Customer Reviews

Rosetta Stone V3: Arabic Level 1 with Audio Companion [OLD VERSION]

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

 

 

Please read this before investing in this product.

I've studied Arabic for 3 years. I started my Arabic studies with a brief stint using Rosetta Stone, and I'm afraid that the glowing reviews on Amazon are clearly written by people who haven't spent any time in an Arabic-speaking country. The Arabic taught in Rosetta Stone is Al-FusHa, which roughly means "Elegant Arabic". That may sound like a pleasant way to start your studies, but if you wish to actually speak with Arabs, I strongly recommend that you refrain from investing in this product. Let's say you manage to finish the full three-level course. If you were to try and engage someone in conversation on the streets of Cairo or Dubai, you would sound something like this:

O Sir! Hast thou the hour?
(Translation: What time is it?)

Here's the kicker: they will barely, if at all, understand you. If they do understand, they giggle hysterically.

Here's the double kicker: You won't understand anyone. At all.

The problem is that learning a language requires active use of acquired knowledge by speaking, and the Arabic taught in Rosetta Stone is not spoken ANYWHERE in the Arab world except in prepared news reports by Al-Jazeera. It is a contrived spoken form that is based on the writing system. Rosetta Stone incorporates all the "case endings" which essentially are vowels at the end of each word that denote whether it is the subject, indirect object, direct object, adverb, etc. Case endings are archaic and very rarely spoken. You will spend months un-learning the case endings. Even the vocabulary is outdated. If you want to read the Qur'an, then by all means go for it. However, if communicating with Arabs, rather than translating old texts, is your goal, you should go down the other routes available:

1.) When starting from scratch, you can't do better than the book w/ DVD's Alif-Baa, which teaches the alphabet, basic vocabulary, and verbs.

2.) Pimsleur has good audio courses for Egyptian and Eastern Arabic. Michel Thomas Method Arabic is absolutely excellent but focuses exclusively on Egyptian Arabic (which is the most widely understood dialect), and doesn't teach the writing system.

3.) Google "GLOSS" by the Defense Language Institute. It's totally free and has more Arabic material by dialect than any resource I've found yet. However, it assumes that the learner is at a lower-intermediate level of study.

4.) Sign up for a free account at [...] (by Rosetta Stone) or [...], where you can find Arabs who will be happy to help you if you just help them with their English a little (75% of the users will speak English almost fluently). Plus, they can help answer some of the pesky questions you will come across. Talking via skype is one of the best ways to learn the language without a visa, and it's free.

5.) Al-kitaab fii ta'allum al-'Arabiyya is the best series for learning enough Arabic so that you can effectively communicate with most Arab people. They focus on Formal Spoken Arabic and they have plenty of good information on how the spoken dialects (especially Egyptian) differ from what they're teaching you. It's a classroom textbook, so you MUST buy the Answer Key that is also available on Amazon. Otherwise, you won't know if you're right or wrong about anything.

6.) Buy the Hans Wehr Arabic-English dictionary. There is no getting around this.

7.) Check out the free podcasts on iTunes for Arabic Students. They're pretty good, especially for learning how to phrase things more naturally and understanding flow-of-speech discourse.

And finally, the best advice ANYONE can give you about learning Arabic... drum-roll, please...

8.) If you are intent on learning Arabic, the best approach is some combination of the above recommendations that suits your specific goals. Arabic has a vast vocabulary and has some grammatical conventions according to region, so think about how you want to use it. Any combination of the resources listed above will get you further along than RS Arabic at about half the cost or less. In my experience, the reward of learning a new language is the ability to communicate with new people, which no amount of RS Arabic will enable you to do.

Lastly, don't shell out about a thousand dollars based on the review of a 19 year old kid who is getting a minor in Arabic. He's going to realize sooner or later that when it comes to communication, the Arabic taught in Rosetta Stone is to Spoken Arabic as a Shakespearean Comedy is to 30 Rock: One is something that is taught in classrooms as funny, whereas the other is something that actually is.

Good Luck!

I normally don't bother reviewing the products I use, but I felt that the only other review on this item was overly harsh and a poor reflection of the quality of the product. This was my first Rosetta Stone product, and I haven't even had it a full week, but I am excited with what I've learned so far, and eager to learn more.

At first, the lesson was somewhat frustrating since it throws you into a completely new language with an unfamiliar alphabet. The first time through unit 1, lesson 1, part 1, I mostly guessed and felt somewhat overwhelmed. I figured that if the entire program was set up with each lesson being just as hard, I wouldn't learn anything. But I was wrong. I went through the first part of the first lesson twice, picking up some patterns the second time through. Then I moved on to the second part and discovered that the following parts in the lesson better explain the first part, and help with pronunciation and character recognition.

Since then I have worked through the sections diligently. Yes, it can be frustrating at times. The native speakers don't all have the same dialect, so pronunciation of words sometimes varies. Also, it seems that sometimes I can't seem to say a word right, though I feel like I am. While irritating, I've found that if I take a break and come back to it, I can usually get by ok. And then I'll go back and do it the next day. While no where close to any sort of fluency, or really much of an ability to hold a conversation, I can see that if I continue to work through it I will be able to in a relatively short period of time.

As far as the price goes, certainly it is pricey, but I think it is a worthwhile investment for anyone who truly wants to learn a new language. Sure, over $200 is steep, but consider the cost and hassle of taking a new language as a class or through a private tutor. Short of someone you know, you'd probably spend well over $200, and for a class, you would have to schedule around a time to take the class, whereas with RS, you get the convenience to go at your own pace in your own free time.

In the end, I think Rosetta Stone is very much worth the investment, and I expect I will use it to learn the other languages that interest me, as well as all levels of Arabic.

I took a chance on this software because I had read the bad reviews on amazon. I needed to learn Arabic for my minor and I wanted a head start. Take it from an 19 year old guy who hates learning languages: This software works! I just have level 1 right now, and after only one core lesson and it's follow up lessons (roughly an hours time) I can now identify several verbs, their female/male counterparts, nouns, individual letters, and a lot more to come. This makes learning a language seem obsolete. With Rosetta Stone, you understand the language. You don't need to memorize anything because you begin to associate words, sounds, and letters together with pictures and native speakers to reach a level of comprehension that seems impossible through normal studying. I hate learning languages and this was actually fun. It allows you to work at your own pace and do things as many times as you want until you get it right. Language teachers probably can't learn it because they are too busy with their own methods to be open minded to this software. If you want to learn Arabic, or any other language for that matter, GET ROSETTA STONE! It's made a believer out of a cynic.

I bought this for my husband who is going to Iraq for a year. It's been a very long time since he was in school, so learning a new language was somewhat intimidating. He's learning from and thoroughly enjoying the Rosetta Stone, Arabic.

While I think that this program might be good for someone with some knowledge of Arabic, for someone like me with absolutely no knowledge of the language, it is much too difficult and frustrating. However, I plan to learn some basic vocabulary and then to go back to try to see if the immersion program works better for me.