Customer Reviews

Rosetta Stone V3: Arabic Level 1-3 Set with Audio Companion [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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 Even the vocabulary is outdated.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 Egyptians) 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 thing 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 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.

Come on guys. No tech support? Confusing manuals? Review the software and whether you learned. This is awesome language learning software and if you are patient for the first thirty minutes of the first core lesson and trudge through, the next lessons completely help you understand every facet of the language. I guarantee you will learn something after your first 40 minutes. Ten minutes after my first core lesson, I learned several verbs and other vocab. Then every short lesson after that just enhanced the other areas of language learning. This software is well worth the money!

I really love the Rosetta Stone Arabic program and I do disagree with some of the other reviews here. Arabic is a hard language to learn and Rosetta Stone Arabic is an excellent resource for hearing Formal Arabic outside of the classroom. I have been learning Arabic and using a dialect for day yo day life for a bit under a year now and I find Rosetta Stone gives useful vocabulary, insights on grammar and a great amount of interaction with the language.
That said, don't think that spending any amount of time with the software will teach you this complex language-- people who don't know a dialect will want to pick up something like Pimsleur or Michel Thomas or a simple phrase book with an audio cd so that you can get around for simple things and just have one or two things you can actually say. Buy a script book like Teach Yourself Arabic Script or Alif Baa, because Rosetta Stone uses only Arabic script and does a fairly spotty job of "teaching" the script. Finally, and most importantly, buy a book that will teach you how to make grammatical constructions! I've been working through Brustad's Al-Kitaab and the process is slow, frustrating and all of that, but using Rosetta Stone is an excellent component to a much larger language learning curriculum.

I've taken numerous language classes at various levels (middle school, high school, college), and have taken classes is 4 different languages, so I consider myself someone who knows HOW to learn a language. I needed to learn Arabic, so I decided to give Rosetta Stone a try, and I was actually quite disappointed. Not only do they not teach you the alphabet (do this on your own before starting lessons), but they also neglect to display clear pictures to illustrate the word you're learning (e.g. there was a photo of a duck, and a word to go with it, and I wasn't sure if the word meant "duck" or "animal." Only later did I learn the meaning of the word.) Grammatical points are also not always clear, and I often felt that while I could use the words I had learned while operating the Rosetta Stone program, I was not able to remember words, phrases, or meanings when I was not using the software. I would very highly suggest purchasing a grammar book (such as Alif Baa and Al-Kitaab) as well as a dictionary if you're serious about learning this language. I don't think Rosetta Stone is nearly enough to produce the results it claims, though it is a good place to start learning words.

While deployed in Iraq, I began using Rosetta Stone v.2, which is closer to MSA. V3 is Classical or Quranic. To make a comparison, if you were to talk to any native Arabic speaker in Arabic using Rosetta Stone [period] it would be like speaking to them with Shakespearean or old English Bible English. Moreover, unless they are educated in this form of Arabic they may only slightly understand you (which was in my case with the "what the hell are you saying look.")

So then I moved on to the Teach Yourself Arabic series and Michel Thomas Methods, which was extremely useful as I was able to communicate with Arabs, but not necessarily understand them due to different verbs and vocabulary usage.

Then came Pimsleur's Eastern Arabic: I have a collection of Arabic study guides, textbooks, etc. You name it I probably have it. By this time I already had a functional knowledge of Arabic grammar, but my comprehension and conversational abilities was not up to par at all. After completing the Pimsleur's Level 1 (I am now a third of the way through level 2), I was able to hold fairly lengthy conversations in Arabic with native speakers from Iraq, Jordan, and Yemen mainly and while talking about a variety of everyday activities.

From all the materials that I have, I would recommend this approach: Easy Arabic Grammar, Read and Speak Arabic for Beginners, Teach Yourself Arabic, Teach Yourself Conversation, Michel Thomas Beginner, Advanced and Vocabulary Courses, and Pimsleur's Eastern Arabic Level 1-3 and Pimsleurs Egyptian Arabic. You can purchase all the previously mentioned materials for the same price as the Rosetta Stone (on Pimsleur Marketplace you can purchase the levels for $114 to $159 and return it for a $100 refund).

Other supplementary software that is worth mentioning, affordable, and still better than Rosetta Stone are: Tell Me More [Arabic] (~$350ish), Transparent Language Complete edition ($179), Alif Baa Kitaab, Linguaphone ($300 to $500 depending on if there is a sale from[...]), Living Language Ultimate, and Berlitz Guranteed.

I hope this review was somewhat useful.

This may not be the exact program I have access to through an employer's license, but it covers Rosetta's lessons 1-3. I learn how to say and recognize words for things like 'apple,' 'swimming,' 'eating,' 'bicycle,' and other such words, but there isn't anything about how to say 'My name is...' or 'Do you speak English?' or 'Help me.' This is NOT a good program to start learning Arabic. I'm exceptionally disappointed in this program. I need to learn Arabic because I work with Arabic-speaking children with little or no English skills, and Rosetta Stone is at the bottom of my list with regard to helpful tools.

Rosetta's voice recognition is questionable. I've tripped over pronunciation many times, ended a phrase with "blah blah blah" (literally), and the program accepted it. Arabic is a difficult language with many sounds either uncommon to- or not part of- the English language, and the breakneck pace of this program does not allow for absorption.

I have numerous language programs, both audio-only and CD-rom, and Rosetta does not impress me. If you want to learn basic communication skills, try Pimsleur Conversational Arabic. I have several Pimsleur language programs (purchased on Amazon), and they are much better at teaching simple introductory communications skills - something far more important to me in order to begin breaking the ice. "My name is..." or "I don't understand" is far more valuable to me than "Those men are swimming" or "That bicycle is green." I need to be able to start talking, not randomly throwing out phrases.

If you're looking to start with the basics, save your money and drop $40 (or so) into Pimsleur's audio programs. They are - with my real world experience - far better than Rosetta. Thanks for reading.

I am a student in her second year of Arabic study at university and since I find the Arabic textbook frustrating and difficult to use I've been looking for other methods to help improve my abilities in the language, but especially with speaking and listening, since we do little of this in the classroom. I also wanted a better method for learning vocabulary. Rosetta Stone isn't it. As a former language teacher I have to say the biggest fault of the program is that it's just plain boring. There is no reason for this. Vocabulary needs to be taught in a context and one of the best ways to do this is with some kind of story. What Rosetta Stone offers instead is what I like to call vocabulary grinding. It's dull, it's repetitive, and it will get you somewhere if you can stay awake through the process. But it's not fun. Conversational phrases are completely absent. It's also very hard to find specific units if you want to review something. There is a vast amount of information and with no search or index tool if you decide one day you want to review color vocabulary (for instance) you'll have to remember exactly what unit it was in to be able to find it with any speed. You'll also have to know enough Arabic to be able to read the unit titles. I definitely do not recommend this program for anyone who can't read Arabic already. There is no tool to assist the learner in learning the alphabet, which would have been easy enough to include. I have learned some from using this dull, repetitive program. But I really wish Pimsleur offered a Modern Standard Arabic course. I know it isn't the way people speak Arabic in reality. Unfortunately it is the way we're required to speak in class. Pimsleur's method is excellent, but unfortunately many colloquial expressions are far different than their MSA equivalents, so for those of us required to speak fus-ha (MSA) it can be a little confusing. Rosetta Stone is highly overpriced as well, especially considering their cookie-cutter approach to languages. I am a graduate student in linguistics and the pedagogy of this program is just poor. Anyone with basic linguistics training knows that when aquiring a second language the skill sets used are different than when aquiring a first language, especially for adult learners who have knowledge of grammar. Rosetta Stone does not make use of this and tries to treat second language acquisition as if it were no different than first language acquisition. Save your money. Pimsleur may not be ideal for a student studying Arabic in the university classroom, but I have aquired far more vocabulary with those cds than with the Rosetta Stone program, not to mention enjoyed the learning experience a great deal more than I did with Rosetta Stone. If you're not in a university classroom and want to use Arabic to actually talk with people, find out what dialect you need and get the Pimsleur program.

As a linguist, I have learned various languages in a classroom setting, and studied a lot of books. Rosetta stone is a lot more fun that studying a language the traditional way. I found myself wanting to keep going and going, and I would only quit when it was time for me to go somewhere and do something else. That's a lot different from my past experiences with language study. I would recommend Rosetta Stone who wants to learn another language.

Very nicely packaged. Simple to set up. Overall presentation of the software is outstanding. Does require a fair amount of harddrive space but overall so far, it's awesome. Outstanding. The program is intiutive and easy to use. I didn't read any instructions, I just jumped in. After my first night of using it, I woke up the next morning with Arabic words in my head. Words that associate with images and things rather than as "x" = "american word" It feels like learning a language the way babies do. very cool.

As background, I am currently a full time language student studying Modern Standard Arabic. The program was very easy to install but it has semi-regular malfunctions when I try to run it (twice in the last month an error message has appeared after it aborted start-up, indicating that the database was out of date and could not be updated). My primary use for the program is to have additional exposure to native speakers asking questions and giving instructions in Arabic. The voice on the program is clear and the speakers do not go too fast. The instruction booklet is accurate in pointing out that the program itself is not enough for learning the language. You need additional material such as a book on grammar and/or an instructor. As advertised, the program is like a mini-immersion class, in that it has the student parrot what the recorded voice says or has the student match or select pictures based on a question asked by the voice. It does not explain the grammar rules or translate the words that the student is repeating. Having worked with this program at school, I knew this going in, and therefore do not view it as a negative. However, students who are considering buying this program should be aware of this facet of the program. The only major drawback that I have encountered (keeping in mind that I am still working my way through level 1) is that the program uses case endings for all nouns (nominative, genitive, and accusative). From the native speakers I study under and my co-workers who have learned the language and lived in the Middle East, I have learned that no one uses these suffixes in either spoken or written Arabic. I am learning Modern Standard Arabic, which I understand is itself seen as very formal, however the case endings make the language overly formal (possibly even archaic) and possibly confusing for native speakers without extended exposure to advanced, formal Arabic grammar. I have looked through the instruction booklet and cannot find a way to turn this off. That aside, the program does give the student good exposure to the sounds of native speakers using the language and reinforces vocabulary through constant repetition.