The Rocket Arabic Course

I chose to review the Rocket Arabic course because a long-time family friend spend his first 20 years growing up in Egypt and has remained fluent - and I wanted his feedback on the quality of the course - particularly since he's spent the last year teaching his first grandson Arabic.

So with very few Arabic courses available, I decided to give this one a try as he looked over my shoulder.

The Rocket Arabic Website

Rocket has an excellent reputation and in fact offers eight different langauge courses including Chinese, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Arabic as well as a full blown course on the American Sign language.

The Rocket Arabic course was written by Amira Zaki, who is a native Arabic speaker from Egypt.

The first module contains 31 sessions (over 11 hours of material and the transcripts) designed to have you speaking basic Arabic after your first session.

Initially, the Rocket Arabic course teaches conversational Arabic, which means you'll be able to converse with other Arabic speakers, as well as feel comfortable ordering in restaurants, asking for directions, even greeting others.

The package also includes the transcripts of the audios and I found that feature particularly helpful in following along. Each audio is roughly 20 minutes which means the full module comes in at 11 hours of content.

The methods used within this content allow you to understand and speak Arabic quickly. The use of audio tracks made the presentation of the material entertaining.

The program also includes software which makes learning very easy, and more importantly, fun. The first piece of software is called MegaVocab™.

This is a vocabulary recognition tool and I found this very helpful in the beginning.

My friend said the MegaVocab presented in English Arabic script is very good because it is the standard system for using English letters and numbers to represent the sounds used in Arabic.

The software has 1000 words and pictures built into it, but it also allows you to add more words and pictures of your choosing as your skills improve.

screenshot of the actual software

In my opinion this is where the few other programs were weak and where Rocket Arabic excels.

Another very important aspect of the Rocket Arabic ™ program was that it's not just an introductory course. The course is designed around the assumption you have no background in Arabic when starting.

But it continues to an advanced level, which meant I wouldn't have to go out and buy a more advanced course as I progressed with the language.

To me, this added tremendous value to the course.

Possibly the most impressive part of this course is the members only forum where you can ask questions and communicate with other students and the Rocket Language online instructors.

As I looked at it this forum made the cost of this course a real bargain, because if you happen to get stuck on something, you find lots of help in the forum. And this was included for free!

It was difficult to even find a home study course for the Arabic language, but to find one at the price of one hundred dollars, and of this quality, was impressive.

In fact as I continued to use the material, I became even more impressed with the price.

The course I decided on was the downloadable version, but they also have it available on CD's which can be shipped to your home. I chose the downloaded version because it was cheaper and I could listen to the program on my computer, burn my own CD's for listening in the car, and load audio into my ipod.

To top it all off, the folks at Rocket offer the course with a 60 day, no questions asked, money back guarantee.

When I considered the quality of the course work, the software, the forum, the guarantee, and the price, I give the Rocket Arabic ™ program my top rating of 5 stars.

If you want to learn Arabic as a second language, I can't think of a better way than by using Rocket Arabic from the Rocket Language company.

I wish you success with your decision to learn Arabic.

Our Rating 5/5