Familiarize yourself with the layout of the Rosetta Stone. You will notice the Egyptian hieroglyphs are at the top, the demotic in the middle and the Greek at the bottom.
Translate the Greek into English or another chosen language first. The Greek is the most accessible of the three languages. To translate the hieroglyphs, you will need to understand the Greek text.
Compare the Greek to the hieroglyphs. The three texts relay the same information. This is the hardest stage to learn and the one that took Thomas Young of Britain and Jean-Francois Champollion the longest. Look for and highlight repeated words in the Greek text and for similar patterns in the hieroglyphs.
Find proper names in the stone by highlighting cartouches. A cartouche is a loop that surrounds a number of glyphs. The meaning of the cartouche was found by Thomas Young in 1814. Hieroglyphs represent phonetic sounds like Japanese kana (hiragana and katakana), not symbols or allegories like Chinese and Japanese kanji. Use other cartouches in other texts as a guide to learning the names of people and the phonetic sound of each unit.
Use the repeated words and symbols in the Greek and hieroglyph texts to translate the meanings and structure of the language. This will take quite some time and the incomplete nature of the stone will lead to an incomplete picture of the language. There are several code breaking tricks to use. For example:
1. Look for how a tense change in Greek affects its hieroglyph counterpart's root.
2. Check for plurals.
3. Repeated articles such as "a" or "the."
Use what you have learned to translate hieroglyphs on Egyptian sites, photographs and objects. The stone does not contain all of the glyphs present in Egyptian, so there will be gaps in your knowledge.