In the beginning of December I had a chance to visit China for a week. If I had to guess, I would say it took me around 70 hours to finish the first lesson. If my math is correct, that is 32 hours of instruction per lesson. They have 4 courses per session and 4 sessions per lesson. They approximate about an hour per course and you automatically repeat each course twice. I am going much slower than the estimate Rosetta Stone has per lesson. Altogether I have been using Rosetta Stone for about 5 months. At that point I started integrating CLO and the grammar book and now use Rosetta Stone about twice a week. It does things that neither the book nor audio courses do and I personally feel I wouldn't be very far along without was using it approximately 1 hour per day, 5 days per week up to about a month ago.
Overall I am happy with Rosetta Stone and find it continues to add value to my studies. The weakneses I find are a lack of focus on grammer, no english translation of anything, and I found that I was starting to become dependent on seeing the pinyin and was using that as a crutch in translating the sentences while they were spoken. Speech recognition isn't perfect and can at times be frustrating but with a little work I understand what pronuciation mistakes I am making. The audio only courses that I found, like, don't have a feedback mechanism to tell you how close you are getting. I also like the speech recognition functionality which forces me to pronounce the words closer to how they actually should be. However, I have to make sure I have a good dictionary around at the beggining of each new level to make sure I am understanding correctly what the words are suppose to mean. They do this by having me listen to it, speak it, write it, and read it in pinyin.
I find that Rosetta Stone does a very good job with repitition and embedding vocabulary into my brain.
I have also recently started using 's free audio course as well as the Beginning Chinese book by John DeFrancis.Įach of these tools has its strength and weaknesses. I am currently using version 3 of Rosetta Stone as one of my tools to learn Mandarin.