Too vague

by Percival
(Japan)

I understand what Rosetta Stone is trying to do by getting you to associate the words with the pictures, but the pictures are often vague. I recently moved to Japan so I obtained the Japanese version to help me learn the language. At first, the software is pretty clear but then as it goes on, the pictures become more and more vague and there's no translation option so you can be sure what you're looking at.

One picture, for example, was of a young girl in a toy car. The problem with this is that the girl in the picture had short hair and it was difficult to tell if it was a boy or a girl. Another picture featured a woman riding a horse, but the sentence structure was completely different with different words than the ones for the boy or the man riding the horse and no explanation was given for this difference.

In Japanese as well, there are a lot of different verb endings depending on what is being done, which is completely unclear with Rosetta Stone. This program only succeeded in confusing me more than it did helping me and I found it very frustrating to try and decipher the meaning of the pictures.

For the price they charge, Rosetta Stone gives very, very little in the way of background or supplemental information. If you're learning Japanese, you're better off relying on a textbook and flash cards combined with a healthy diet of Japanese television and movies.