Customer Rating: 
Summary: The Best Software Tool For Building Spoken Fluency
Comment: Rosetta Stone products are expensive, far more expensive than most of the language learning tools you'll find on Amazon or in a bookstore. But Rosetta Stone is well worth the price.
Without a true immersion experience (visiting a foreign nation or cloistering yourself at a very expensive university program like Middlebury's where you must pledge to speak only the language you're trying to learn) it can be quite difficult to build speaking skills. Reading skills develop, but speaking, and listening, tend to lag pretty far behind.
Rosetta Stone's French isn't as useful as a summer in Paris, but it's the next best thing. The lessons are exceptionally well-designed for a software immersion program and it's possible to begin to build real fluency if you stick with it and practice frequently.
Some folks may find the program more useful if they supplement the lessons with a good textbook to garner an understanding of the grammatical concepts introduced by the software. This is particularly true if you find you are more a "book learner" than a "visual learner."
If you need a two week cram session before visiting France for a week, go with Pimsleur's beginning CD course. It's more geared to travel survival French (and it's far cheaper). If you are more serious about learning French, and you want to invest some pretty serious time, Rosetta's products are well worth the cost.
