Customer Reviews

EuroTalk Interactive - Talk Now! Learn Armenian

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I was imagining a software that would have a veritable dictionary of phrases, with some kind of orderly lesson plan for how to proceed from one set of vocabulary to the next, a progression that lets you learn Armenian.

The product description states: "Extensive basic vocabulary, from first words, food, colors, phrases, parts of the body and numbers, to telling time, shopping and countries." The "from ... to ..." suggests that there are other categories as well. This is not so. The vocabulary mentioned: first words, food, colors, phrases, body parts, numbers, time, shopping,countries, include essentially ALL the vocabulary available in this product.

The mini games and speakers (they have both a man and woman native speaker giving words) do a reasonable job. The games especially help you learn the vocabulary. There are several things about this software, however, that made it essentially useless for me.

1) Western/Eastern Armenian.
I bought the software because my fiance is Armenian and I wanted to be able to converse with her family, who speaks in the Western Armenian dialect. This software seems to be an inconsistent mix of Western and/or Eastern without distinguishing between the two. (For example, the word "five" -- "hing" as is taught in the software, is actually pronounced "hink" in Western Armenian.) My fiance also found a considerable number of mis-pronunciations and mis-spellings, even beyond the Eastern/Western mixing.

2) I wanted to learn to speak Armenian in a more day-to-day setting. This software is clearly heavily geared towards travel, however. Out of the "basic phrases," things you should think would be very commonly used phrases, there were phrases like "where is my passport?" "where are my suitcases?" etc.

3) There is absolutely no explanation of sentence structure / verb tenses /etc. I realize this is beginner's software, and grammar can get complicated, but just picking up an Armenian dictionary (in paper form, not computer software), the very first sections explained that, for example, adjectives preceed verbs (unlike English) (example: a literal translation from Armenian would have you say "American I am" instead of "I am American." Knowing grammar structure like this right off the bat helps a LOT in learning the language, because it makes it possible to learn the patterns of speech more easily.

The concept, having native speakers quiz you with mini-games, etc. would work well. But in this case, the Western/Eastern inconsistencies, and lack of relevant vocabulary (unless you're learning in order to travel)
made this software mostly worthless to me.