Rosetta Stone Arabic
I finally broke down and purchased the Arabic language module from Rosetta Stone. Anybody out there already have experience with Rosetta Stone language software?
I had long considered taking Arabic in a structured way from an accredited institution, whether brick-and-mortar or at a distance, but two factors have so far conspired against me:
- My own teaching schedule is very tight, and almost always conflicts with whatever is available.
- Institutions of learning may as well throw up electrified fences with ground-glass ramparts, if they refuse to keep contact information up to date. Nobody can tell whether our web sites were published last week, last year, or ten years ago, and when you send emails to the contact people on our web sites, those emails drop into our Big Black Hole. (I don’t mean my own school when I say “our” and “we”: I’m talking about a culture-spanning problem.) No schools want my tuition money badly enough to keep their contact information up to date or answer an email, so Rosetta Stone gets it. And I get a six-month money-back return policy, in the bargain.
Let me know if you’ve had any experience with Rosetta Stone. It will be a few days before I dig in, but monkeying around with the thing at the store was more fun than I’ve had with language since I puzzled out my first liver omen.
(Obligatory disclaimer: I don’t work for Rosetta Stone, and they haven’t given me anything in exchange for writing about their software. They did throw in an extra headset-and-mike, which was pretty cool.)