Thread: Rosetta Stone VS Pimsleur,Which is better?

Rosetta Stone VS Pimsleur? What is better? Pimsleur course - expensive, but good or Rosetta stone software - expensive too, but it has writting and reading tools.

Pimsleur is a much more serious product than Rosetta Stone.
Rosetta stone is basically language learning for dummies.

You can download both courses online and "try before you buy", so to speak. So there is no reason to wonder about that.

That said, native speakers seem to find some problems with the Pimsleur Russian course, and it's full of incredibly silly pickup phrases and rather silly cliches.

I have read that the Assimil courses are the best Russian courses, but the native speakers don't seem too impressed by those either - at least not the English one which is very old. If you speak French, then you should definitely get the latest Assimil course. They are very intense for sure, I tried a few chapters and learnt quite a lot actually.

To get a feel for the language, you could start with a free website, like Livemocha or LingQ.

Rosetta is a joke~

Pimsleur, all the way! I've already been through volume 1 and it was very helpful. Yeah, there is probably odd phrases and stuff that sounds funny to a native speaker, but I think that is always the case with beginner language materials. It starts with vocab and a verb or two and then builds simple phrases and then more phrases on top of that. It gives you just enough grammar to get by so you should have a good grammar book in hand if you really want to learn that stuff. I really found the number drills to help. If you are going to use Russian in any real situation, especially travel, then numbers are so important.