Is Rosetta Stone for Mandarin a good learning tool?

Unfortunately, the Rosetta Stone method is not particularly suited to the Chinese language, and I believe students who use it, especially at the beginning level, are doing themselves a disservice. read more

Rosetta Stone is actually a very good beginner tool for Chinese. I didn't know a single word of Chinese when I got the program (just 2 months before I moved to China) and used it for about 4 hours a day. read more

One of the things that amazes the most when I travel is the ease with which the rest of the world is multi-lingual while Americans can get away with relying on just one common tongue. read more

I got Rosetta Stone for Mandarin and I enjoy it for supplemental study, but it's pretty overpriced for what it does. It's sort of obvious that the method is designed for European languages, because it tries to teach you grammar without any explanation, but Chinese is a bit to foreign for that to work. read more