Has anyone out there used Rosetta Stone?

So, remember when Peter was being all goofy and weird?  Well, it turns out his Top Secret secret was that he wanted to learn Dutch.

After I found this out, I tried to dissuade him from spending any time learning Dutch and to perhaps focus on the Spanish that he's actually being taught in school.  I also reminded him that there are quite a few people around here that actually speak Spanish (at his school, in his own class even!) and that he could actually practice with. I also mentioned that being fluent in  Spanish would look great on a resume.

This motherly advice was quickly dismissed and he spent time googling  Dutch and learned some simple greetings. 

He even asked me to get a Dutch - English dictionary from the library  (our little country library did not carry one).  As the weeks progressed, he talked less and less about Dutch but continued to talk about learning another language (other than Spanish much to my dismay).

Last week, he earnestly asked me which language he should learn.  I gave him some self-serving motherly advice and told him to at least pick a country that I wanted to go to so he could be my tour guide some day.

I steered him to Italian because I would love to go to Italy.  He seemed to get excited about the thought of taking us around as our tour guide and being able to say things to the natives that Dan and I couldn't understand.

He downloaded an app to his iPod and started learning a couple of phrases.  But, I know my boy.  He gets super excited about something and is all in for about a week and then moves on to something else. 

So just to make it interesting and to see if would actually pursue this and stick with it, I told him that if he ever became fluent in Italian we would all go to Italy.  Well, that seemed to do it!  On the way home from school yesterday he asked if we could go to the library to get a book on how to speak Italian.

And whenever a kid asks to go to the library, you go.  Our tiny library had one copy of a small traveler's phrase book so we quickly checked that out. He had a lot of homework last night and didn't get a chance to look at it but he took it to school with him today - probably to read during Spanish class. (He did inform me that since Italian and Spanish are learning Italian will help him with  Spanish class. We'll see about that.)

He seems excited about this, but he gets excited about a lot of things.  I think it would be great if he learned another language and I would like to encourage him in this.  His birthday is coming up and I was contemplating getting him Rosetta Stone.  Although giving a kid Rosetta Stone for his birthday may be the equivilant of a husband giving his wife a vacuum cleaner for their anniversary.

So my question for you, my internet friends, is this:  Have any of you ever used Rosetta Stone?  Have your kids?  Is it worth it? How much time do you need to spend on it?  Is it something that you can learn from in 10-15 minute increments or do you need to sit down with it for an hour a day for it to be worthwhile?  Do you use the homeschool version or the regular version? If you have any information, please share!