Rosetta Stone V3: Italian, Level 1

List Price: $209.00 Discount Price: $188.10

Features:

• Rosetta Stone helps you understand everyday language through our proficiency-based listening and reading activities
• You will pronounce words correctly after practicing with our proprietary speech recognition and analysis tools
• In no time you will speak without a script, Rosetta Stone's Contextual Formation™ makes sure you have the confidence and the cues you need to get the words out on the spot
• With Rosetta Stone Milestone activities you quickly gain confidence to engage in real-life conversations
• Track your progress to reinforce your strengths and revisit needs with our Adaptive Recall™ Language feature

Customer Reviews:

a software note [Posted on 2007-12-27]
This product is sold as licensed software. Users will NOT be able to load it onto more than one computer. This aspect of the product is not clear from the blurbing on the Rosetta Stone website. It is a "single-user" product.
Don't think that you can share this with friends, or that it is appropriate for a lending collection.

Excellent software to learn the language [Posted on 2008-01-06]
This was my big Christmas gift this year and I noticed that the rating of it is only 2 stars, primarily because it does not allow the user to copy it and install it in a variety of PCs or to share with friends. Fair enough... but what about the program as a way to learn the language?

1) The most important element for me is that the immersion method is a fun way to learn; instead of being given translations of words or phrases, you "discover" the language, just like a baby discovers language.

2) This game like approach, of looking at alternatives and guessing and slowly building up your skills, keeps me coming back for more, which I think is an important step towards making progress and learning the language.

3) The actual software installed very smoothly and easily and the USB headset/microphone has been very useful and without problems (I was worried about drivers and incompatibilities, but there have been no issues). It has some fairly powerful speech recognition capabilities and it is very good at giving me feedback on my pronunciation of Italian. Again, I had fairly low expectations in this area and I was very pleasantly surprised that it all works as advertised.

To supplement the software, I have also gotten a dictionary and a couple of books on grammar and I make occasional use of AltaVista's Babelfish translation. Depending on how you learn, you may or may not need additional resources such as these, but I find as an engineer, that in addition to the immersion method I like the handholding of some structure and rules provided by a bit of grammar/syntax on the side.

All in all, I'm very happy with this software and I highly recommend it.

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