Pros & Cons
-
- Polished user experience
- Accurate lessons
- Optional online tutoring sessions
-
- Repetitive
- No placement test
- Not good for learning a new script
- Latest rebranding leaves Rosetta Stone Lifetime purchasers in the dust
Rosetta Stone Language Learning Specs
| Average Duration of Lesson (Mins) | 10 |
| No. of Languages Offered (Not Incl. English) | 23 |
| Price Includes | All Languages, All Levels |
| Style of Program | Interactive Exercises |
Rosetta Stone is now called Rosetta Stone Sapphire—but don't be fooled. It merely organizes existing content into shorter lessons for you to complete on your phone and throws in some AI tools for good measure. Although the learning materials are still accurate and the app experience is slick, this change ultimately isn't for the better. If you bought a Lifetime subscription to Rosetta Stone in recent years, for example, you might rightfully be upset to find that you don't get any of the new Sapphire features. Moreover, the old Rosetta Stone asked you to sit with lessons for a full 30 minutes per day, a worthy goal for learning a language; the new app encourages learning at your leisure, just like every other alternative. In essence, Rosetta Stone has moved away from the aspects that made it special, so we've lowered its score by half a star. You're much better off with our Editors' Choice winners for language learning: the free Duolingo for daily practice, Fluenz for self-paced learning, and Lingoda for live online classes and tutoring.
Which Languages Can You Learn With Rosetta Stone?
Excluding American and British English, Rosetta Stone has programs for 23 languages: Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), Dutch, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin (web app only), Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish (Latin American and European), Swedish, Tagalog (Filipino), Turkish, and Vietnamese.
If you need a language that's not on that list, you should try other apps. Duolingo covers more than 30 languages. Pimsleur (named for Dr. Paul Pimsleur, who founded the method it uses) has around 50 language programs and is one of my favorite services. The catch is that the best parts are entirely audio-based. As such, Pimsleur is great for speaking, listening, and learning pronunciation, but not for reading and writing. For languages that are especially hard to find, try Transparent Language or Mango, though neither is a stellar program.
(Credit: Rosetta Stone/PCMag)Who Should Use Rosetta Stone?
Rosetta Stone works best if you're a beginner in a language and can already read the script (you might struggle if you don't). The app doesn't offer a placement test, which makes it hard for experienced speakers to know where to start.
I've used Rosetta Stone both at home and for review purposes at PCMag for more than two decades. I've tried the programs for French, German, Irish, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and even English. I found it great for picking up new Romance languages (French, Italian, and Portuguese) because I can read the Latin alphabet and already speak a good amount of Spanish and Romanian. Learning a related language isn't hard.
(Credit: Rosetta Stone/PCMag)But when it came to learning a language with a script that I don't know, such as Korean, the lessons didn't set me up for success. Rosetta Stone wanted me to parrot complete sentences before I could even identify the characters. Later lessons did cover the Korean alphabet, but I couldn't do what it asked because I didn't have that instruction first. If you want to learn a new script, I recommend working with a live human teacher. That said, Duolingo does a good job of teaching new alphabets. I've tried the Japanese and Korean courses in that app, and it does a better job of introducing new characters intentionally and slowly enough that I could actually retain and apply the knowledge.
Pricing: Reasonable Monthly and Annual Rates, With Optional Tutoring
Rosetta Stone Sapphire costs $19.99 per month or $159 per year. For that price, you get access to all languages and all levels. It includes a handful of tools under the Sapphire Studio umbrella, but, as I discuss later, none are remarkable.
If you previously purchased a Lifetime subscription to Rosetta Stone, you can still access all the old lessons that take about 30 minutes each to complete. (If you use Rosetta Stone on the web, you see the old name, Totale, in the URL.) The content in those lessons is as accurate and useful as ever. However, I worry that Rosetta Stone will not continue to maintain the infrastructure that supports that experience going forward. I reached out to Rosetta Stone for confirmation, but didn't receive a reply by the time of publishing. For clarity, Sapphire users don't get access to the old lessons, and Lifetime subscribers can't use the new Sapphire features.
For comparison, Fluenz charges $2,698 (typically discounted to $548) for one year of access to all levels of its seven language courses. Pimsleur's All-Access plan, which unlocks content for 50 languages, costs $20.95 per month,
Optional tutoring for an additional fee is still on the menu. These sessions last just 30 minutes and stick closely to the material in the app. I've tried group classes with Rosetta Stone before, but only one-on-one classes were available this time around. As for pricing, a set of five 30-minute sessions costs $279 (about $56 per session) at the time of writing. You can save money by booking more sessions at once, though the prices still seem high. If you're serious about tutoring, try Lingoda instead. Its one-on-one class packages cost between $23 and $48 per class. As I discuss later, Lingoda's lessons run longer than Rosetta Stone's, and group sessions are still available.
Teaching Style: 'Immersion' Means Deductive Reasoning and Repetition
Rosetta Stone's look has changed a lot over the past two decades, and bonus content seems to change every few years, but the teaching method remains the same. In Rosetta Stone, you primarily learn through deductive reasoning, followed by heavy repetition. For example, you might hear the word for "girl" two or three times while looking at a picture of a girl. Then, you hear a new word and see pictures of both a girl and a boy. You infer that the new word means boy. You click the boy's image, and Rosetta Stone plays a little trill to indicate you got it right. You progress using this same type of deductive reasoning, no matter which language you study. Once a new word enters your vocabulary, you engage with it a lot. You hear it, say it, write it, and choose it from a list of options in multiple-choice questions.
(Credit: Rosetta Stone/PCMag)Drill-and-kill teaching can be effective at helping you memorize new things, but the tedious repetition will get to you. You'll want to speed through some of the exercises, which you often can do because the deductive logic is so simple. For example, if you see a set of four pictures with only one showing a woman, and the first prompt starts with "The woman...", you know which picture to choose without having to listen to or read the full prompt.
Similar Products
Our Current Picks for The Best Language Learning Apps for 2026
Rosetta Stone doesn't use English as a language of instruction, or any language for that matter. The program has always advertised itself as teaching through 'immersion,' but don't get too hung up on the idea. Real immersion means living and operating in a language nonstop. Working in Rosetta Stone for 10 or 30 minutes every day hardly qualifies. More importantly, some languages can be extremely hard for adults to learn if they don't get instruction in their native language. Does the German "erwachsene" mean "people" or "adults"? Is "guten tag" formal or informal, or does it not matter? Rosetta Stone doesn't tell you.
Getting a simple explanation of a grammatical rule or the nuance of a term is a shortcut that helps adults learn faster. If you like this kind of explanation, try Fluenz instead. Every lesson includes videos of a teacher walking you through new concepts, pronunciation, vocabulary, and more.
Course Structure: The Shorter Lessons Work Better on Mobile Devices
As mentioned, the Sapphire edition repackages Rosetta Stone's core program into shorter lessons. Rosetta Stone used to recommend completing one lesson per day, with lessons lasting about 30 minutes. In other words, it required you to sit down and actually focus. As a result, I always preferred to do the lessons on a computer rather than a phone. The restructured lessons take only about 10 minutes to finish and are clearly optimized for a mobile experience. The app has the polish and stability you'd expect from a well-established brand, and the experience is smooth. The app keeps track of your progress, too. From a functionality perspective, it's top-notch.
It's possible to jump around and work on lessons out of order. Clear descriptions, such as the Fundamentals of "colors and sizes" or "clothing and quantities," help you choose what you want to learn, for instance.
Exercises: Accurate Lessons That Lack Important Cultural Context
Rosetta Stone is consistent, predictable, stable, and reliable, no matter what language you're learning. The first couple of lessons always teach you words like "boy," "eat," "drink," "girl," "juice," "man," "rice," "water," and "woman." This isn't a bad formula, but it doesn't capture vital cultural context. As universal as the word "rice" might be, "potato" and "cabbage" are more essential to learn in some places. The old version of Rosetta Stone includes helpful videos in its bonus content that provide cultural context, but I couldn't find them in Sapphire.
(Credit: Rosetta Stone/PCMag)Fluenz is better on this front. It purposefully teaches you words and phrases that you would use as a beginner, and the words you learn change based on the language you're studying. The aforementioned instructor videos also break down ideas, such as contractions (essential in French) and which word to use when there are two that mean the same thing but have different use cases (like an and année, which both mean "year" in French).
Sapphire Studio: The AI-Enabled Bonus Tools Aren't Anything Special
The Sapphire Studio (the section for all the new content) houses a small collection of bonus tools, such as flashcards, a matching game, a Reading Guide (translation tool), a vocabulary list, and two generative AI tools that rewrite text in your new language at your level. I don't understand the point of the generative AI tools. Is the idea to trick someone, like a teacher, into thinking you wrote a block of text when you haven't? What learning comes from this?
Similarly, a Chat Mission feature is meant to simulate a conversation in the language you're learning, but it's not very effective and doesn't feel natural. You choose a theme, like asking for help in a hotel, and then the Chat Mission gives you objectives for what you need to accomplish in the conversation. Using keywords satisfies those requirements, even if the conversation doesn't come to a satisfying conclusion.
The layout of the Sapphire Studio pages needs work, too. For example, the flashcards appear both within the Sapphire Studio and outside of it. Chat Missions aren't on the Sapphire Studio page, but they seem like they should be. The organization of features is simply confusing.
Optional Tutoring: Sessions Are Short, But Beginners Might Still Find Them Useful
The optional 30-minute tutoring sessions in Rosetta Stone are reasonably good, though I much prefer Lingoda's 50-minute classes, especially for intermediate and advanced students. Half an hour is not enough time to learn much. Sessions are available at various times across time zones.
(Credit: Rosetta Stone/PCMag)During sessions, you can see and hear an instructor who can only hear you—you don't even have the option to enable video. A portion of the screen shows the relevant materials for the class. In a past group session I joined, I saw only images, no readings. The instructor asked questions about the images, and I had to answer when they called on me.
Although I highly recommend small-group classes and tutoring for intermediate and advanced speakers, beginners might still find Rosetta Stone's sessions valuable. The reason? It's uncomfortable. Live interactions push you out of your comfort zone and get you to generate language. Even in a beginner class in which you're doing little more than naming the color of objects, you listen to a native speaker who says some things you don't understand. Your job is to do your best to keep up. That is where real learning happens. Language teachers sometimes say you should be able to understand about 80% of the instruction for it to be effective. If you feel like you're at 100%, then you're not learning.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Rosetta Stone)
Rosetta Stone
The newly repackaged Rosetta Stone, now with the Sapphire branding, has shorter lessons designed for a mobile-first learning experience, but it abandons the structured practice requirements that made it special.