Customer Reviews

Behind the Wheel Arabic (8 One Hour Multi-Track CDs)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I received Behnd the Wheel Arabic for Christmas. We live in a small university town and have a variety of 'ethnic' neighbors, among them Chinese and Arabic speaking.

The native speaker's (Muhammad) voice is stunningly clear and his accent is easy to copy. The easy going learning style on the CDs and the rapid and dynamic 'sentence building' techniques are far beyond anything I have ever heard in other language courses, and I have heard quite a few.

My neighbor Adiso is so confident in my newly acquired Arabic that he says that I can now go to the Middle East and get along fine with what I know after 5 or so weeks.

I was so impressed with the speed with which I was able to speak complete sentences in Arabic after just a few days with Behind the Wheel Arabic, that I ran down to my local bookstore and bought Behind the Wheel Chinese as well.

This course is an unbelieveably good bargain because it works where all else fails.

Pro:
The Arabic speaker is very clear and easily reproduced.

Con:
No matter how easily introduced, everything can not be accurately reproduced.

This starts out with a 10 minute intro of just vocabulary and then jumps right into it. The problem is that there is no booklet included of what's being said. So it is difficult to know if you are saying the word right. So if you are a beginner, I would not recommend it because you will have a hard time differentiating between hamzas, qaafs, vocal and non-vocal words. Arabic is an interesting languages because you must where a word is pronounced in the mouth or throat. Although we have vocal and non-vocal sounds in English, most people don't know this.

There are also no conversations. The english speaker just says an english word or phrase and the Arab speaker just repeats it in Arabic. This is the entire cd. You have to hear a rhythmn and have natural responses. Such as in English Thank You should be followed Your Welcome. You don't want to have to think of "Your Welcome" after someone says thank you to you. You've already lost your opportunity. The way you obtain this rhythmn is by hearing Thank You and then hearing Your Welcome after it. This comes from instant language reflexes, sort of like when your touch something hot, you instantly yank your arm away. It needs to be like this in your foreign language.

The pros of this is that there is a dynamic progression of language building. You use newly acquired words and form new sentences throughout the course.

I would only recommend this course to those who know Arabic well and need to improve and want to improve the way the speed in which they form sentences. Since the english speaker ALWAYS says what is about to be spoken in english and the arab person translates it. But then this will require you to stop and start the cd. So not really conducive to driving.

I would also recommend this to those who don't really care about the most accurate pronunciation and just need to converse with someone on a visit.

I used these cds by looking up every word in the dictionary and repetition of the same tracks over and over. As a beginner who has learned the alphabet and a good amount of vocabulary, If I had the chance again, I would not buy this course and use another. However, I can understand the usefulness of this cd set if you have studied Arabic for some time.

Verdict: Not for beginner's unless you use multiple supplementary materials. Intermediate users could practice sentence formation and Advanced users will find no use for this.

Behind the Wheel Arabic is very similar to the Pimsleur courses. The format is all audio, with every word translated, making this ideal for brushing up on your Arabic while jogging or commuting.

But unlike Pimsleur, Behind the Wheel Arabic is accessible for almost every budget. These CDs are a great bargain, at least when compared to Pimsleur.

This course won't teach you Arabic by itself. It is most effective when used in combination with other materials. This course is a great "reinforcer" of material that you learn from courses that have a book *and* audio component. These CDs are also quite useful for vocabulary acquisition.

The recordings are clear and a native speaker pronounces all the Arabic words. Many words are repeated in variable sentences/usage examples, increasing your retention.

Language Dynamics has less visibility in the marketplace than Penton Overseas or Pimsleur, so I gambled a bit in buying this. However, I am happy to report that the money for this program was well spent.

This is a good product that gives non arabic speakers a good introduction to spoken arabic. I would recommend to those who are willing to dedicate at least 30 minutes a day listening to the lessons to learn arabic. It has helped me understand spoken arabic alot better when I am around arabic speakers.

I'm only writing this review to try to nullify the libel of the reviewer "New Student." I have no idea how good this course is, because I haven't tried it. But when I saw New Student's inept one-star review saying, in essence "I would never buy this because it doesn't come with a booklet, therefore it is a one-star product," I had to act.

To the reviewer "New Student": having no experience with the product, you cannot give it one star. You went from your belief that "audio-only (no transcript/booklet) courses cannot be effective for learning language" to concluding that Behind the Wheel Arabic is a one-star product. Not only is that an embarassing fallacy on your part, but it is based on a scientifically disproven hypothesis, namely, that audio-only courses cannot be effective. On the contrary, it is an incontrovertible scientific fact that many people can learn language efficiently from audio-only methods. Pimsleur, which is excellent, is the industry standard in audio courses, and while they do have "booklets," their booklets are virtually useless (they are just lists of words, without transliteration, from which you may, at best, learn what sounds the letters make in some situations), and will certainly not help you understand the language on the CDs; it is the audio content that is so valuable, the booklets are negligible. So for you, New Student, to be consistent, you should probably go give one-star ratings to every Pimsleur product. I've used Pimsleur French, Russian, German, Italian, and Mandarin, as well as Behind the Wheel French 1 and 2, and I never used booklets, but I still learned quickly and found them very effective.

So, in conclusion: ignore both New Student's rating and my rating, and listen to the reviewers who own, have used, or have some knowledge of the product.

Thank you R. Morris. I almost bought this product assuming it had and accompanying booklet in at least transliteration, but preferably script and transliteration. A language product without either?! Ridiculous! Thank you for letting me know before I wasted my money!