I’ve spent untold hours looking umpteen pages deep in Google searches for things related to Arabic study. One of my most unusual of my finds turned out to be the Interactive Drama’s, Virtual Conversations Language Programs – The Arabic Series.
The Arabic Series appears to have been adapted to assist military linguists with maintaining their language skills, supported by funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the Department of Defense.
Here is Interactive Drama’s (http://www.idrama.com/ArabicSeries.htm) description of the program:
“This is a role-playing, educational experience designed to help you speak and understand the Arabic language. Four Virtual Conversations® programs allow you to gather information through direct dialogues with native Arabic speakers. Assume the role of "Interrogator" and you can engage in hours of face-to-face dialogue with these charismatic native Arabs as they reveal their intriguing stories. An intelligent prompting system will guide you through a perfect interview. Also, each simulation includes a video Instructor who will help you pronounce the Arabic”
It looked very intriguing so, a couple months ago I bought it. Interactive Drama lists the complete four volume set at $229.00; although, you may get a better price elsewhere as I know other sites sell it. You can also buy each module individually. I’ve honestly forgotten how much I paid for it.
So, each CD contains a different scenario. The four different scenarios consist of:
1. A pilot in the Iraqi air force who has decided to defect. (Keep in mind that these courses were designed after the first Gulf War but before the second Gulf war)
2. A civilian student at Baghdad University, who was arrested for political reasons by Saddam’s regime and has fled Iraq and is now seeking to emigrate to the United States.
3. A Kurdish refugee who, along with is family, are in a camp being organized by U.S. Special Operations Forces. The refugee “appears to be an educated man with the potential to help manage the camp.”
4. The final scenario involves an enemy prisoner of war captured near the Kuwait border.
Each module allows you to review and practice the questions that are to be asked, which and what surprised me the most is that the majority of the questions (maybe 90%) are directly usable in a non-“Interrogator” sense.
Of the four different CDs, I felt that the POW module would be of the least benefit as a large majority of the questions involve asking about what he knows about Saddam’s military machine. At first I thought the POW module would be mostly useless for non-military linguists, but then I decided that if a person really wanted to be fluent in Arabic, they should know military terminology also (eventually anyway).
The program monitors your pronunciation of the question and if you pronounce it well enough, the person you are interviewing responds and allows you to ask further questions. The questions you are allowed to, ask at any given time, scroll across the bottom of the screen. You don’t have to enter the interrogation mode and could just practice your pronunciation by repeating after the instructor and having the program tell you how well you are pronouncing each sentence.
You do have to download an Iraqi Font update from iDrama’s website in order for the questions to appear in something other than gibberish and you have to have the specific scenario CD in your CD drive in order for the program to run. If you load the font update, you’ll probably have to reboot your PC in order for the gibberish to go away when you run the program. Because of the requirement to have the CD loaded to run a module, I strongly recommend making copies of this software.
What I like about this series is that you really get the impression you are in a dialogue with a native speaker of Arabic and it allows for the questions to be asked in Iraqi dialect, in addition to Modern Standard Arabic (in three of the four modules I think). In order to switch back from MSA to Iraqi dialect, all you have to do is click on a tab.
What I don’t like is that being a circa 1994 program, it isn’t as polished as what we’ve come to expect. It isn’t entirely clear that you need to download the font update until you do some searching on iDrama’s website, which is pretty damn frustrating. And finally, the software as it is very sensitive to ambient sound and you may have problems using it in a noisy place like a café.
Ultimately, this program series targets linguists that have at least a limited working proficiency and isn’t really appropriate for somebody just beginning to learn Arabic. This isn’t a “must have” item; although, I think many linguists may find it useful at keeping in practice speaking. It does expose a person to the Iraqi dialect too.
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