To start with Rosetta Stone, you must decide between Castilian Spanish (Spain) or Latin American Spanish. This will depend on your learning goals or travel plans. The platform will then ask you to choose between thematic categories: viajes (travel), familia (family), en el trabajo (at work), and conceptos básicos (basic concepts). Depending on your chosen topic, Rosetta Stone will create a learning plan you can follow for six weeks. Every week’s content is separated into days, and each day into different lessons. However, if you seek a more inclusive learning path not limited to these specific subjects or pre-arranged order, you can explore Rosetta Stone’s content in a different tab.
These courses are called unidades (units) and cover different topics of daily life activities, such as viajar (travel), etapas de la vida y la geografía (life stages and geography), turismo y recreación (tourism and leisure), amongst others. Each course comprises four lessons corresponding to different thematic components. For instance, Unit 12 Lugares y Acontecimientos (places and historical events) is divided into four lessons: política y medios (politics and media), idiomas y negocios (languages and business), aprendizaje y memoria (learning and memory), and celebrar festividades (celebration of festivities). As Rosetta Stone Spanish offers 20 units in total, the subjects you will encounter in the learning plan might cover the interests of almost everyone.
Each lesson is divided into different sections that can vary in organization and duration. Most of them comprise a main lesson where you will get familiarized with the content, and then you will proceed to pronunciation, speaking, vocabulary, reading, and grammar sections. Between sections, you can also find revisions to check your learning progress. These components can intercalate within a single lesson, which means that in some, you will need to do more than one set of exercises on a specific linguistic skill or even more than two revisions. What is interesting about Rosetta Stone is that you can jump from one component or session to another, giving you flexibility in the topics that most suit your needs.
This might be one of the most particular aspects of Rosetta Stone’s method: it covers with equal importance all the linguistic skills you need to develop to master a new language. Many other online language-learning platforms focus too much on reading or listening. In Rosetta Stone, you will have a comprehensive learning experience based on reading, listening, writing, and speaking.