just you and the language - no training wheels.

You won't learn much about culture or grammar

Rosetta Stone has a lot of gaps. Supposedly, Stories are supposed to do the bulk of the work of teaching you about the culture of the language you're learning, but given these are not accessible to learners without a basic grasp of the language, you're likely to lag far behind learners who chose another program. That makes Rosetta Stone particularly ill-suited to anyone using it to learn a language for travel. By now, it won't come as much surprise that Rosetta Stone's language learning programs do not include specific instruction on grammar. You're expected to just pick it up as you go along like - say it with us now - children do. (Never mind the fact that children are known for making cute grammatical errors, and you may prefer to be taken more seriously than a child typically is.)

Look elsewhere

We're not alone in our disillusionment with Rosetta Stone. A quick scan of customer reviews reveals plenty of disappointed users who felt they had paid premium prices for what amounted to not much more than a deck of flashcards. We'd recommend you steer clear of Rosetta Stone and try out one of our higher-ranked language learning programs instead.