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|  | |  | | | Rosetta Stone V3: Arabic Level 1-3 Set with Audio Companion [OLD VERSION] | | | | | | | |
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| | Features | Rosetta Stone teaches you a new language naturally, by getting you to think, live and breathe the languageInnovative solutions get you speaking new words, right from the startRosetta Stone moves forward only when you're ready--you drive the pace, you set the scheduleWith Rosetta Stone, you'll discover a foundation of key vocabulary that you'll use to build into a whole new languageAudio Companion lets you take the Rosetta Stone experience anywhere: in the car, at the gym, or on-the-go
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| | Description | Foreign language learning with Rosetta Stone Arabic Levels 1, 2&3 you connect with the world around you. With level one you begin learning fundamental vocabulary and essential language structure, from greetings and introductions to simple questions and their answers. Gain the confidence and enter the intermediate level where you will be able to talk about your environment; give and get directions, tell time, dine out with self-reliance, shop and enjoy basic social interactions. Taking what you’ve learned in Levels 1 and 2, we help you reach an advanced level of competence. This competence allows you to connect with the world around you. You will learn to share your ideas and opinions, express your feelings and talk about everyday life; your work, current events and much more. Now Rosetta Stone with Audio Companion allows the learner to take Rosetta Stone anywhere: in the car, the gym or on-the-go! What is Audio Companion? Audio Companion CDs are activities that correspond to the Rosetta Stone CD-ROM software lessons. The learner can listen to Audio Companion and practice what they’ve been learning on the computer, turning travel time into productive language learning time. Audio Companion lets the student access the power of Rosetta Stone lessons whenever and wherever they want, they can play the CD’s on a stereo, or download them to a MP3 player. It empowers the student and helps reinforce the lessons in any busy lifestyle! | |
| | Product Details | | Package Length: | 7.7 inches | | Package Width: | 6.5 inches | | Package Height: | 3.1 inches | | Package Weight: | 1.85 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 20 reviews |
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| | System Requirements | | Platform: | Windows Vista / Windows 2000 / Windows XP / Mac OS X | | Media: | CD-ROM | | Item Quantity: | 1 |
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| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review: ( 20 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
80 of 81 found the following review helpful:
 Please, please know what you're buying Jun 03, 2010
By Sean
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!
28 of 30 found the following review helpful:
 People need to be open minded. Try it. It works! Apr 04, 2009
By TM
"Y"
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!
20 of 21 found the following review helpful:
 Amazing learning tool, but supplement with other aids Apr 04, 2009
By S. Moore
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.
20 of 24 found the following review helpful:
Not what I expected Aug 20, 2009
By Ayla M. Amon
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.
6 of 6 found the following review helpful:
 Get Pimsleur's Eastern Arabic Aug 03, 2010
By Rafael Sanchez
"infamousgringo"
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.
See all 20 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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