The Rosetta Stone products deserve the stellar reputation they have earned. They install easily and in less than a half an hour. Once you’ve installed, though, hold on to your seat! Rosetta Stone’s “Dynamic Immersion” program results from its use of images associated with words, intuition about carefully designed patterns for modeling grammar concepts, interactivity that gives learners instant feedback, and finally, systematic instruction that incrementally builds by combining simple concepts into more and more complex sentences to create meaningful utterances. Thus, Rosetta Stone takes learners on a supersonic adventure in language learning that is revolutionary, not because any of the pedagogical concepts are new themselves (immersion is nothing new), but because technology has made it possible to harness the best methods and make them available 24/7, to allow learners to artificially immerse themselves anywhere they can use the program.

Rosetta Stone uses what traditional wisdom has always known, but it uses technology to do it consistently and with intensity. The human mind naturally searches for patterns and makes deductions and inferences about them. That is how we all learned our mother tongues. What Rosetta Stone has done is to limit the choices learners are asked to make and the result is to fast-track the natural process of language acquisition. This allows the mind–dare I say causes the mind?–to correctly lay down new pathways for the second language you have decided to learn.

Another reason Rosetta Stone succeeds is because it does not give in to the temptation that most “live” language teachers succumb to when they empathize with students’ confusion and translate. All that is required of learners is that they work consistently, engaging their consciousness and paying attention. There are nearly 100 lessons in Level 1, distributed among four core lessons per unit. Lessons in each unit can take about 30 minutes, making it easy to budget your time. Rosetta Stone charts your course, evaluates your work, and even allows you to reset your score to zero and start again. What’s more, it gives learners schedules and deadlines. The language recognition software is so impressive it seems as if science fiction has become a reality.

Finally, no matter how much work you do or how successful you are with an automated system such as Rosetta Stone, good as it is, the time will come when you need to study Spanish Face to Face — with a live instructor. And, good as such programs are to help you develop some fundamental intuitions about grammar, eventually, you will have to face the details.

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