Rosetta Stone is pretty good
Does anyone know if the Rosetta Stone course is any good? It might not really be worth asking since I'm getting it tomorrow anyway ^^; , but if anyone could give me info it would help... I'm getting levels 1 and 2
I'll write a review or something on it when I'm done.
I've heard a lot of opinions about Rosetta Stone over the years, so I figured I'd throw mine into the mix.
I used RS about 10 years ago when I was starting out, and it didn't work very well at first. I was trying to use it more or less as designed, by associating phrases with pictures. That proved to be confusing, because it wasn't always clear what the images were depicting, and I couldn't always distinguish the words clearly (this is especially a problem if you're just starting out).
But once I reached a bit of an intermediate level, I actually got a lot of value out of RS, and now I think it's pretty good. Here's what I did differently:
1. I listened to each phrase and looked at the picture, but this time while reading the kanji. Anything I couldn't read, I flipped over to the hiragana and read that.
2. Then--and here's the critical part--I looked up any words I didn't know in a dictionary. Trying to figure everything out from context often resulted in misunderstanding. But once you look things up, and clearly understand the sentence, it's much easier to remember.
3. After that, I'd simply review the phrases and repeat them a few times throughout the day. I didn't bother with the speech recognition software.
If you use RS like that, you will learn a lot of basic vocabulary and sentence constructions, and in that I think it's pretty effective. It'll also familiarize you with many of the common kanji.
Rosetta Stone won't make you fluent, but it will increase your ability, which is maybe all you could hope for from a software package.
Yet another great reason to learn Hiragana! Also they've used some constructs which I'm not sure are the most common or natural ways to express the thoughts they represent. Though, since I'm a novice, you definitely shouldn't trust me for this kind of information. 
