Rosetta Stone Language Software

While I'm thinking about language learning I thought I'd right about Rosetta Stone, the American Governments language education software. Rosetta Stone was the first method we tried to learn Japanese with back at RISD, and the first we abandoned. I can't say for sure because we only tried the demo, which is free. The problem we ran into was the complete lack of English, one of their selling points. It all sounds good in theory, looking at pictures, listening to simple descriptions of the pictures in Japanese and seeing the Kanji, or Romanji, transcription. But when we got to lesson five or so they pictures started showing a ball resting on a table, or a boy standing under an airplane wing, and we realized we didn't know if they were say the ball is on the table or the table is under the ball, or the boy is under the airplane or the airplane is above the boy. With no english to set us straight we were lost and it only got more confusing. So if you do try Rosetta stone you will at least need a good to way dictionary, but a grammar book would probably be more helpful.