I have very little experience with Rosetta Stone – I did a short trial around 15 years ago, but at that stage, they only offered trials in languages I had already studied. Hence, I could judge the interface, but not how much the software would actually teach me.
Since they were offering a 3-day trial in any of their languages, I signed up for Arabic to get a better idea of Rosetta Stone’s capabilities. I have studied the Arabic alphabet in the past, can currently remember some of the letters and guess others. I have attended a 1-hour in-person trial lesson in Arabic, and begun an Arabic vocab course on Memrise; neither within the last five years. Although I’m therefore not completely new to Arabic, I’m starting from a very basic level.
What does Rosetta Stone cost?
Rosetta Stone, like many businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, is currently having a sale. When I started this post, on their main website you could get lifetime access to all 24 languages they offer for £299, although this increased to £349 within one week.
There was even cheaper lifetime access at $199 through an external Social distancing lifetime bundle.
Rosetta Stone are also offering 3 months’ free access for schoolchildren during the COVID-19 pandemic.
What does the Rosetta Stone Arabic 3-day trial cover?
When you sign up for a trial, Rosetta Stone lets you pick a level; I can’t remember the terms, but had the impression it was A0, A1/A2 and B1 of the CEFR.
After picking your level, you can choose one of four goals: travel, family, work or basics and beyond. The first three seem aimed at teaching relevant phrases and vocabulary, whereas the fourth has a more foundational grammar approach.
I selected the first skill level and the Basics and beyond programme. From these, Rosetta Stone created a 6-week programme, requiring 30 days of study for 5 days a week.
The 3-day period covers 72 hours rather than 3 calendar days, so for me this spanned 4 days (evening on Day 1 and morning on Day 4).
What is included in Rosetta Stone Arabic Unit 1?
What kind of Arabic does Rosetta Stone teach?
The course teaches Modern Standard Arabic; bear this in mind if you need the Arabic for a specific country.
During the trial, I was able to cover all 5 lessons in Unit 1.
Lesson 1
Lesson 1 gave a grounding in basic vocabulary, similar to what you’d expect from a typical Duolingo course: boy, girl, man, woman and their plurals. Eat, drink, read, write, run, swim conjugated for 3rd person singular and plural. I also learned that Arabic has a separate plural and conjugation for two people.
The course did not teach the Arabic alphabet, it went straight into showing Arabic text, which might be a concern for any languages with different alphabets.
The lesson focused on sets of 4 images, usually with a written Arabic description and with Arabic audio. The written instructions in English require learners to either repeat the spoken Arabic, listen and/or read the phrase and match it to a picture, and in a couple of the end lessons, produce the spoken Arabic for a specific picture.
The pictures were never described in English but were usually clear enough for me to guess what different meanings they were trying to show. However, for a native English speaker with a limited level of English grammar knowledge and no prior experience of language study, it might be difficult: particularly the dual concept. That only made sense to me as I’d previously heard about it existing in Slovenian.
Lesson 2
Lesson 2 was split into three sections with an indicator of timing (vocab 5 mins, grammar 10 mins, pronunciation 10 mins). This was an improvement from the long session in Lesson 1, and also made it easier to fit lessons into small pockets of time.
The vocab session was a review of the nouns from Lesson 1 and some of the phrases. The grammar session concentrated on contrasting verb conjugations e.g. 4 images of people swimming, which helped to start identifying the differences in verb use. The pronunciation session showed some of the phrases already learned and then broke down the pronunciation of one word from the phrase into syllables.
Lesson 3
Lesson 3 was described as a 30-minute core session, meaning another stream of picture and vocab matching as for Lesson 1.
As well as refreshing the previous vocabulary (man/woman/boy/girl/eat/drink), new food vocabulary was presented (bread/egg/apple/rice/sandwich/milk/water/coffee) as well as “and”.
More new vocabulary followed in a less logical sequence: dog/cat/horse, then car/newspaper/bike, plus drive/walk. A bit of practice, then on to book/fish/pen/sleep and “to have”. A bit more practice, then child/children/adult/adults.
The numbering system of the lessons is a bit confusing. The daily sessions don’t correspond to a lesson number, so both lessons described above (and officially Day 2 and Day 3 sessions in the plan) were officially numbered Lesson 2.
Lesson 4
Following the previous core lesson, the structure of vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation sections was used. With the quantity of new vocabulary introduced before, the grammar lesson seemed not detailed enough to cover everything.
I learned a bit more about the scoring system. For all previous lessons, I had received a score of above 90% with a message “Try for 100%” (a bit demotivating that anything below 100% doesn’t merit praise). For the grammar lesson this time around, I got 85% with the advice “Try again”. You need 90% to pass a lesson.
I didn’t get through the whole lesson on the same day, but stalled halfway through the pronunciation, as there was an error with the speech recognition that left me shouting the same word repeatedly but being unable to move on.
The following morning, I was able to finish the pronunciation lesson, then I had to redo the grammar lesson before being able to move on. Fortunately, it gave me an option to continue my progress, after which it just made me repeat a few of the exercises rather than the whole 10-minute session.
Lesson 5
Another 30-minute core session, this time on colours and sizes.
New vocabulary presented was:
white/black/red/blue/green/yellow/ball/big/small/I am/ I am not/ we are/you are (plus some incidentals you didn’t need to understand to complete the lesson: sun/moon/sky/grass/flower/various jobs)
Some grammatical points came up. Adjectives change for singular/dual/plural. Or maybe singular and plural are the same but dual is different. There are definitely two noun genders, as nouns other than people were now called “he” or “she”.
What are the benefits of Rosetta Stone Arabic?
- Most of the vocabulary covered was useful.
- There was always audio or an image with written text, so it wasn’t necessary to read Arabic (in contrast with Duolingo, which requires a lot of reading from the beginning).
- There were no built-in reading lessons, which would benefit learners who just want to speak and don’t care about reading.
- The lessons force you both to repeat vocabulary out loud, and to produce vocabulary from memory (both good policies for an online course).
- Splitting lessons into 5- and 10-minute sessions made it more interesting and easier to focus.
- The shorter vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation sessions are more interesting than core sessions.
- The pronunciation trainer helped to solidify some of the vocabulary.
- The flying confetti at the end of each daily session gives positive reinforcement.
What are the disadvantages of Rosetta Stone Arabic?
- As the sentence structure expands, the lack of grammar explanation becomes more noticeable. I wasn’t confident that I was guessing the intended meaning each time.
- Generally, the speech recognition was overly generous – I had to make a real hash of a word not to get a correct mark. Good for keeping the lesson moving, but bad for fine-tuning pronunciation.
- The core lesson structure was a bit boring, and there was no way to see how far I’d progressed. Towards the end, I was hoping every time I finished an exercise that the lesson would be over.
- Having a series of 4 images and 1 question per image, meant that you could always guess the fourth answer without even listening.
- I couldn’t find any further grammar information or explanations, so for those of us who like to read up on it and get really clear, some external research is needed.
- More recognition of written Arabic was required in some exercises.
- “Newspaper” is such an outdated and useless noun to learn, yet courses seem to push it as fundamental vocabulary.
- Although the images used in the course feature a diverse range of ethnicities (which I really appreciate), it feels like muslim images are being missed out, particularly women in hijab. For a language which is spoken in predominantly muslim countries, it would nice to include that cultural aspect.
- There was too much new vocabulary to absorb in one session for an absolute beginner.
- Lesson numbering system is more confusing than it needs to be.
- Every time I log in, I’m asked to check the microphone, although I’ve made no changes and it’s the same day.
- The scoring system is a bit demotivating – I miss Duo telling me “Your hard work is paying off” and “Well done, you got 5 in a row”.
Does Rosetta Stone actually work?
Below I summarise what I had learned at the end of 72 hours and Unit 1 of Rosetta Stone Arabic Basics and Beyond. I split vocabulary into words I can produce now (active) and words I could probably recognise (passive).
Active vocabulary
- No = laa
- Yes = nam
- Girl = bintun
- Boy = waladun
- Man = rajalun
- Child = teflon
- I = ana
- He = huwa
- She = heya
- They = huma
- The = al
- Fish = samakatun
- Dog = kalbun
- Cat = kittatun
- Rice = arazun
- Book = kitabun
- Egg = bayadun
- He runs = huwa yejeree
- She runs = heya tajeree
- He writes = huwa yaktubu
- She writes = heya taktubu
- He eats = huwa ya’akulu
- She eats = heya ta’akulu
Passive vocabulary
Car, read, swim, to have, horse, cook, drink, sandwich, walk
Grammar
- Arabic dual exists.
- Female 3rd person starts with “ta” while male 3rd person starts with “ya”.
- Dual nouns and verbs end with “tani”.
- There are two noun genders.
Should you use Rosetta Stone to learn Arabic?
From my perspective, Duolingo learning materials and library books are already available for free, so a course would have to add benefit to those freely available materials to be worth it.
I personally would not pay for the Rosetta Stone Arabic course, because:
- I would have to use additional resources to understand the grammar.
- The core sessions are quite long and boring.
I would not recommend the immersion method of learning for adults without a background of language learning and/or grammar learning. Without a teacher or text to clarify, it was sometimes difficult to know exactly what an image was trying to convey. In my experience, information like verb conjugations can be very frustrating and hard to pick up for people who don’t already recognise them from prior learning.
What about for children? If you’re using the free trial, it doesn’t cost anything to let them try. However, as an adult with high language learning motivation, I got a bit bored during the lessons, so I’m not confident that children would stay interested – especially during the long core sessions. The requirement for a 90% pass rate in order to progress might also be a barrier.