Al-Kitaab fii Ta'allum al-'Arabiyya: A Textbook for Beginning Arabic, Part One

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: 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.