Rosetta Stone TOTALe (French) review

There are plenty of language learning applications out there, but Rosetta Stone is the best known, providing an immersive course that uses images and speech to build your familiarity with your chosen language. Rosetta Stone TOTALe is the online version of the course, and is platform independent. This means you can run it on any device, whether it’s a laptop, PC or tablet. All you need is access to a web browser, although you can also use an app for your Android or iOS smartphone or tablet.

The disadvantage is that you need an internet connection to access your course. Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be a particularly fast internet connection. We completed several lessons on an iPad over a slow 3G connection with only occasional interruptions. Even if a lesson is interrupted, whether by loss of connectivity or because you’re called away from the PC, your progress will be saved.

The many individual lessons that make up each unit of the course take between five and 30 minutes to complete. There are four half-hour lessons in each unit, and a plethora of shorter lessons help you revise the material from the four main lessons. You can focus on specific elements, such as listening, reading, speaking, writing or vocabulary. There’s also a Milestone test at the end of each unit in which you put what you’ve learned to use in a simulated conversation. You’ll ideally want to use a headset for most of the lessons, as Rosetta Stone uses voice recognition to help you perfect your pronunciation.

As well as speaking and reading, you’ll learn to write in your chosen language and even use accents correctly

A structured education

Each level of the course is comprised of four units, and the French course has five levels. In addition to the lessons in each unit, there are two live sessions with a tutor and up to three other students. You can take up to four live classes per month and participate via your browser or an iOS app. Unfortunately, there’s no Rosetta Studio app to provide live sessions on Android at the time of writing, although Rosetta Course for Android otherwise has all the same features as its iOS equivalent.

The live lessons are taught entirely in the language you’re learning, by native speakers who encourage you to put what you’ve learned to practical use and prompt you to converse with your classmates. Rosetta Stone’s emphasis on learning your new tongue without referring to your first language sets it apart from many language learning systems, such as the free, web-based rival Duolingo. With Duolingo, you have to translate directly between your mother tongue and the target language.

Clear, simple images make phrases easy to understand, even though they never refer to your first language

While the latter approach works well for some, we’re among those who do best with immersive learning. Rosetta Stone starts by teaching you the basics, beginning with simple words and phrases that describe what’s going on in a picture. Increasingly advanced elements such as verb conjugation and tenses are slipped into conversation sequences that provide context. In each four-lesson unit, elements of previous lessons are interspersed with new content, and you’ll periodically be presented with short sessions that revisit material from previous units.

This gradual, building block approach to learning a language may frustrate those who want to revise a language they’ve previously learned and just want grammatical references and verb tables. However, we found the pace of the course to be ideal and supplemented what we learned with simple books, audio material and comics written in French.

Putting it into practice

Having completed the first of the five units, which provides a foundation in the language but little more, we had an opportunity to test our new skills on a trip to France. We were pleased to find that the basic French we’d learned was enough for us to communicate in shops and restaurants and even converse with a new acquaintance at a concert. The emphasis the course places on correct pronunciation proved its value when we talked to native speakers, and we found we were easily understood.

The course moves from individual words and simple sentences to virtual conversations that give context to what you’ve learned

The lessons in Level 2 build upon your vocabulary and knowledge of grammatical tenses with themed units about subjects such as travel and discussions about the past and future. Further into the course, you’ll learn the grammar and vocabulary you’ll need to discuss more challenging topics such as world events and the state of your health.

In addition to the course lessons, and studio sessions with teachers, TOTALe provides games and activities to support your learning. The Explore section contains stories to read, listen and then read aloud to improve your speech. These are graded to match the difficulty level of different units in the course and introduce supplementary words and sentence structures.

Beyond the classroom

In the Play and Talk areas of the site, you’ll find a number of single- and two-player games, from simple sound-identification puzzles to more advanced challenges where you and another player must describe scenes to one another and identify the differences. If you want more freedom to practice your spoken or written French, you can use the two-person Chatonium chat room to stretch your language skills. However, finding partners to play two-player games can be a challenge. Learners from all over the world use TOTALe at most hours of the day, but we had a hard time finding partners on weeknights.

Rosetta Stone’s system of immersive teaching by example won’t suit the needs of every language learner, but for absolute beginners and those who haven’t encountered a language in a very long time, its natural approach is brilliant. As with any learning process, you’ll need to invest regular effort and plenty of time in your learning. Each level has 40 to 50 hours of content; it took us just under three months to complete the first level. If you’re interested in languages other than French, it’s worth noting that not all have a five level course. Three levels are more common for the majority of languages, without the complex grammatical teaching that goes into the final two.

A 12 month subscription to the course costs £240, or you can pay £150 for six months of access. You can pay as a lump sum or in five instalments. 12 months works out to be under £5 a week, so Rosetta Stone is great value compared to many forms of tuition, especially if you take part in the live classes. However, the value you get out of it depends on how much you effort you put into the course. A one month free trial is available and we recommend using it before you buy to see if the teaching method suits you.

Once your initial subscription period is over, you can pay monthly. In a slightly complicated arrangement, the monthly price equals the total purchase price for your initial subscription term divided by the number of months in that term, so a 12 month contract will convert into a £20 per month month-by-month subscription.

We found Rosetta Stone TOTALe to be easy to use and fun to learn. Most importantly, we could apply what we’d learned when talking to native speakers. However, if you spend much of your time without access to an internet connection then the offline Rosetta Course will be a better choice, but you won’t have access to lessons with live teachers.