Rosetta Stone Arabic Level 1 & 2 Personal Edition

Rating:
Summary: Good vocabulary builder and refresher, not for serious study
Review: I am actually reviewing the online version from Rosetta Stone Online, which makes the full Level I and II versions available by subscription.

Each section consists of a series of Listening, Reading/Listening, Speaking, and Reading exercises. The full version of this software consists of 19 units of 10-12 sections each.

In each exercise, you are given a series of activities consisting of a choice of four pictures and/or pieces of text and/or spoken dialogues (depending on which type of activity it is), and you must choose the correct picture/text/dialogue from the cues.

The exercises are very simple, suitable for children or for quick reviews. If you are new to Arabic, or refreshing your skills after a long period of disuse, the repetition will be useful in building your vocabulary (back) up. You are fed bits of grammar incrementally with each new unit. You start with simply identifying various people and objects, and then add a few adjectives, and then add a few verbs so you are recognizing simple sentences such as "The boy drinks some milk" or "The bird flies" or "This car is not red, it is white," etc. Each unit adds more pieces of grammar and more vocabulary, building up to more complex sentences, different verb tenses, and so on.

However, that is as far as it can take you. Diligently practicing all the exercises should expand your vocabulary and give you basic grammatical skills in Arabic. It will not bring you to the point of being able to carry on a meaningful conversation (unless your conversations are confined to describing objects and pointing at various people and animals and stating what they are doing), nor will it enable you to, say, read a newspaper.

For self-study, this software makes a good supplement to more robust texts and tapes. Don't expect it to bring you up to full proficiency. If you want to do more than recognize simple sentences and learn a lot of "everyday vocabulary," Rosetta Stone is insufficient. However, I do recommend it for the crucial repetition and "training your ear" that every language student needs, especially those doing self-study, if you are at a low to moderate proficiency level.

It is important to note that the text is entirely in Arabic script. You must be able to read Arabic before you can practice anything but the listening exercises. (Get a good book on Arabic script and learn it -- it's not that difficult, a serious student should be able to read the script fairly proficiently within a week.) Also, there are no English translations at all. This is not a bad thing -- the way the information is presented, you are expected to pick up the meaning as you go along, and if you practice the exercises seriously, you will. Just be aware that this software is based on the Audio-Lingual method, so you will find no glossaries or explanations of grammar.

Rating:
Summary: Liked it but it needs a lot of patience and head scratching.
Review: I bought the Rosetta Stone Explorer Arabic course and got through it with some difficulty (but it was fun for the most part).

I have lived and worked in Saudi Arabia and have studied the language and writing so I knew a little bit already. I found that several times it was difficult to determine the gender or ages of the people in the pictures. I also found that the small display (at least half the size of my laptop screen made it more difficult to see the pictures especially if the arabic script is on top of it. It would be helpful also if the Arabic script were larger. I would have liked to see a translation of the Arabic words into English as a way to clear up any confusion that does arise often. It would have been ok to rely primarily on the method that Rosetta Stone uses as long as you can look up the words in question. It would have been really super to be able to point and click on the Arabic script or on the specific images in the picture to get a translation.

It takes a lot of concentration to look at the pictures and try to associate the spoken or printed arabic words to just what is meant to be conveyed in the pictures. Often you have to go back and forth between two or more different pictures to see what is common to the Arabic words being spoken/written. The words are written only in Arabic script and unless you know that Arabic is written from right to left and know what the characters represent you can forget about associating the printed word to any meaning.

Finally, despite the relatively high price for the more advanced Level 1 and Level 2 courses I did enjoy the "Explorers" course and will probably buy them anyway. But first, I want to buy the Transparent Language Arabic course which is considerably cheaper. I also bought the Transparent Languages "101 Languages of the World" course which is the inexpensive intoduction to Transparent Languages more expensive and more in depth course which is much cheaper than Rosetta Stone. It also has immediate translations and a lot of other teaching methods that I find very good.

Rating:
Summary: Liked it but it needs a lot of patience and head scratching.
Review: I've been using a number of different language software programs as research for a thesis. I've enjoyed using the Rosetta Stone software to study German, Arabic and Japanese. I have lived in Japan and I had studied Japanese for a number of years before I came across this software. It was my first time studying German and Arabic.

My biggest problem with Rosetta Stone software comes from the complete lack of any explanation of the basics of the target language. The theory here is that you will learn the language as a child does by seeing pictures, hearing the words and making the connection. This idea in practice can be a lot of fun and you should be able to pick up some vocabulary and sentence structures in a very short time (as long as the language uses an English alphabet). However, without a few basic pointers on the writing systems of languages like Japanese and Arabic, good luck figuring anything out. For example, if you did not know that Arabic is written and read from right to left with the letters joined together as in cursive English, you stand little hope of ever being able to break words and phrases down into the 28 Arabic alphabet's characters. It wasn't until I went to another source outside the Rosetta Stone software that I realised my massive error in trying to decipher the most basic script. This could have easily been avoided had the software offered a few pages of explanation, or even just the alphabet itself spelled out with English letter approximate equivalents and an arrow pointing from right to left. And Japanese? The same problem times 3 (the number of written character styles in Japanese) and just as confusing.

Final review then? The Rosetta Stone software by itself can be quite useful as long as you are after listening and speaking skills only AND you don't think you'll ever need to see and read the word as you hear it. However, if you were hoping to learn reading and writing in a target language that uses a writing system other than the English alphabet, be prepared to go hunting for additional resources as a primer before you start banging your head against this Stone. After an hour or so of basic tutorial from an Arabic alphabet website, I got back on track with Rosetta, but I was quite annoyed that I ever had to make that extra journey in the first place. A company should not try to claim that its software is an all encompassing program if it falls so far short of just that from the get go.

Rating:
Summary: Good with other resources, but can't stand on its own
Review: I've been using a number of different language software programs as research for a thesis. I've enjoyed using the Rosetta Stone software to study German, Arabic and Japanese. I have lived in Japan and I had studied Japanese for a number of years before I came across this software. It was my first time studying German and Arabic.

My biggest problem with Rosetta Stone software comes from the complete lack of any explanation of the basics of the target language. The theory here is that you will learn the language as a child does by seeing pictures, hearing the words and making the connection. This idea in practice can be a lot of fun and you should be able to pick up some vocabulary and sentence structures in a very short time (as long as the language uses an English alphabet). However, without a few basic pointers on the writing systems of languages like Japanese and Arabic, good luck figuring anything out. For example, if you did not know that Arabic is written and read from right to left with the letters joined together as in cursive English, you stand little hope of ever being able to break words and phrases down into the 28 Arabic alphabet's characters. It wasn't until I went to another source outside the Rosetta Stone software that I realised my massive error in trying to decipher the most basic script. This could have easily been avoided had the software offered a few pages of explanation, or even just the alphabet itself spelled out with English letter approximate equivalents and an arrow pointing from right to left. And Japanese? The same problem times 3 (the number of written character styles in Japanese) and just as confusing.

Final review then? The Rosetta Stone software by itself can be quite useful as long as you are after listening and speaking skills only AND you don't think you'll ever need to see and read the word as you hear it. However, if you were hoping to learn reading and writing in a target language that uses a writing system other than the English alphabet, be prepared to go hunting for additional resources as a primer before you start banging your head against this Stone. After an hour or so of basic tutorial from an Arabic alphabet website, I got back on track with Rosetta, but I was quite annoyed that I ever had to make that extra journey in the first place. A company should not try to claim that its software is an all encompassing program if it falls so far short of just that from the get go.