Rosetta Stone: the Cadillac with flat tires

Rosetta Stone impressed me from the very first.  No other app provides such a true immersive experience.  You study Chinese without using any English.   They do this through high-quality, carefully-planned photos, relying on the natural ability of the human brain to decode language using contextual clues. For example, if you see a photo of two apples with the description "er ping guo" next to another photo of three apples with the description "san ping guo", you'll deduce that "er" means "two", "san" means "three", and "ping guo" means "apple".  Rosetta Stone monitors and incrementally expands the words you have decoded.

Rosetta Stone used to be extremely expensive.  This time, they offered me lifetime access to all their languages for $200.  I was sorely tempted, but in the end I opted for a 3-month subscription to just their Mandarin course for $36 + tax.  And soon I was glad I did - because Rosetta Stone quickly lost its appeal as I got into subsequent lessons.  

By lesson three of unit 1, I was having trouble keeping up.  Unlike other apps in which you control the pace, Rosetta Stone keeps you hopping unless you press "pause".  Worse, I found that my mind was not retaining the words I thought I was learning.  Why couldn't this Cadillac of Mandarin apps keep me moving?  

First, by relying mostly on multiple choice quizzes (often with only 2 or 3 choices) to gauge your understanding, Rosetta Stone often thinks you've learned something when actually you've just made a lucky guess.  

Second, the app forces you to choose between seeing pinyin or Chinese characters.  You can't see both at the same time.  Learning pinyin spelling is essential to eventually learning how to type in Chinese, and a great aid to retention of pronunciation.  On the other hand, learning the Chinese characters is essential to reading Chinese.  Thus, to learn both, you'd have to go through each lesson twice.  (The default setting is Chinese characters, but if you use Rosetta Stone, I recommend starting with pinyin.)

Third, Rosetta Stone fails almost entirely to get you speaking from memory - an essential part of language acquisition.  Most of the "speaking" is simply mimicking the sounds you just heard, often without understanding of what they mean.  

Rosetta Stone requires blocks of time - thirty minutes for the main lesson.  It's not the sort of tool you could whip out and practice with while you wait for the bus.  Also, when you make mistakes, the feedback "dings" become a bit like Chinese water torture.  

If Rosetta Stone were not so expensive, I would recommend it as an auxiliary aid to practice.  But given the cost, and the fact that it works so poorly for locking anything into memory, I don't recommend anyone purchase a subscription.  Your time and money are better spent elsewhere.  

Want to know what apps I do recommend?