Rosetta Stone V3: Arabic, Level 1, 2 & 3

List Price: $499.00 Discount Price: $449.10

Features:

• Rosetta Stone helps you understand everyday language through our proficiency-based listening and reading activities
• You will pronounce words correctly after practicing with our proprietary speech recognition and analysis tools
• In no time you will speak without a script, Rosetta Stone's Contextual Formation™ makes sure you have the confidence and the cues you need to get the words out on the spot
• With Rosetta Stone Milestone activities you quickly gain confidence to engage in real-life conversations in a foreign language.
• Track your progress to reinforce your new foreign language strengths and revisit needs with our Adaptive Recall™ language feature.

Customer Reviews:

a software note [Posted on 2007-12-27]
This product is sold as licensed software. Users will NOT be able to load it onto more than one computer. This aspect of the product is not clear from the blurbing on the Rosetta Stone website. It is a "single-user" product.
Don't think that you can share this with friends, or that it is appropriate for a lending collection.

Rosetta Stone works [Posted on 2008-01-18]
I've been using this for about 2 weeks about half an hour a day. I just finished Unit 1 (out of 4) in Level 1. I can already read more than half of the letters, I know maybe 20 words of vocabulary, and I'm getting the hang of some grammar rules.
Maybe not impressive compared to a full time language learner, but this tool is great for the casual learner who doesn't have hours a day to spend learning a language.

Rosetta Stone [Posted on 2008-02-06]
I've been happy with the product so far. I'm not happy however, that I filled out an application with Amazon for a credit card in order to receive $30 off the product and never received this savings.

Good, but not as good as you would think given the cost [Posted on 2008-03-22]
This course teaches Modern Standard ARabic. Bear in mind that MSA is essentially formal, textbook ARabic, used throughout the Arab world for formal situations, but it differs significantly from the Arabic spoken daily, especially in North Africa. I have been working with the software nearly everyday for 1-2 months, and have completed level 1, and started level 2.

The good: It works. I can read the full alphabet, have a decent understanding of the grammar, and I think my pronunciation is decent. I would guess I have an effective vocabulary of somewhere around 100 words, though the course has covered significantly more than that, I just haven't retained it all.

The bad: The software never gives you a translation. you must decode meaning from pictures. This is part of Rosetta's approach, but for me personally, an online dictionary to tell me what some of the smaller words (but, because, the question words) mean would be helpful and would probably speed my learning. I'd also like explanation of what cases the endings correspond to. I personally suggest picking up a book on Arabic grammar to accompany your study. Also, this software is really only for people who really want to learn the language, not just some survival phrases. IF you just want enough to get you through a few days of travel, just buy a phrasebook.

The ugly: The program appears to me to have memory leaks associated with some of the audio files, which means that the longer you run it, the slower it becomes, and eventually bogs down to a standstill, requiring you to shut the program down and restart. Not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things, but for the money, I'd think Rosetta could have fixed that.

Really Helpful Learning Tool [Posted on 2008-04-20]
Yes, this is really expensive. It comes with a headset/microphone of good quality, installation cd's, stickers of the arabic alphabet to put on your keyboard, and one (yes 1) activation code, which does mean that it can only be loaded onto one computer (you CAN, however, load it onto an external hard-drive and thereby be able to access it from other computers). All 3 levels together will take up about 1800MB (or 1.8GB) of space on your computer, which is pretty good, and once loaded, you don't need the cd's in order to access the program.

I've only been using the program for about two days, it's pretty tough (but also fun and addicting), haha. But I've gone back over the lessons until I've gotten 100% on each area and I'm surprised that I'm able to retain so much and learn so well by their immersion method. Crazy enough, it does work, but it takes practice. This is the type of thing that you're going to have to do every day and to really dedicate yourself to if you want to be any good at it.

Buy this. It's worth it.

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