4 stars (Good Program - With Limitations) - The Good: Rosetta Stone is a very user-friendly, low-stress program that will teach you a lot of Arabic vocabularly over time. The format is very simple (a good and bad point)- You get four pictures on the screen and either a written or spoken phrase beneath. Match the phrase to the picture and you're on the way. Very good for association and vocabularly drilling, and pretty easy to use, so you can play with it throughout the day without having to devote a lot of time to "studying." Also, you would be surprised at how creative they can get with the "match the picture" format; all kinds of situations you wouldn't think possible.
The Bad: First, the price. This would be a great $70 program, but the $170 tag is really pushing the envelope. Also, although this program is sold everywhere, the company seems to be pretty rigid on the price- always advertised as $195 but offered for some type of discount at $170. On the other hand, there are a lot of lessons in the program and they go pretty far into the language, so unless you are sure you are going to stick with it, this is a big investment to make and then give up after a few weeks.
Next, this program cannot stand alone, especially in Arabic. For one thing, it does not teach Arabic script, you need that before you start (see Awde's book on the Arabic Alphabet as the best choice for that). Second, it does not teach grammar, just word association, and you should be aware that Rosetta Stone uses the exact same lessons for every language, they are not tailored to the pecularities of Arabic. You absolutely need an Arabic textbook to accompany this, or by lesson 4 you will be lost (Smart's Teach Yourself Arabic is the simplest and cheapest). Last, the voices used (unless they've changed them recently) are very strange. Some of the other languages are good, but the Arabic speakers sound like greeters at Disney World. If you've been to the Middle East, you will recognize how silly they sound.
Bottom Line - if the price doesn't bother you and you use it to supplement existing Arabic study, this is a great program for drilling and vocabulary building.
4 stars (Great Program) - I purchased Rosetta Stone Personal Edition Arabic 1 and 2. The first few lessons of the program will get you used to the sound of Arabic and teach you some grammatical constructions and vocabulary.
To get the most out of the program, however, you really need to be able to read the script. You will need a human or a book to teach you this skill. One of the reviewers is correct in recommending "Alif Baa" with CDs to learn the sound and shape of each letter of Arabic script. I receive private Arabic lessons from the Defense Language Institute, and I learned to read the Arabic alphabet with "Alif Baa." We also use the Wehr and Oxford dictionaries.
My Rosetta Stone program is now very useful to me and is helping me develop good sentence structure and learn vocabulary naturally. My instructor is a native speaker and compliments the sentence structure and native accents.
This is truly the Cadillac of Arabic language learning programs but a bit overpriced. Buy it used from E-Bay and Amazon for a big savings. You can also buy it directly from the company during December for a fairer price.
You won't learn much conversational Arabic from Rosetta Stone. Pimsleur's Egyptian Arabic (used widely in movies) or Eastern Arabic learning tapes and CDs will do a great job (without books) at teaching you a dialect for speaking on the street but won't teach you how to converse in Modern Standard Arabic, the formal language used in the Rosetta Stone program, books, newspapers, and television news.
5 stars (The addition of the curriculum text manual is great!) - I bought the Arabic Level 1 edition soon after using the "Explorer" version. To my great relief, Level 1 includes a 200 page text which provides all the written Arabic screen prompts used throughout the program, in two formats no less, modern standard without the short vowels as well as fully-vowelled. This really beats trying to copy down everything by hand for study notes. As the lack of this text was the only shortcoming I found with Explorer, I am now a very happy camper. The other reviewer comments on Level 1 are right on the money as far as I am concerned. |
