Well the title says it all: Has anyone tried Rosetta Stone to learn a language? (Please share your experience), I am mainly interested in the German version of the software (correction I have the German software) but would like to hear other people's experience with the different versions of the software.
I find I am able to understand and recognize things but am yet unable to "produce" or "generate" language, as in have a conversation or build a sentence. There is no explanations for grammer and I find that the German grammer is especially difficult to grasp. I am still on unit 3 of level one.
Also would anyone recommend a grammer book, any material they have used to learn German (books, online resources, etc)
A combination of Duolingo (Free) and Memrise (Also free) have served me much better. It is worth giving these a look as additional resources.
I tried Rosetta & didn't like it at all. It seemed way too random & I learned nothing. Then I did all 5 levels of Fluenz for Spanish & it got me to about a B1 level. I loved it. Google it and you'll see they also have Fluenz for German.
I used the Pimsleur in conjuction with Fluenz & liked it but Pimsleur is completely audio. There is no visual component to it so in my case I had to look up every word to understand how it is spelled in order to remember the words. A few years back I used Michel Thomas to learn Italian & thought it was overrated. Again it was 100% audio.
If you can get it for free, I found it to be a good supplement but not as a stand-alone. But if you are going to spend the money it can be much better spent on something like Assimil (much, much cheaper. Anywhere from $20 for just the book to around $100 with book+audio, though you can probably get it for even cheaper if you look around). Assimil, which is amazing, coupled with a good, general grammar source (something like Hugo German in 3 months or The Everything Learning German Book) and you will definitely gain a solid foundation. Also see if your local library has the Pimsleur and/or Michel Thomas courses; these will help with speaking.
I know this application, I had downloaded it. Seem to me that it is very useful, but I have noticed that it must buy more of the parts even you can benefit of its, and these parts is very expensive .