UPDATE: stopped working on my older iPad mini a couple days ago. I’ll restore 5 star rating if it gets fixed. I still believe in the Rosetta Stone approach but I’m very unhappy about the developer disallowing some of the older devices. -——————————— If you rely on translating, I don’t think you can ever become fluent. Each language has words and phrases that simply cannot be translated. When you have a conversation in a foreign language and you have to translate the foreign words you hear into your native language and then translate your response from native back into foreign language, you will not only get tired and stressed out but your conversation will not be fluent and natural. What works for me are images. When learning the foreign word for flowers for example, I don’t translate into my native language but imagine a picture of flowers in my head. Then coming up with Blumen, fleures, flores, etc. in a foreign language conversation is much faster and requires much less brain power than translating. Those are just my 2 cents. This approach works best for me. I’m a foreign language major with 4 foreign languages. English is my 3rd language. Everyone is different and has their preferred way of learning but I encourage everyone to try the immersion approach for one or two weeks and see how it goes. App works great. I only encountered one small glitch but that may have been a glitch on my device.

My adult daughter purchased a family subscription to DuoLingo so that she, her teenage daughter, and myself could all learn French together. Since I live distantly, this would be a fun way to learn AND have something that just the women of the family did. After almost a year of daily use of the application, I had a book of handwritten notes, three different French-English dictionaries ( one is in order of word most used which is really cool), print outs of verb conjugations….get the picture? I was frustrated that I still did not feel comfortable approaching a fluent speaker of French at work. I had no confidence in spending, writing, or in any way USING the language I was putting so much time and energy into!Then, my wonderful husband, who has been present for the majority of my D.L. Lessons, gave me a subscription to Rosetta Stone for my recent birthday. He lived in LaRochelle, France as a child and I truly believe he had forgotten less of the language than I had up to that point learned.After three weeks with only five days a week classes that are at MY pace, I am using French! I have posted on social media using French. Had a rudementary exchange at work en Français. Have to correct text and typed words for American versus French spelling. I am retaining the phrases because they are applicable to daily life.I hope I am offered the opportunity to leave a review again…I’ll include some of the crazy phases DL had me practice.

I purchased a lifetime subscription to this app and I’ve only used it a little at this point, but today I was extremely impressed and pleasantly surprised by one of its features. I love learning new languages, this app is great for that and I need to spend more time using it. I also love it when app developers are respectful of my time and my focus. Unfortunately, this is the first one I’ve seen that really takes steps to show that respect. Recently I have made it my practice to leave one star reviews for any app that highjacks my time and requires me to touch a button or answer a question before releasing me to continue on with whatever it was I was trying to do. I know the negative impact that a one star review has for the developers, and I hate that I don’t see another way, but the message is being received. I am leaving the five star review for the developers of the Rosetta Stone app because they did invade my time and force me to push a button, but they also included a button that gave me the choice to never again have another pop-up box holding my app hostage and demanding my time for a ransom. It seems that Apple App Store requires developers to incorporate this disrespectful and annoying feature into their apps, or makes it impossible to compete or get noticed in the App Store without it. Nonetheless, if everybody did the same as I, you can guarantee Apple would have a lot of upset developers and would begin to find a different way to encourage customers to share their opinions.

As a teacher, and polyglot or multingual speaker, I am very happy with this program and the manner it goes about teaching languages. You are not learning by lists or memorization, per se, but by being immersed in the language and learning through association. I used to teach several subjects to gifted and talented children and they learn information best in this manner, as do all children. My husband and best friend are learning Italian for a trip we are all taking to Italy in the further. I learned Italianan as a child much in the way this program teaches, I am working on learning the formal italian so I will not appear rude by giving the familiar when I should be addressing people formally; I am doing this because otherwise Italians think I am just a rude Italian. Italians (and people of other cultures) are very forgiving when they know you are a non-native speaker and are trying to speak their language, so my husband and friend will be treated well when we go. Don’t worry about being perfect, just do your best, and you can always do the lessons over to become more proficient. I’m very happy that I am going to get to improve my language skills and perhaps even learn a bit of a few new languages as we finally travel since we retired. Remember, that you are above the curve of most people, because you are actually trying and working on a language to improve.