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As with any Chinese course, Rosetta Stone is not there to teach you fluent Chinese. It's simply a step-by-step guide to help you become proficient in the language (i.e., you can hold conversation and have a good understanding of sentence structure, and so on).
This course is very good at what it does and does give you a great "foundation" of knowledge which you can easily build on later. Your understanding of Chinese with this course will be one of the best, which is why this course is a best seller.
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Course Quality:  |
Rosetta Stone is a very professional Chinese course, as can be seen by its website. Not only does it give you plenty of quality information, but it gives you that information in the simplest, most easy to understand ways possible, which means that you learn what you need to a lot easier.
The course itself is very visually focused, which means, unlike courses such as Rocket Chinese, it emphasizes teaching through images rather than words. Although it's personal taste as to which method you learn the most from (visual or audio), Rosetta Stone Chinese gives you access to both, with some pretty cool add-on features such as speaking practice software.
Course quality is extremely high as the company has obviously invested a lot in its creation. Not only do you get a lot of resources with this course, but what you do get is also great quality too. The only problem with it is that what it actually teaches you (the content) does not cover as much ground as Rocket Chinese. This means you will develop a strong core of basic knowledge and will then have to branch out when speaking to fluent Chinese speakers.
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Value For Money:  |
This Chinese course is offered in a variety of packages. Levels 1, 2 and 3 are separate courses which need to be bought separately. Considering each of these packages are over $200 each, it could leave a large hole in your pocket.
Each package is sold with a license which means you can only install it on one computer, making it extremely hard for people without laptops or with family computers to learn. It also means that you have to install it on one PC and use that one for your entire learning program... which might get boring.
The online version of this course is subscription based, meaning that you need to pay each month for access. This, we felt, wasn't something we would be willing to pay for, because not only would we want to learn on our own time, but we would also want to keep access to the course forever, and not just 3 months.
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Customer Support:  |
Customer support is as good as most companies in the USA. They are open during business hours and are very responsive when you contact them.
Click the image below to access the Rosetta Stone Chinese homepage:
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