I've tried a few different language learning packages. Instant Immersion makes the mistake (for me, anyway) of going through all the basics first - numbers, months, days, blah blah. Useful but boring. Pimsleur says the same phrase umpteen times. And so on. So this approach seems the best so far in terms of interest, and some of my comments will seem like nitpicking, but it could be better.
Rosetta starts with matching words to pictures, and includes hearing, speaking, reading, and writing. You can choose which of these activities to include, but you can't fine tune it to have just reading and no writing. You have the option of displaying simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, pinyin, or both. If you choose both, however, the pinyin is shown above the script in a font that's a little too small for easy reading on a 13.1" or 14.1" laptop screen. The title text at the top is also unclear, even on fullscreen, because it's antialiased, but that's not a huge problem, since it doesn't affect the lesson. Other than that, the interface is bright and pleasant and refreshingly different from the normal Windows dialogs.
The lessons available are limited to about half the full content until you activate the product, i.e. tie it to one PC. I've heard horror stories about transferring the activation, so be warned.
The picture/word matching thing seems to work for the most part, but there are sometimes problems. Is that a boy or a girl? What are they doing? Hard to say at first glance, since they use a couple of different pictures for the same word. Also feels strange to match "he is not doing this"-type phrases to the pictures of someone ... er ... not doing it.
Because it's an immersion-type course, sometimes you have to figure out what's going on with little or no explanation - for example the different numeratives ("one tail of fish"). You aren't told why a bicycle is called what it is. But that's part of the immersive learning process.
The program defaults to moving along automatically. Problem is, there are pages where it should stop for you to review, but it doesn't - it moves along after a second or two. If you set it to manual, you have to advance by clicking on the button for the next lesson - from a tiny row of boxes at the bottom. That could've been designed better.
In general, response is slow - a couple of seconds to get to the next page, for instance. It's a little annoying because you're not sure if the program recognized your input, so ... get used to it, or get used to clicking twice just in case.
I've heard many actors simply butcher Mandarin in movies or on TV (Serenity *cough*). For those of you having trouble with the accent, may I suggest that you think of it in terms of singing the phrase, see if that helps.
Is it worth it? If you want to learn the language at your own pace, and the price is within your budget, I would say yes. I give it three stars because of the price and the room for improvement - and the activation requirement. Considering what you pay for it, you shouldn't be treated like a criminal or inconvenienced in that way.
Michael Owen
Grimmy