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Rating: 
Summary: Challenging, but rewarding
Review: I agree 100% with Ben Wing's review. The book is TOTALLY mistitled, as it is NOT a beginner's book. Unless you already have a working reading knowledge of Arabic, it's worthless. Worst $$ on a book--I was baited by the erroneous title--I've ever spent. AMAZON.COM should enter a STRONG message of caution that this book IS NOT FOR BEGINNERS.DON'T BUY IT, you're wasting your money. Sorry I did.
Rating: 
Summary: The Best on The Market for All Age Groups
Review: I can't really add too much to what the more articulate reviewers have already said. I'm really writing this to counter the negative reviews.I've been using this book for about a month, in a second-semester class (Alif-Baa was used in the first). It's true that it asks you to make leaps of faith, in that you're sometimes given only parts of a verb ('she lives', 'I study'), or apparently inappropriately advanced vocabulary ('My father is a translator for the United Nations' in lesson 1?). On the other hand, it does seem to mimic how we learn our native languages: we learn piecemeal, rather than by memorizing conjugation tables, and we often learn by guessing the meaning, using the word, and re-evaluating based on the listeners' reactions. Also, we learn in several ways, all at once: reading, speaking, listening, watching. I have studied and achieved various levels of fluency in several languages over the last 30 years, ranging over Indo-European from Irish to Spanish to Russian, with a few others in between. I think you have to accept that, as exotic as any of these languages may seem to an English speaker, you'll have to open your mind to other ways of expressing yourself once you leave that (Indo-European) family. For a beginner like me, learning Arabic seems like a very long journey. Everyone decides for themselves whether it's worth the time and effort. I think this book goes some way towards making the journey interesting and stimulating.
Rating:
Summary: Student of Arabic
Review: I feel sorry for those reviewers who had nothing good to say about this textbook. I think that their frustration comes not so much from this textbook as it does from the fact that Arabic IS HARD!! I have studied over 10 languages and Arabic is by far the hardest. This book is not perfect; I doubt any textbook could be, but it does what most Arabic textbooks do not--it tackles the language from many aspects: written, spoken, audio, reading, etc. AND gives you a lot of vocabulary to learn. While this can be frustrating at times it is absolutely essential to learning Arabic--it is a vocabulary rich language. As far as the Isalmic slant to some of exercises, what do you expect. Arabic and Islam are inseperable. Even everyday phrases reflect this. A lot of the complaints I read about this book seem to stem from the fact that a lot of students didn't buy the series but instead tried to start with part 1 (without Aleph Baa--the book for learning the alphabet) or part 2 without part 1 etc. These books build upon each other as language learning should. You can't expect to understand what is going on in part 2 without learning what was taught in part 1. This seems logical to me. If you want to learn Arabic get ready for a long haul and buy this book. Buy others as well but for sure buy this book. If you are trying to learn Arabic without the benefit of classroom study buy this book and get ready to be frustrated. Arabic is hard, but so worth the effort.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent texbook for long-term Arabic study
Review: I had been trying to learn Arabic for a few years and not getting far when I finally was pointed toward this book. Wow -- our small study group made amazing progress. We're in the final couple of chapters and already bought Book 2 in anticipation of starting it immediately afterwards. The textbook is set up like a workbook, so with the exception of essay-type exercises you do the writing in the book itself. There's a good balance of all 4 skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking) so it's not just focusing on reading/writing like other Arabic textbooks do. It assumes you already have basic reading/writing skills, plus know a few vocabulary words that are taught in _Alif Baa_. From the beginning they incorporate real-world reading from newspaper & magazine articles. There's a big focus on educated guessing and using context & other clues to get the meaning. This is extremely useful. You have to get the cassettes if you're serious about studying, but we managed fine without the video. Near the beginning of the book, the speakers on the cassettes stick pretty close to MSA, but near the end you will hear the Egyptian accent much more -- get used to those g's! The culture sections at the end of the chapters are actually interesting -- Fairuz, Umm Kulthoom, Nizar Qabbani, etc. The textbook is meant for a classroom, but we are using it in a small study group. Once we got about halfway, we found it useful to have a native speaker tutor join us for our study group to correct our exercises & do the spoken drills with us. Now that we're near the end of the book, it's almost essential to have that kind of support. Without it you'll have no idea whether your answers are correct on the more difficult exercises. When you get partway, there will be dictionary exercises. It's important to get the right kind of dictionary, because not all of the Arabic dictionaries you find at the bookstore will work for these. I already had 2 sets of dictionaries, neither worked. Get the Hans Wehr dictionary, which has words arranged by roots/patterns.
Rating:
Summary: The Best on The Market for All Age Groups
Review: I have studied Arabic at a variety of schools (graduate, undergrauate, professional programs) with different text books, and I found this book the be the most help. Most Arabic text books are preoccupied with wasting chapters on describiing school life and leaving very little time to develop vocabulary for adult/non-student situations, such as talking about personal lives, jobs, political and eocnomic situations, and comprehending news stories. In this series you follow people through daily lives, not only students, but people who speak about immigrations and failed relationships and fellowships and jobs and moving and being lonely. It's an awesome scope of context for vocabulary development, and the stories are linked in a way that provides a good basis for retaining the vocubulary accumulated. This is also an easy book to follow on its own, in the absence of an Arabic teacher; if a course is not avaiulable near your or too expensive at the momment. The audio cassettes/cd are vital but the video cassetes are not, and the stories told on video tapes are the same used for the oral comprehension exercises form the video tapes. Other Arabic series I tried (or were forced to use in classes) were Ahlan wa Salaam, which had an abyssmal vocabulary, focused entirely on student's perspecitves and gave almost no information about the gramtical structure; and the Cambridge (orange book) textbook for Elmentary Arabic, which lacked oral exercises. Both books provided answers, but due to poor editing, many erors were in the provided answers, which caused much confusion for students until a teacher was available for a dialogue(the Cambridge book was much worse in that apsect, but covered more grammatical details).
Rating: 
Summary: Not worth the money
Review: I sat in on an intro level Arabic course at Indiana University where this text was being used. I already knew the Arabic alphabet but found the layout of the book, the activities, the explanations, etc, unmotivating. It's been a couple years so I can't remember specifics except that it looked like someone typeset the thing on a Commodore 64 (I believe SpeedScript was the name of that word processor) and had their 5 year old scribble in all the illustrations. There were also some very badly-scanned black and white photos included.
When I showed this book to my Egyptian roommate he was totally apalled and insisted that I just drop the course and learn from him because the book was full of errors and extraneous rules that "nobody uses or even cares about".
I have no idea why the field of Arabic language instruction is 600 years behind the books for 20-30 other languages I have looked at. (...)
Rating:
Summary: The best Arabic learning course, but still short...
Review: I used this book to study first year Arabic at the University of Utah. My teacher, a native Arabic speaker, often stated that this was the best Arabic learning course that he had ever seen. After studying Arabic for three years, and trying some other books, I must agree. We used the audio and video cassettes to enhance the learning process, and these were very helpful. (You could probably get by without the video, but it would very difficult to go without the audio cassettes.) While this course is great for studying Modern Standard Arabic (the formal written text used in the Quran) it isn't very helpful for spoken Arabic. I would suggest this course for classroom, group or tutoring use in which a native Arabic speaker is present. If you are using it for self study, I highly recommend that you find a native speaker to help you out with pronunciation and conversation. THE GOOD: It is set up like other good language learning programs. It incorporates multi-media and all language skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking) to help students learn vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. While this may not seem incredible, just try some other Arabic learning courses, and you will see that this is a major benefit of this course. THE BAD: 1) This book assumes that you have already gone through Alif Baa' (the first of three books in this series), and therefore learned how to read and write Arabic. It builds on the foundation started in that book. If you haven't gone through that 6-week course yet then I strongly recommend that you do it first. 2) While the "guess the meaning from context" style of learning is helpful, it can be a bit much in this book. If you do not have the answer key, or a native speaker to help you with the answers, you may not be able to figure out the meanings of some items. 3) Looking back on this book now, I think that the absolute worst thing about it was that it teaches too much Modern Standard Arabic. While this is nice if you plan on studying the Quran, it is not very good for conversing with native speakers in everyday colloquial Arabic. As the series progresses I became very frustrated by the fact that I had studied all this Arabic for all these years, yet native speakers had a hard time understanding me, saying that I sounded like the Quran, or an ancient author. If you supplement this course with conversation (and tons of it) with a native speaker you will benefit MUCH more from the system, and you will probably even learn Arabic! OVERALL: If you are going to study Arabic, then this is the course to use - no doubt about it! If you incorporate the audio and video cassettes, and go through all three books in the series, your Arabic will be MUCH better than if you just use this book alone. Yet the book relies on the multi-national "Modern Standard Arabic", and doesn't give enough support for the colloquial language that is used everyday by native speakers. If you have a native speaker to practice with, I think that you will get the full Arabic experience that the authors had in mind when designing this series.
Rating:
Summary: This is THE BEST course out there
Review: Wow. I am surprised at the negative reviews and comments about this course but somewhat not. For the person that said his looked like it was printed on a Commodore 64, don't exaggerate; it is **not** as bad as all that! This book was written and published in the U.S. by the respected and esteemed Georgetown University. If it was that bad, I am sure they wouldn't have wasted their time printing it. My book is fine and sure the drawings are a little crudish, but the point is the lessons **not** the drawings or pictures. Not to mention, they are not by American artists (they are Egyptian), so maybe they are not what you are used to but that doesn't make them horrible. Open your mind, gosh!
Anyway, this course is probably the best I have seen out there besides going overseas and learning there. Arabic has come a long way and has fought tooth-and-nail just to be accepted by schools/universities to be a language to be wreckoned with; fast behind Spanish. Over 240 million people speak Arabic and that is only counting people in Middle Eastern countries where it is considered the national language--not counting Malaysia, Southern Africa and other places Islam is practised. There is also a HUGE population of Arabic speakers in the U.S. no matter how people try to ignore it, in light of Sept. 11th. It is quickly becoming part of society regardless whether anyone likes it or not.
The book does have a few flaws--ALL language books do but not THAT many; that is why there are teachers and why you go to class. This course was not built on learning Arabic without the benefit of formal instruction and class interaction. You can, if you want, get a huge gist of the Arabic language using this book but not without knowing things like the alphabet, small words and phrases before-hand (which is what Alif Baa is for) and other things, yes, it will be very, very, frustrating for you. I agree with the other poster about if you have NOT done the Alif Baa book before using this book, you are wasting your time. How can you expect to know the rest of the material without the pre-requisite? That is foolish to think you can skip ahead in a language.
Yes, you have to take big leaps of faith but the aim of these books is to teach you the structure, the rules, grammer, situations, usage, etc. They are not designed to be a word-for-word type course like others with tapes and a dictionary/phrasebook, that you use to recite and memorize like a parrot. That is why it is **primarily** for formal instruction. If you read in the beginning Foreword of the book, (and listen to your teacher, who will surely tell you) the book is so that **you** learn a lot on your own thru trial and error; not by the book telling you everything or figuring out a few words. To be truly fluent in Arabic takes years of study, not a fly by night course, like I think some people expect from these books. This is a 3-4 yr. planned course, which is reasonable and actually pretty fast. If you don't have that much patience or time to invest, give up now and do the other stuff like Rosetta Stone or something. Less frustration, easier to learn but you are truly on your own to learn and you will need many more books, tapes, rely on Arabic speakers to help you and may take you longer than this course can teach you. These books are GOOD. Before I took this course, I didn't even know the alphabet. After, 4 months, I knew the alphabet and the first few chapters of Maha's coversation just by glance and how to make a little small talk with my husband (he is Arab) in Arabic. Even he was surprised. If you just can't get the hang of this book, I suggest trying the University of Medinah course but it for you who are "religiously-phobic", it will turn you off. Like one person here said, you cannot seperate our religion from Arabic; it is part of our daily speaking and conversation and constantly filled with it. If you don't like that, then you should really try another language you would feel more comfortable with.
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