Thanks for your refreshing review, (I prefer Rocket French – Rosetta Stone is waaay to expensive), most reviews always say that ‘Rosetta Stone is the best’ and I’m never convinced that the reviewer has actually used it!

But, to digress, I rather like langlearner.com, and I found another site
http://www.surfacelanguages.com which is similar. Except you can play around for free.

Back to French, I love it, even though I always struggle with those verbs

Helen.

Thanks for this useful review. I agree that Rocket French is the winner against Rosetta Stone. I was just wondering whether you also checked out Langlearner; http://www.langlearner.com? It’s quite new and its approach to learning a language is in a way comparable to that of RS – they use a lot of flashcards, audio etc. to learn the basic vocabulary, but it offers extra features and is waaaaay cheaper.
One of the features I liked best is the Reader. You can read – and listen to – up-to-date french newspaper articles and if you’re stuck at a word you don’t know, you can get the translation of that word with one mouse-click.

They don’t have a mobile version yet, but they promise to release that this fall.

I don’t think you can learn to write and read French on a very high level only by using this software, but like you said, most people want to be able to speak and understand the language. I think Langlearner is able to do that.
When you want to achieve a higher level you will have to learn the French grammar – and as I remember from high school that’s not easy …

Frank