No, but this is how Rosetta should be teaching language. Instead they hawk their "immersive" language learning. Immersion is great for children, but adults learn differently (I say this as someone who learned a foreign language as a child and two as an adult). It's not sexy, and it's not pretty, but to build a foundation for learning a language as an adult, rote memorization of vocabulary is by far the most effective route in the beginning. Once you have a good base (say 500 of the most common words), you can start learning grammar and then, slowly, starting to practice speaking, reading and writing. But continuing to build up a vocabulary is vital to continuing to learn the language. Once you reach about 1000 of the most common words, things will start falling into place if you have adequate exposure to the language. In my opinion, it's only at this point that Rosetta Stone becomes worth using, and then only if you don't have access to friends, family, or tv channels in the language you're learning.
From my experience, Rosetta Stone does not work. I've also found from reading the about other peoples' negative experiences with Rosetta Stone I'm not alone in this. It's a nice method in theory, but in in practice it fails. Here is one well written argument for why it doesn't work: http://language101.com/reviews/rosetta-stone/
does anyone know the most common 500 words? Is it language neutral or does it vary from language to language? I definitely agree that learning the 500 or so most common words is a great start - even if some of the words are conjugated verbs and you don't have the background to understand the conjugation.
I am not a believer in rote word memorization, but rather putting each word in a sentence and using the sentence as the memorization route. Rote memorization stores the word in a different part of the brain than the language center, and using the sentence as the unit of flash card seems to override this.
I still see use for flash cards to re-trigger words in memory, but not for actually learning new words. I can't tell you how much I struggled to de-link certain words because I "memorized" them at the same time and so mixed up the meanings of the two words.
