Customer Reviews

Rosetta Stone V2: Farsi Level 1 [OLD VERSION]

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Great value, wonderful experience. My first exposure to Rosetta stone and I'm very impressed. Worked extremely well for me in all respects, it is thoroughly intuitive and easy to use, self-paced. Non-Arabic speakers should take a couple of days to master the alphabet first. I used it on a trip with great effect. But the library visual images are often quite inappropriate to the culture of Iran (e.g. swimming costumes)!
Just one complaint. At this price, Rosetta Stone really should find a way to allow users to make a legitimate backup, or at least rapid replacement for damaged CDs. The language CD is used intensively and often in travel conditions, and I am extremely nervous with only the original. If the CD becomes unusable, and can't be replaced free, I wont use Rosetta Stone ever again.

Despite all of Rosetta Stone's claims that it's the fastest way to learn a language, I don't think this program is the way to learn a language. This is the only Rosetta Stone program I've tried, and I've worked four of the seven lessons (unless memory fails), and I don't think I've learned very much at all.

The thing about Rosetta Stone is that it doesn't teach grammar, you simply learn to associate words with pictures. Many times now I've seen the picture for children jumping into a swimming pool or off a table and, while I always get that right in the exercises, I don't remember the sentence without some prompting. And face it, that's very limited knowledge. Rosetta Stone may help to strengthen vocabulary skills and even comprehension, but it isn't a good course for learning a language. Use this course in combination with a program which teaches grammar -- explaining what all those little Farsi particles actually do -- and which explains the writing system (this one does not), a program like Teach Yourself, but don't expect excellent results from Rosetta Stone alone.

I bought the Rosetta Stone to learn Farsi and didn't find it useful. Before buying this I used the Pimsleur CDs which were very helpful for conversational Farsi. It even helped me aquire the accent. The Rosetta Stone makes you guess at everything. It will show you pictures and then say the word in Farsi and you're supposed to guess which picture it talks about. The frustrating part is that there could be several things in the picture, example: ball, boy, tree--and it doesn't tell you which one is the actual word that you heard. I've taken private lessons and now have a great foundation to try this again. I find it a huge waste of time and money though.