Speaking is absolutely horrendous
I was trying to start chinese and it wouldn’t let me pass the ni hao speaking test because it doesn’t recognize it as correct. I tried with spanish and it took me soo long for it to recognize my speech and I’m a NATIVE spanish speaker. This app is so broken im so disappointed after even thinking about downloading this
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AI Everything
All images, and I assume most of the content as well, is generative AI and feels very fake and hard to connect to. No kind of placement tests so if you’re not brand new to the language there’s very minimal options for you.
Not a big update
I tested this with the week free trial. I have the lifetime account to the Totale system, and I can’t say I see big enough changes to upgrade. Quite frankly, the changes are quite minor. The UI changes are nice, but not $20 a month nice when I already paid for Totale.
RS has been resting on their laurels for decades now, letting competitors overshadow them and not really doing anything about it, and Sapphire is a continuation of that. The AI features are quite bland; they have the potential to be nice, but take the Flashcards as a specific example. The app just lets you read them once. You can’t mark a card as wrong and see it again, you’d have to reload the whole deck. I can’t think of a reason to use this Flashcard system over Anki or even handwritten Flashcards
The lesson content is exactly the same, but the UX is worse. With Totale I can pause a lesson or turn off auto-proceed to read sentences and take my time, but with Sapphire, I cannot turn off the auto-proceed, and if I missed something, it keeps going, and I’m not given a chance to try to re-read it
Finally, this was RS’s chance to move away from the whole “learn like a child” approach which isn’t supported by second language acquisition research.
Pros of RS though are that they have very nice native audio with formal sentences. If I compare RS’s Arabic course to Duolingo’s Arabic course, I can see very quickly that RS teaches truly formal MSA with case endings and all. Very nice! Duolingo drops the case endings but otherwise retains the MSA vocabulary. Neither is bad per se, but if I’m going learn MSA, I want to learn it fully and with native audio, which makes learning a new language better than hearing bad TTS audio. I prefer RS for MSA over Duolingo, but again, see above about how the content is the same between Totale and Sapphire
RS has been resting on their laurels for decades now, letting competitors overshadow them and not really doing anything about it, and Sapphire is a continuation of that. The AI features are quite bland; they have the potential to be nice, but take the Flashcards as a specific example. The app just lets you read them once. You can’t mark a card as wrong and see it again, you’d have to reload the whole deck. I can’t think of a reason to use this Flashcard system over Anki or even handwritten Flashcards
The lesson content is exactly the same, but the UX is worse. With Totale I can pause a lesson or turn off auto-proceed to read sentences and take my time, but with Sapphire, I cannot turn off the auto-proceed, and if I missed something, it keeps going, and I’m not given a chance to try to re-read it
Finally, this was RS’s chance to move away from the whole “learn like a child” approach which isn’t supported by second language acquisition research.
Pros of RS though are that they have very nice native audio with formal sentences. If I compare RS’s Arabic course to Duolingo’s Arabic course, I can see very quickly that RS teaches truly formal MSA with case endings and all. Very nice! Duolingo drops the case endings but otherwise retains the MSA vocabulary. Neither is bad per se, but if I’m going learn MSA, I want to learn it fully and with native audio, which makes learning a new language better than hearing bad TTS audio. I prefer RS for MSA over Duolingo, but again, see above about how the content is the same between Totale and Sapphire
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Response from developer
Thank you for providing very detailed feedback. We are always looking for ways to improve our products, so feedback like yours helps us to get a perspective on things we can do better. We will pass this feedback along to the appropriate team for review.
Bad Company. Don’t bother
I never considered Rosetta Stone the best language learning software to begin with. However, they are generally excellent as a supplemental to your learning.
That being said, having purchased a lifetime license to Rosetta Stone I would have expected access for… well, a lifetime. But instead of continuing to offer lifetime access to previous customers who shelled out a lot of money for their now, mostly useless, lifetime license, they rebrand it as “Sapphire” and go with a subscription model. I understand the change from a business standpoint, but don’t leave your previous customers in the dust. At least offer some sort of incentive or discount to your lifetime customers. But, seeing as we get none of that, Rosetta Stone has lost my trust as a business and I will be saying goodbye for good and moving onto better options. I suggest everyone else do the same and stay away from this program.
That being said, having purchased a lifetime license to Rosetta Stone I would have expected access for… well, a lifetime. But instead of continuing to offer lifetime access to previous customers who shelled out a lot of money for their now, mostly useless, lifetime license, they rebrand it as “Sapphire” and go with a subscription model. I understand the change from a business standpoint, but don’t leave your previous customers in the dust. At least offer some sort of incentive or discount to your lifetime customers. But, seeing as we get none of that, Rosetta Stone has lost my trust as a business and I will be saying goodbye for good and moving onto better options. I suggest everyone else do the same and stay away from this program.
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Response from developer
Thank you for your feedback. At this time, there aren’t any discounts for current Rosetta Stone Classic customers to switch to Rosetta Stone Sapphire, but we will let our team know about your request and will notify our Rosetta Stone Classic subscribers if any transition options become available. In the meantime, Rosetta Stone Classic access has not changed, and you can continue using it as normal.
Can't use old subscription,,,
I have a lifetime subscription for classic and it said I could use it for the sapphire... Wrong. Why would I pay more for the same content??
