Rosetta Stone works if you ignore the way they try to teach you.
I pirated the Japanese version of Rosetta Stone about two years ago, and found it to be absolutely worthless. It doesn't explain anything, and forces you to just figure stuff out. Starting from knowing nothing, I can see how this would work for learning Spanish or French, but for Japanese it just didn't work. Japanese is just too different from English.
However, after working my way through "Japanese in Mangaland" by Marc Bernabe, it all makes perfect sense now. The book gives a really good crash course on Japanese grammar and sentence structure. Now knowing what Japanese grammar particles are and what they mean, the fact that Japanese is actually backwards from English, and being able to read both alphabets and some kanji Rosetta Stone makes perfect sense. When they introduce new verbs, I can automatically say, "Oh, they're using the te-form. From that I can figure out that the dictionary and polite forms are A and B, and the negative, past, and past negative forms are C/D, E/F, and G/H." Also, when it introduces new words, you're supposed to just figure out what they mean through context, but screw that. Look them up in a dictionary. The images they use are small and can be hard to see. Also, some of them are just stupid. For example, when they introduce the concept of "new" and "old" they try to show it with cars. Problem is, the "new" cars are actually quite old at this point.
For about the last week and a half, I've been doing about 2-3 lessons per day of Rosetta Stone. Not only is it now super easy, this time I've actually set it to the hardest mode where it uses kanji, and by the end of the lessons, I can read along with it. So far I've gone through all but one lesson without getting any questions wrong (not counting the ones where I'm not paying attention or accidentally clink the wrong one).
