Educational Software

I think we have all seen the Rosetta Stone comercials on television. In fact, I just saw one yesterday evening. I may not ever try to constantly teach students a foriegn language, but a language program might find some use in cross-curriculum activities. Not to mention with the every increasing numbers of the population of Spanish speaking students, lessons to teachers may come in handy. I decided to try to find a review on the Roseta Stone program and found this website: http://www.language-learning-advisor.com/review-of-rosetta-stone.html. This review is written by a single who has reviewed multiple language learning systems. Then at the bottom there are multiple reviews from other consumers.
The creator of the site is Ron Tichenor, CPhT. He calls himself a hobbyist, that plans on going back to school to study languages. His review of Rosetta Stone summed up told me to use the trial first instead of paying hundreds of dollars first to see if the product will work for me. Rosetta Stone does not use translation from the native language to the new one. The native language is not involved. It is all done in the new language and pictures and hints are used along with trial and error. Tichenor said that this can lead to students just being lazy and guessing without learning or cheating with the latin base of the word.
From the both Tichenor's and the personal reviews, Rosetta Stone can be summed up by saying it is an expensive program that needs to work more on proper language grammar and it only works well with some people.
I think I would probably be on the look out for good reviews on less expensive language learning programs.