A year ago, I decided to learn Spanish more seriously. I use Rosetta Stone to learn grammar and new vocabulary, and Anki to review flashcards.
Rosetta Stone
I bought a Rosetta Stone lifetime license a year ago and have completed three units. I like its approach of linking language to images. Understanding what's happening in a picture is universal, and Rosetta Stone builds different kinds of exercises around images.
For example, the software shows an image of a woman handing a piece of candy to a child. The exercise might ask you to select the sentence that describes the image. Another might ask you to read the sentence aloud, choose the correctly conjugated verb, or select the right word for what's happening. All of these exercises practice vocabulary, grammar, or pronunciation in context.
Using the Rosetta Stone iOS App
Great content, poor software - that's my summary so far. Rosetta Stone offers both a browser version and a mobile app, and I use the iOS app almost exclusively. It feels laggy, crashes if I minimize and reopen it too often, and is generally buggy.
The most annoying issue is speech recognition: if the iOS app prompts me to speak and I respond instantly, recognition fails. This was maddening until I figured out why: I have to wait for the orange dot in my iPhone's status bar to appear. That dot indicates the microphone is active. If I speak after it appears, the app correctly recognizes what I say.
Spaced repetition with Anki
After using Rosetta Stone for a while, I realized that vocabulary was still a struggle. I remembered using Anki on my laptop in the past, but I never built a habit around it. Buying the iOS AnkiMobile Flashcards app changed that. Now I review flashcards on the train during my commute, and it takes surprisingly little effort - although I don't exactly look forward to it. It feels like flossing: a small daily nuisance with long-term benefit.
I find Anki unintuitive. It took me several hours with the (excellent) manual to find a good workflow for Spanish vocabulary. But once I did, I started enjoying it. It is calm technology and emphasizes user control. There are no ads and no default notifications, although you can configure them. The app also has fun usage stats - I'm still a beginner, but I'm proud to have learned 136 Spanish words so far.
In practice, Anki compensates for Rosetta Stone's weak app. I use Rosetta Stone mainly for grammar and new vocabulary, then feed that into Anki, which I use far more often. The two work well together.
