Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

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 Even the vocabulary is outdated.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!