When I first began to attempt learning Japanese, I decided to go with Rosetta Stone. I'd watched the ads on TV and seen countless ads in magazines, so I figured it had to be a good way to learn another language. I played around with the program for a month or two before realizing that I wasn't really learning anything, which is what led me to finding the methods that did work. So what exactly is wrong with Rosetta Stone? I'll tell you.
First of all, Rosetta Stone has it right about needing to immerse in the target language in order to really understand, but what Rosetta Stone fails at is giving you authentic Japanese to sink into. When I first began using the program, I had no knowledge of hiragana, katakana, or kanji, so I was cruising along in the land of romaji (Japanese written in roman characters). Yes, romaji. For anyone who knows anything about Japanese, you're already aware that romaji is useless. That was the first big problem with Rosetta Stone – it didn't tell me that I was learning something completely useless.
About the time I realized I was learning something that wouldn't actually help me with the language, I switched to using kana only. I once again started learning, but it was taking ages to get anywhere because I had not actually learned the hiragana in any solid way. In fact, I couldn't write them at all – I was doing my best to just recognize and read them. During that period where I was struggling to read kana, I found out that real Japanese is all about the kanji. I tried using the kanji, but I just couldn't make sense of them. They were these big, complicated assortments of lines that made absolutely no sense – and Rosetta Stone certainly wasn't going to explain them to me. Shortly after attempting kanji, I quit Rosetta Stone and never looked back.
The experience I just explained relates the largest fault of the Rosetta Stone learning method – it doesn't handle characters well. The method would probably work really well if used for learning French, Spanish, or some other language that uses the roman alphabet, but for learning something completely different it's lacking too much. At best, Rosetta Stone could be used as a vocabulary supplement to other methods of learning, but who wants to spend hundreds of dollars when you could get the same (or better) vocabulary building tools for free with Anki?
To sum things up, Rosetta Stone is a tool that could work for building your knowledge of Japanese – but only if you already know a lot. In order to really learn from Rosetta Stone, you need to have a firm grasp of the kana and be capable of learning new kanji relatively fast (or have already learned them through Heisig's Remembering the Kanji or Kanjidamage). The problem is that if you have already done these things, then you have really already overcome the greatest barriers in Japanese and no longer need Rosetta Stone. Which means the only thing Rosetta Stone has to offer is its voice recognition/pronunciation practice – which is trivial at best.
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