Best Price: $299
(CD Version)

Our Rating:
89%

Tell Me More Arabic review: Levels 1+2+3

By Gerrit du Plessis

While Tell Me More Arabic is technically not a way to learn Arabic online - you don't have to be connected to the Internet to use it - it is indeed an impressive-looking package. When you open it up, you'll find an Installation CD, three lesson CDs, a printed workbook and a headset. The documentation promises you over 800 hours of instruction and 5000 different exercises to satisfy visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners. Its interactive dialogues portray daily life situations, and the software is extremely user-friendly. It features snappy 3D animations and MPEG videos, and has a well-produced feel. Best of all, Tell Me More claims to be the first program to utilize sophisticated speech recognition technology, which essentially means that when you repeat an Arabic phrase into the microphone, it analyzes and corrects your pronunciation to improve your accent word by word.

So why isn't this my favorite program? Tell Me More Arabic plunges in under the assumption you already know the Arabic alphabet, understand a few words, and have at least a bare-bones ability to read Arabic; if you don't, you're basically on hold until you learn those things, which is not going to happen in THIS program. (You can certainly learn Arabic online to jumpstart you to the point where Tell Me More can take over, but why should you have to do that?) And Tell Me More's speech recognition technology works well if your accent is decent enough for the computer to understand what you're trying to say. If not, it isn't going to do you much good. On the positive side, Tell Me More is excellent at teaching grammar, and provides intelligent instruction on reading, writing, and the formation of useful sentences. But for use at home, where you don't have a teacher, the program assumes too much background knowledge the beginner may not have. For this reason, I've given this very excellent program a 89% rating.

For a more beginner friendly Arabic course have a look at Rocket Arabic.

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