Living Language Vs Rosetta Stone 2024: Which is The best

If you are wanting to learn a new language but are struggling to know where to start when it comes to language teaching apps, then this guide should help you.

We have compared both Living Language vs Rosetta Stone so that you can make an informed decision as to which one is best for you.

Living Language Overview

Living Language is an older series of foreign language educational courses that are still available on the market today.

The courses are based on procedures established by the US Department of State to prepare diplomats for postings abroad.

Students consistently praise Living Language classes, which have a reputation for great production values.

How Living Language Works

When you purchase a membership to Living Language Comprehensive, you have unrestricted access to everything online learning for the duration of your subscription.

It has up to 46 courses that encompass vocabulary, grammar explanations, cultural notes, brief audio dialogues, games, and forum access.

There are no longer any mobile applications for Living Language. Everything is only accessible over the internet.

The activities, interface, and user experience are essentially the same regardless of language.

The content is separated into three sections based on experience level: essential, intermediate, and advanced. You have complete freedom to move around.

Flashcards are commonly used to introduce new terminology. On a card, you’ll often find a word in the language you’re studying linked with an illustration.

To hear the word uttered, just press the play button. The card is then flipped, revealing the English translation.

You can select to display transliterated text on the front of the flashcard beneath the native lettering for languages that do not use the Roman alphabet.

The flashcards in Living Language function well if you are already familiar with the writing system and sounds. Then you may go through the deck quickly and move on to other exercises.

You designate a flashcard as “mastered” when you have remembered it. If you don’t know what a term means, mark it “study.”

After you’ve gone over all of the terminologies, you may go over the ones you highlighted to study. It’s a dull and uninteresting system.

Living Language is built-in modules. It includes interactive sentence construction, fill-in-the-blank activities, listening portions, games, and reading material with grammatical lessons, cultural notes, and other information, in addition to flashcards.

If you often utilize mobile applications or play video games, the design and interaction in Living Language will appear old.

One of the activities requires you to convert a statement from English into the language you’re studying by dragging words from a word bank into position.

The games have the potential to be tedious and time-consuming. In one, word bubbles in both English and the language you’re studying are displayed on the screen.

To bust the bubbles, click on the words with the same meaning.

Another game is similar to the card game Memory, but with words. You match words in the other language with terms in English once again. This strategy is inefficient for learning and memorizing new words.

Living Language Pros

High Quality Online Tutoring Sessions

Some people buy the Living Language courses just for access to sessions. A full year’s worth of tutoring is available for $179.

This is excellent value and almost justifies the buying price. You can ask questions about the online course material and review your lessons during the sessions.

There are many classes to choose from, and you should be able to find one that fits your schedule.

There will be no more than three pupils in a class. This means you’ll have plenty of time to ask questions and receive personalized attention. Classes are well-organized, and tutors are often well-prepared.

Citrix GoToMeeting, the market leader in online video conferencing, powers e-tutoring sessions.

Reading And Writing Instructions

Reading and writing exercises teaching is one area in which the Living Language method excels. Because these topics might be difficult to teach successfully, some language schools avoid them.

This is especially true for “harder” languages like Mandarin Chinese and Arabic.

There are several activities and instructional materials available to help pupils speak, read, and write the language.

They also give a detailed character guide for non-Latin-based languages such as Japanese to aid pupils with their studies.

Flexible Purchasing Options

There are budget-friendly choices available. Students who do not like to acquire the entire platinum course can select the smaller essentials and complete components.

Other courses, like Pimsleur, provide more restricted versions of their whole offering. The distinction is that these lesser offerings are excellent courses in their own right.

Clear Explanations

Other online courses employ an immersive approach to language instruction. This entails learning in the same way as a kid does by imitating others around them.

Living Language, on the other hand, takes a more academic approach and includes detailed explanations of grammatical concepts and vocabulary.

People who prefer to study a language’s rules will appreciate and love this method much more.

Living Language Cons

Laborious Reading

A variety of reading passages are utilized to demonstrate grammatical topics. While these sections are helpful, they may often be tedious.

Reading stuff that is a little more fascinating would make the experience more immersive.

Ineffective Flash Card System

Flashcards are the most common way to introduce a new language. The new term will be connected with a card image. You must submit a translation when you flip the card. If you don’t know the term, it will be marked “study,” but if you guess it properly, it will be marked “mastered.”

Lots Of English Text

It’s hardly surprising that there’s a lot of English material to absorb in the program, given the number of explanations of grammatical ideas and vocabulary.

For the most part, this is really useful, especially when dealing with languages other than English, such as Korean or Mandarin. However, there is a risk that people would utilize the English texts as a crutch, slowing their capacity to acquire the foreign language organically.

Rosetta Stone Overview

Rosetta Stone is one of the most well-known names in language learning programs. Almost every language student has heard of it.

But don’t confuse it with the Rosetta Stone, which was used to decode Egyptian hieroglyphics and is named after it.
You are entirely immersed in another language the minute you begin using Rosetta Stone.

The app teaches you words and phrases with audio and visuals, and it employs high-quality voice recognition technology to assess your pronunciation.

While it is not a perfect language program, Rosetta Stone’s strategy is effective and scientifically supported. The classes cover a wide range of topics, and the software is simple to use.

How Rosetta Stone Works

Rosetta Stone now allows you to select the type of vocabulary you wish to create. Travel, Work, Family, and Basic and Beyond are the possibilities, with the latter including everyday products and activities, colors, sizes, and formal and casual circumstances.

You are taught by performing activities in the program, which frequently begin with deductive reasoning.

The new term can be translated as “dog.” When you select the dog image, Rosetta Stone plays a harp trill to signal that you were correct.

If you find that sounds bothersome, you may turn it off. This deductive reasoning occurs regardless of the language studied.

There is a lot of drill-and-kill instruction. Prepare to interact with a new term as soon as it enters your lexicon. In multiple choice questions, you hear it, speak it, write it, and select it from a list of possibilities.

Though it might be boring at times, drill-and-kill instruction can be successful at making new content stick in the brain.

Rosetta Stone is dependable, constant, predictable, and steady. Because each program is almost the same regardless of the language being learned, some cultural context is lost.

Rosetta Stone Pros

A Lot Of Content

You will have complete access to their whole curriculum once you sign up for a subscription.

It’s extremely rationally designed and covers all the themes you’d expect to see, progressively rising in complexity from ‘Greetings and Introductions’ (unit 2) to ‘Home and Healthy’ (unit 4). (unit 9).

There’s enough stuff to keep you going for a long time.

Variety Of Exercises

The format of the questions is simple enough for young children to use. You’re mainly simply matching what you hear to the appropriate image or text.

The questions change a little, which keeps things interesting. Sometimes the transcript is shown, and sometimes it isn’t, this keeps you on your toes and works on your listening skills.

Can Be Used Offline

Along with the app, the curriculum may be utilized without wifi, providing you more freedom to study on the move and arrange your online courses around your hectic schedule.

In addition, many of the audio recordings may be downloaded and listened to while traveling to work, at the gym, or during your lunch break.

A fantastic technique to pack in additional material and evaluate what you’ve learned.

Rosetta Stone Cons

Basic Approach To Syllabus

The curriculum is the same for all of the languages that they provide.

Linguists are said to have created its material, although linguists would recognize the necessity to arrange each online course appropriately for each language rather than using the same technique for languages as disparate as Korean and Hebrew.

This is also true for the visuals, which are recycled repeatedly regardless of the language you are learning.

This misses an opportunity to learn more about the culture from which you are learning the language by displaying photographs of their food, people, architecture, and so on.

Not Very Immersive

Only images and isolated audio samples are used in the software to provide context and ‘immersion.’ In actuality, there is a lot more going on while learning through immersion.

You are always learning from situational awareness, social cues, body language, the personality and character of individuals with whom you are conversing, and so on – not simply an isolated generic image with a pre-recorded sentence.

It’s difficult to discern context based only on photos. To improve this component of the training, they must dive deeper and create a more immersive experience, maybe through videos, conversations, street interviews, movie clips, and so on.

Language Is Not Always Accurate

The target language is not often based on how people actually talk in the place of origin, maybe due to the way the syllabus has been built (or lacks design).

Many students who finished the online language learning courses have now returned to the country and have been unable to understand what the locals are saying.

Their reading abilities are frequently excellent, but the curriculum did not give them sufficient conversational speaking skills to converse successfully.

Living Language Vs Rosetta Stone

Language Options

English people may study up to 61 languages through Living Language online language learning programs.

Among the other courses available are to learn other foreign languages Spanish, (American Sign Language) ASL, Arabic, Dothraki, Dutch, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, and Russian.

The Essential and Complete versions cannot be purchased online since they exclusively use books and audio CDs.

Depending on the level of commitment desired, Living Language provides four corporate language courses, ten languages for Passport courses, and three language courses for travelers.

Law enforcement, librarians, and healthcare professionals can also take the ‘On-the-Job’ course, which combines (American Sign Language) ASL and Spanish. A flashcards-only course that takes 36 minutes to complete is also available.

Rosetta Stone presently has 25 languages accessible. However, not all of them are available on all online language learning platforms. Consumer-type plan subscribers will be unable to access Dari, Indonesian, Pashto, or Swahili.

The Living Language app gets my recommendation since it allows you to choose from a range of languages. Even if you were not a natural English speaker, the curriculum allowed you to study English as a second language.

It also provided online education in American Sign Language (ASL). You can also take short classes to improve your conversational skills.

Leaning Methods

Both Living Language and Rosetta Stone concentrate on progressively laying a solid basis for novices. The main distinction is that Living Language uses explicit grammar to instruct.

Living Language provides grammatical explanations so that individuals understand how to use certain terminology or phrases correctly.

Another advantage is that it teaches you words and phrases that you may use to talk in real-life circumstances.

Living Language also makes use of flashcards, as well as visuals and audio recordings of local speakers. It will let you pick whether or not you want to see how words and phrases are written.

The graphics aren’t always related to the meaning, and the flashcards can get boring. It also includes audio so you can hear how words are spoken, although it does not sound as natural as it should.

There is also far too much English in the text, some of it is erroneous and out of date.

Rosetta Stone, on the other hand, employs just pictures and audio recordings. You will only understand the message by looking at the photographs.

The images will force you to think thoroughly about how you will interpret them and will offer you numerous options to aid you.

The app will assist you in effectively pronouncing the vocabulary and phrases. One disadvantage of the audio is that, while it appears to be from native speakers, you must closely observe the pitch or intonations.

Also, the graphics utilized by Rosetta Stone are unclear, and there is no explanation for the words and phrases that cannot be used in real-life settings.

Living Language and Rosetta Stone encourage participation in its material, such as games, short tales, and so on.

Living Language continues to evolve in order to accommodate new technology, however, the games introduced to the program are not always entertaining.

It appears odd for adult students to just click floating bubbles or flip cards. Perhaps younger kids will be more interested in this approach. Rosetta Stone has more interesting material.

Many people prefer Living Language to Rosetta Stone when it comes to learning methods. This is because Living Language incorporates grammatical principles into the sessions to help you grasp the language better.

Even though it is less entertaining than Rosetta Stone, users may quickly learn to talk in the language.

Pricing

Living language provides comprehensive courses beginning at $25 per month and specialized courses for employment, business, and travel beginning at $15 per month. Prices differ depending on the language.

The cost of a Rosetta Stone pricing membership varies according to the number of months selected, so it’s easy to say that we can recommend rosetta stone.

Currently, Rosetta Stone offers a lifetime membership for $299, and the number of months you choose determines the plan you receive, starting at $11.99/month for three months with only one language, and $14.92/month for twelve months with an unlimited language subscription. Prices vary depending on the length of the subscription.

Conclusion

These language learning programs are suitable for beginners. The process, features, languages available, and cost are what distinguish these two.

So, while deciding which is superior between Living Language vs Rosetta Stone based on these four criteria, the judgment is in favor of Living Language.

Living Language has been on the market for more than 70 years, but its dedication to adapting its language learning programs to new technology is laudable.

Another significant advantage of Living Language is the freedom it provides to language learners, as well as the teaching technique that incorporates explanations to help learners better comprehend the language.

However, picking the best language learning program for you ultimately comes down to your unique tastes and learning methods. So, before you buy or attempt any language learning programs, evaluate yourself first and which is the best from Living Language vs Rosetta Stone