Rating: 
Summary: A headache of a book...
Review: "A noun cannot only be defined more closely by an attributive adjective, but also by a subsequent noun in the genitive. The relation of both nouns to each other is that of a governing noun (nomen regens) to an attributive adjunct(nomen rectum) in the function..."If that makes sense to you, and you can use instructions like that to construct sentences, this book will be very helpful to you. It is fairly comprehensive and moves quickly. However, for the rest of us, the dense grammar terminology and the otherwise bewildering presentation of concepts require too much time deciphering the authors' English- much less utilizing it for learning Arabic! Not recommended for teaching yourself.
Rating: 
Summary: Cumbersome to use and many outdated grammatical terms.
Review: Although the book is very comprehensive, it takes an extremely rigid and characterless way in teaching the Arabic language. Using this book is difficult and cumbersome. Many advanced language grammatical terms are used in the book and I found myself referring to the (english) dictionary many times while using this book. Also, the terms in the book follow the fomal format, which no one speaks. This book would be perfect for the discerning English professor or English major who wishes to learn the fromal Arabic language in its entirety, otherwise, I really don't recommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: Kitaab Mukammal!
Review: Great Book! It's definitely not padded or dumbed down like many course books out there. The focus is heavy on grammar and the course moves along quickly, but if you have a knack for languages and aren't put off by lots of grammar terminology, this course is great. I finally feel I'm starting to get somewhere with my Arabic. The cassettes are a useful addition to the book.
Rating: 
Summary: A great review for intermediate students of Arabic
Review: I found this book to be a great resource for an overall review and reference guide to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The book has upper-level texts and dialogs not found in many other Arabic grammar texts. The book also contains a suitable amount of exercises that go along with the lessons and has an answer key in the back of the book. The glossary possesses ample vocabulary for the intermediate student with direct meanings (unlike trying to decipher the true meaning of a word in an Arabic dictionary).
Also the book has 35 in-depth verb charts that support most if not all possible grammatical verb patterns.
DO NOT buy this book if you are trying to teach yourself Arabic. I would suggest this book to students that have a strong general understanding of Arabic that desire to build upon current knowledge.
Rating:
Summary: A great review for intermediate students of Arabic
Review: I found this book to be a great resource for an overall review and reference guide to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The book has upper-level texts and dialogs not found in many other Arabic grammar texts. The book also contains a suitable amount of exercises that go along with the lessons and has an answer key in the back of the book. The glossary possesses ample vocabulary for the intermediate student with direct meanings (unlike trying to decipher the true meaning of a word in an Arabic dictionary).
Also the book has 35 in-depth verb charts that support most if not all possible grammatical verb patterns.
DO NOT buy this book if you are trying to teach yourself Arabic. I would suggest this book to students that have a strong general understanding of Arabic that desire to build upon current knowledge.
Rating:
Summary: New to the Arabic textbook scene
Review: I just bought this book, following up on my initial study of Arabic using the J.R. Smart Teach Yourself book, which is a great introduction to the main points of Arabic grammar and usage. This text is very academic - lots of case endings, verb details, etc. - and thorough, to say the least. No shortcuts here - and for good reason. It is proper MSA, so there's not much help for those looking for a colloquial dialect, but although I haven't started the text yet, one glance and I get the impression that by the end of it, I will have a very firm grasp of MSA, and the ability to dig into newspapers and the media, as well as other formal usage, with little problem. It appears that there is a cassette series not yet available for it, but listed as Jan.2001 publishing date, for $30. Coupled with the extremely cheap $30 price for this text - it's a lot of Arabic for little money. This makes this course arguably the best value in an elementary-intermediate level Arabic text (even if you add in the tapes forthcoming.) Although it may not appeal to those who don't want an academic text in the Cambridge style, it offers lots for the money, as well as a firm, thorough grounding in the language for further specialization.
Rating: 
Summary: Masochist's choice: painful learning, boredom, discouraging
Review: I love learning languages and yet this book is little fun. I compared books on the shelf at the bookstore and this one seemed to be the most complete book for learning Arabic available. It is however extremely unfriendly, and not meant for self study; this becomes eveident soon, very soon.
Purely as a reference tool it is too cumbersome, and I can't say that it is very complete. More than one example to accompany grammatical and syntactical points would be welcome.
The things that make the book unfriendly to the student are several but as a self learner these are the most salient and annoying:
(1) THE STRUCTURE OF THE INDIVIDUAL LESSONS: All new grammar in each lesson is presented first, and then followed by long vocabulary lists, followed in turn by two texts for reading, and then numerous exercises. The exercises are dry and take forever to get through. I am not sure how effective they are, given the time that they require. I find that I get bogged down in each lesson and am eager to get on to something new in the next lesson about half way through the exercises.
There is in this structure no link between the new grammar presented in the lesson and the exercises included with it. They are separate compartments grouped under a common heading, so that the student is forced to learn a bunch of grammar and syntax and then take it with him and apply his knowledge to the exercises afterwards. For instance, taking lesson 6 as an example, the student learns the genitive construction, then the affixed pronouns (which serve as personal pronouns when attached to nouns, direct objects of personal pronouns when attached to prepositions and verbs), included in the presentation of this material are peculiarities of spelling and pronunciation in their use. There is little there in the way of a focussed exercise to help you learn this new information.
(2) THE VOCAB LISTS: The book follows the principle that short vowel marks should only be included where failure to include them would obscure meaning. That's ok since one needs to learn to read unvowelled texts anyway, however, this liberty should not be taken in vocabulary lists from which a student is to learn new words. And granted that the vowels are included in the list, but not consistently, and fatHa (the short a) is not written in order to save printing. So how is the student to know whether to pronounce the word "employee"? Is it muwadhaf or muudhaf. It's the first, but you wouldn't know it without the short A written above the waaw, unless you had known the word to begin with, or you had an Arabic speaking teacher accompanying your book.
Another example from the vocab list to illustrate another problem: the phrase "How much does _____ cost? is written bkm. Now I think that it is "bikmi" but I am not sure that those little hash marks underneath the letters are meant to be short "i"s and not the "a" vowels from the word underneath it in the vocab list, which sometimes the authors are in fact printing. And in fact the word may be pronounced bikami since the fact that there is no a vowel printed there means you should pronounce one. I haven't yet studied if they are printing "sukuun" (the little circle which tells you there is no vowel) consistently or not. If they do so consistently then this is probably to be pronounced "bikami". Anyway, you get the idea, and this is a consistent problem with the vocab lists. Suggestion to the authors: don't skimp out on vowel signs in vocab lists of new words.
(3) THE EXERCISES AND CORRESPONDING ANSWER KEYS: The fact that there is an answer key is not a strength to the book, and the reason is that neither exercises or corresponding answers are numbered. So what you see when you do an exercise is for example a block of text with an instruction like "translate into Arabic" or "change the verbs from the first person singular to the second person and make them questions", and you have a block of text just like this paragraph I am typing now, only in the book there could be ten or twenty sentences at times. Then you refer to the answer key, and since the sentences of the exercise are given to you in one big chunk, as a paragraph, you will have to hunt for the answers in the corresponding paragraph chunk in the answer key. It's possible only slow and annoying to look for the spot where you left off each time.
The book is obviously meant to be used in a classroom situation with a teacher. My question then is: "why is an answer key included at all?" Anyone who has the fortitude of character and the eyesight to stick with this book will not have to rely on the answer key anyway. Numbering individual sentences in the exercises at any rate is such an obvious help that I do not understand why it was not done. To save space? I'd rather pay for paper and spare my eyesight and my patience.
If you are a self learner and this is enough to dissuade you from purchasing this book then I am content with not continuing into minutiae. If you are a student in an actual class and your teacher has chosen this text then I assume you will get the help you need from your teacher. If you are a teacher, using this book will probably make you have to work a lot harder to help your students through the material.
Rating:
Summary: terrible
Review: I would never recommend this book. You will never learn arabic from it.
Rating:
Summary: A bit of an "extreme" in academic study of language
Review: I wrote the first review of this book above, before I started using it for study, and I've had to abandon it midway through. It is extremely academic in terms of introducing grammar and syntax points, and almost unreadable unless you're a linguist with a firm command of linguistic terms. It is extremely thorough in terms of grammar, syntax and even some prounciation notes, but more of a reference than a text for self-study, given the very dry tone. Also, lessons have extremely long word lists (sometimes as many as 100 new words in a lesson) which can be impossible to memorize in one large chunk, and very overwhelming. Without knowing the word lists, you can't even read the example texts or do the exercises, making study of one lesson very long. Some of the words on the lists are absolutely useless or mind-boggling as to why they included them... Good as a reference text to have on hand, but for actual study, stick with the Munther Younes books (Cornell prof, Yale Publishing.)
Rating:
Summary: A bit of an "extreme" in academic study of language
Review: I wrote the first review of this book above, before I started using it for study, and I've had to abandon it midway through. It is extremely academic in terms of introducing grammar and syntax points, and almost unreadable unless you're a linguist with a firm command of linguistic terms. It is extremely thorough in terms of grammar, syntax and even some prounciation notes, but more of a reference than a text for self-study, given the very dry tone. Also, lessons have extremely long word lists (sometimes as many as 100 new words in a lesson) which can be impossible to memorize in one large chunk, and very overwhelming. Without knowing the word lists, you can't even read the example texts or do the exercises, making study of one lesson very long. Some of the words on the lists are absolutely useless or mind-boggling as to why they included them... Good as a reference text to have on hand, but for actual study, stick with the Munther Younes books (Cornell prof, Yale Publishing.)
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