Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've completed the full German course, 1-5 and have had a very good experience with it. English is a Germanic language, which means many of the words underlying English and German are the same or quite similar. Vocabulary should come fairly easily to students and the program gets one to an intermediate level of communication. The audio companion cd discs (20 of them) do a great job of drumming in vocabulary drills or refresh words and concepts learned in earlier lessons. The studio lessons allow for a genuine small classroom experience with teachers who know which words the student is and is not familiar with. There are deficiencies in the Rosetta Stone system. As 100% of the program is in German, one needs to pick up a dictionary to translate properly some of the words in the course. Also if one forgets a word there is no glossary allowing one to go back to the section the word was introduced. The underlying premiss that adults can learn a language like a child has limits. Do you know a foreigner who learned English as an adult who speaks like a native? The last flaw is a significant one. German has a complex grammatical system and there is no way that one can pick that up by just listening to it. Hitting a german grammar book outside the course is a major help in this regard. I have family in the German part of Switzerland and they can understand me. My fluency level is enough to get by at the conversational level in most situations. Think of Rosetta Stone 1-5 like a couple of years of college level study. One will be far from fluent but at the same time, one can get almost any idea across and have a solid foundation to build on.