Rosetta Stone vs. Rocket Languages: Do You Want to Learn the Basics of Multiple Languages or Study One In-depth?

Mashable once named Rosetta Stone the gold standard of language learning. Meanwhile, European Business Magazine awarded Rocket Languages as one of the best language-learning software in 2017.

While both are amazing programs, I’ve found Rocket Languages takes you further than Rosetta Stone, but Rosetta Stone also has its pros—like offering many more languages (including less common ones).

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What Is Rosetta Stone?

A pioneer in tech-based language learning solutions, Rosetta Stone has been named one of the best for years.

Rather than teaching languages in English or your mother tongue, Rosetta Stone immerses you in the target language through sights, sounds and word-picture association, taking away the element of translation and allowing you to learn similarly to how you learned your native tongue as a kid.

The theory is that acquisition came so easily to us back then because of the deep and meaningful exposure that allowed us to function in the language, and that’s what Rosetta Stone is aiming to accomplish.

What Is Rocket Languages?

Rocket Languages is a popular alternative and pretty much what you’d expect an online language learning program to be.

It’s an interactive course consisting mostly of audio lessons, with some textbook-style grammar lessons. The language of instruction is in English—a different (and perhaps more familiar) learning strategy compared to Rosetta Stone’s immersion technique.

You can probably already see how different these two programs are. There are a couple of similarities between the two, such as they’re both paid programs and utilize native speaker audio. Other than that, they don’t have that much in common.

Rosetta Stone vs. Rocket Languages: What Languages Are Offered?

First things first, let’s go over the basics. Since language is the main concern here, it’s only fair to start off with the languages and proficiency levels offered on each platform.

Rosetta Stone offers 25 Languages: Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), Dutch, English (American), English (British), Filipino (Tagalog), French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin (web only), Persian (Farsi), Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish (Latin America), Spanish (Spain), Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese.

There are different levels to each course, which are further broken down into units. Based on your goal, current level and reason for learning the language, Rosetta Stone generates a six-week personal plan for you.

Rocket Languages offers 14 Languages: Spanish, French, Italian, German, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Portuguese, ASL, English (American), Inglés (Spanish learning English)

The levels in Rocket Languages are as straightforward as they get (Level 1 Beginner, Level 2 Intermediate, Level 3 Advanced). Just like Rosetta Stone, these levels vary per language, with only around half of the list offering all three levels.

When it comes to language fluency, depth trumps breadth. So I have to say Rocket Languages wins in this category.

Features and Format of Rosetta Stone Courses

Rosetta Stone can be used on a desktop, tablet or smartphone, but the website offers a better user experience.

There are three types of accounts (Individual, Enterprise and Schools), which are structured a little differently to suit each type of user.

Your plan is broken down into Core Lessons, which are then broken down into mini-lessons. For example, Core Lesson 1 is broken down into Core Lesson 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 in the Latin American Spanish course.

The core lessons are bite-sized. They’re about 10 minutes, but you’ll probably spend a good half hour on the entire lesson and the exercises.

The main part of the lesson is the picture-word association, then that’s followed by pronunciation, grammar, reading and writing exercises. And as a huge pro, all the speaking exercises are equipped with the TruAccent speech engine that allows you to compare your recordings to that of a native speaker.

Since the very essence of Rosetta Stone is building conversational skills, grammar takes a backseat with this program, only appearing in the grammar exercise of lessons to indicate applicable sentence structures.

Rosetta Stone has a section for extended learning tools for language enrichment.

There’s the “Phrasebook” where you can practice everyday phrases in different fields, though this feature is only available for certain languages.

The “Audio Companion” allows you to download any course audio content so you can practice your pronunciation or new phrases anywhere and anytime.

“Stories” is a compilation of short literature and other texts for additional reading practice. These also can be downloaded onto your phone.

Lastly, they offer live tutoring, which will give you access to a native-speaker professional tutor.

Features and Format of Rocket Languages Courses

Like Rosetta Stone, Rocket Languages can be accessed on your computer and mobile devices. Though the website has far more capabilities than the app.

The content is divided into three sections:

• Audio Lessons (up to 98 lessons with 370 hours of audio)
• Language and Culture (up to 87 lessons)
• Survival Kit (three kits worth $149.95)

For languages with non-Latin scripts (such as Mandarin Chinese or Russian), there’s also a section for writing, which contains video lessons that show you how to read and write the alphabet.

The Audio Lessons make up the bulk of the content, and Language and Culture is a collection of grammar and culture lessons. And as you might have guessed, Survival Kit helps you with everyday situations—handy for travelers. Both the Audio Lessons and Survival Kit utilize the audio and text formats, while Language and Culture lessons are purely made of text.

Each lesson is followed by several exercises. Depending on the language you’re learning, this section has six to seven exercises that test all language skills. These exercises include:

• Role Playing
• Flashcards
• Writing
• Listening
• Speaking
• Quiz

For these activities, there’s voice recording software that allows you to record and compare your answers to native speaker pronunciation.

The majority of Rocket Language’s features are built into the lessons themselves, but there are a couple of extras.

For example, you can create custom flashcards or view public sets. You can also create your own word lists.

There’s also a public forum where users can communicate with each other.

How Far Can You Progress with Rosetta Stone?

While it may not have the conventional audio language lessons that Rocket Languages is built on, Rosetta Stone offers a ton of listening and speaking practice, along with other language skills.

Native speaker audio is scattered throughout the lessons as well as the extensive learning tools, so you won’t be missing out on listening. And wherever there’s native speaker audio, you can practice your speaking. Even the stories feature allows you to record your voice as you’re reading aloud.

For more speaking, there are also live tutoring sessions, where you’ll be speaking purely in your target language.

Outside of the extended learning tools, reading is also included in lessons. The reading exercises are also a chance for language shadowing, which is added speaking practice.

There are also writing exercises, but there isn’t as big of an emphasis on this skill in comparison to the rest.

As a dynamic immersion program, Rosetta Stone focuses more on vocabulary and skips the traditional translation and grammar explanations. While there isn’t really any grammar progression per se, you do learn structures and rules through common conversational phrases.

How Far Can You Progress with Rocket Languages?

As an audio course, listening is a huge component in Rocket Languages, but it’s not the only language skill addressed on the platform.

In fact, most of the lesson exercises tackle at least two language skills, and all the exercises incorporate translation, vocabulary and grammar in some way.

Reading is covered in Language and Culture lessons and throughout the lesson exercises. There’s a little bit of reading involved in the flashcards, as well.

The writing exercise has you listen to audio and write down the word or phrase. Character-based languages like Korean also include exercises for practicing writing and composing words in their script.

The speaking exercise makes you listen to a word or phrase, record your answer and receive a score to see how native you sound.

The quiz is a series of multiple-choice questions, which can include translations or grammar questions. The flashcards can be marked with a difficulty level so you can let Rocket Languages know what you need practice with.

Although there’s lots of pronunciation practice, there doesn’t seem to be any way to practice spontaneous conversation on the platform.

As for building on your skills, I’d say the program does well in increasing your vocabulary and improving grammar. And it expands into more interesting topics as you move up the levels. There seems to be a good balance between conversational fluency and reading comprehension, but as I said, there’s room for improvement in terms of authentic language usage.

A lot of podcast language courses tend to use too much English in their lessons, even for the advanced lessons. Rocket Languages is guilty of doing so too, but I appreciate the reduced English in Levels 2 and 3. Level 1 features two hosts (one English speaker, one native speaker), while lessons in Levels 2 and 3 have three hosts (two native speakers, one English speaker).

Rosetta Stone Prices and Plans

The options for Rosetta Stone subscription plans are three months and a year. It costs $47.97 per three months ($15.99 per month) and $167.88 per year ($13.99 per month).

There is a free trial available, which you can get here. And there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Live tutoring is free for anyone with a subscription (except for School subscribers) and you can take unlimited classes as long as it remains active.

Rocket Languages Prices and Plans

Rocket Languages has one-time payment options or a six-month plan. You can choose to purchase Level 1, Levels 1 and 2 or all three levels. The six-month plan is a six-month commitment of payments and gives you access to all levels.

Level 1 costs $149.95, Levels 1 and 2 cost $299.90 and all three levels cost $449.85. But Rocket Languages runs sales frequently, so it’s often less than this.

The six-month plan is six payments of $75 a month.

There’s a free trial, too—it gives you lifetime access to a few lessons per level and full access to the exercises in these lessons. And finally, there’s a 60-day money-back guarantee.

Rosetta Stone vs. Rocket Languages: Which Is the Best?

In the end, I recommend Rocket Languages over Rosetta Stone to anyone serious about learning a language and wants to make far progress.

But if you want a more affordable option or you’re just getting started, remember that Rosetta Stone has been (and continues to be) a leader in the field for very good reasons.

Rocket Languages won’t take you to complete fluency, but it will push you beyond the basics. It’s also more well-rounded than Rosetta Stone in terms of exercises and target skills.

And of course, if neither one of these works for you, there are plenty of alternatives to Rosetta Stone and Rocket Languages, like Babbel, which has more of a grammar focus—Mango Languages, which has some hard-to-find languages—and then there are free resources like Duolingo.

To fill the grammar void on Rosetta Stone, you can also take advantage of FluentU‘s interactive dictionary which offers definitions, sentence examples and related videos so you can see how words and constructions are used in various contexts.

 

In the end, both language programs are award-winning options that will put you on the right path. If you want to read more, you can check out our full reviews of each program in-depth here:

 

I hope you’ve learned as much as you could about both programs to make an informed decision. And if these two language platforms are still too pricey, you can always explore more budget-friendly options!