FormerRSguy

Yes. There are almost 7 billion people on earth, I can now talk to around 4 billion of them, instead of just the English-speaking ones.

EDIT: Your mileage may vary.

It's ok bro. It's ok.

On the small scale, my superiors were inept, mean-spirited, and uninterested in language. An area manager once showed up drunk, threatened me (playfully) with a blunt object, called me a few racial epithets, and threatened to fire me if the security camera was filming [them]. They made fun of Russian in front of an interested customer and scared of the customer. They tried to micromanage and play employees off one another. It was ugly.

On the larger scale, they insist that stores open an hour before the place they are in opens (wut?), and seem to have spent the last 5 years trying to figure out how to pay their employees the minimum possible. Over the course of the years I worked there, I basically took an enormous paycut. When I quit, I realized that after they went public, their changes to the commission and hourly pay made it so I had effectively taken a $15,000 a year pay cut from when I started. They hire some idiots (it's inevitable in retail), and then treat all their employees like idiots. The customers, it being retail, could sometimes be depressing...everyone has retail horror stories...but the company was worse than any customer ever was.

I have a pet theory about their former corporate big-wigs, some of whom are currently being investigated by the SEC, intentionally trying to run the company into the ground.

I don't want to give away too much personal information, and I have invited a few friends and former colleagues to weigh in, so among us we speak:

French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Mandarin, Russian, Dutch, Persian, Portuguese, and Turkish.

Personally, I love French and Arabic for the phonology. I love the grammar of Arabic. Above all, those of us who speak Chinese love the logic of it, as well as the elegance of it.

On average, how long does it take to learn a language if practiced for at least a half hour a day?

If that practice is smart and effective, the average for all of my friends (RS and non-RS using alike) is 3-6 months for a good foundation. Meaning: you can carry on a conversation entirely in your target language. Another year or two or more to get really articulate and comfortable. For an anglophone, it should be completely doable to take the C2 exam in a European language. Arabic will take longer than that for a foundation, in part just because of a dearth of good English language resources. Chinese, if you ignore exoticizing and orientalist statements about it, should take 3-6 for a good foundation, just like anything else.

are you planning on learning more?

I'm kind of cooling it for a while. I want to work on and perfect things I've already started. But then there are some days that I just want to speak everything, and get pulled by Cantonese, or Tibetan, or Yiddish, or Xhosa.

Why are you no longer with the company?

Moved on to bigger and better things.

were they jerks?

You have no idea.

I've never used it, but I'll check it out.

RS doesn't really think of anyone as a threat, as far as I can tell. Their main competition, as they see it, is universities, and they're trying to neutralize that by partnering with some.