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Rating: 
Summary: A really excellent primer of Arabic
Review: After having struggled with Arabic with the help of inadequate materials and making no progress finally I came upon the book of John Smart. And finally I started to make real progress in Arabic!!!Excellent features in this book: - It is relativelly minimalist so that the student is not overburdened with information and can make the course in relativelly short time
- all Arabic verb forms are meticulously explained when a form is met in the text
- it drops great deal of complex features of Arabic grammar(i`raab) which are not usually marked in the script so that they cannot contribute to the meaning when you are reading. Learning such features can only confuse beginning student
- it does not use transliteration nor Arabic short vowel sounds (harakaat)which also never appear in writing except in the Holy Qur'an. It makes learning a little bit more difficult at first, but you can start aquire right habits of script recognition from the very begining.
- the book is in Litterary Arabic however the style of its texts is kept close to the colloquial. Dialogues in the book are in the litterary language but approximated to the colloquial in a fashion some Arabic playwrights do.
- After finishing this book you can decide whether to go to the
Arab world and to study colloquial Arabic there "from the mouth of people" in noisy bazaars and cafe's or to continue to study litterary language quietly in your room from books and dictionaries.
Rating: 
Summary: Too many errors
Review: I recently purchased this book to teach myself Arabic - I am not taking a course, I'm relying solely on the book. Unfortunately, there are several problems with this text, the 2001 edition. Several times I have been working through the exercises in the book, with the answer key in the back, and have noticed mistakes. After numerous careful checkings on my own work, I am sure that I'm not reading things incorrectly. I must have found at least 20 errors, and I'm only at the end of unit 4. Another thing that bothers me is the number of words presented in exercises that never appear anywhere else in vocabulary lists, or in the glossary. I've spent more minutes than I can count trying to find these words that crop up here and there, only to give up in frustration on my attempts at translating them. Lastly, the presentation of vocabulary first, grammar last, is not the best for someone familiar with learning new languages. I have often been frustrated with what appears to be an inconsistency in the beginning dialogues, only to discover ten pages later, a spelling or grammatical rule that explains it. All in all, despite the frustrations, I am learning the basics of the language. The practice questions generally reinforce what was learned in the chapters, and the transliterations are a great way to check up on yourself to see if you're reading the script properly. That's why I'm giving it a three
Rating:
Summary: Best Arabic Learning Book Proven In Baghdad
Review: I was a recon soldier with 1-13 Armor batalion in Baghdad. My mom sent me this book and I studied it religiously for about two hours a day and it got me readind and speaking it in a semi-effective manner in just a few weeks. It is written in such a way that teaches how to speak it well. I am currently in college at the top of my arabic class. We use "AL-KITAAB FII AL TAALUM AL ARABIYYA" It's not that good. This is, the only thing is I recommend a book to learn script to supplement this one. Remember to study hard too this isn't a freebie. GOOD LUCK.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent beginner's book
Review: I've looked at about a dozen beginning Arabic books so far, and this is one of the best I've seen for the complete novice. The introductory Arabic book by Youssif Haddad and Jack Ingle has a much more detailed treatment of the grammar and structure of the language, but you need more familiarity with written Arabic to benefit from it. I enjoy learning the formal grammar more than most people so although I think Ingle's book is a better book on the actual language, since I'm a rank beginner in Arabic I bought this one instead, and will supplement it with the Ingle book. I also thought the Hippocrene book was good, and it would be my second choice for a [beginner.] About half-way through the book it started including many full paragraphs of material for translation. I have my doubts that the beginning reader would be that advanced by that time but I don't really know. I have the Hippocrene Spanish Grammar and it is the clearest, most concise, and overall best basic grammar I have, out of the four five that I own. One other main strength to this book is that it can accompany the tapes so you can get some idea of the spoken language too. One thing I was pleased to see was that, although I had heard that Arabic was a difficult language, it is actually much simpler than Latin or Greek or even a contemporary Slavic language like Russian, as far as the grammar is concerned. It only has three cases, the nominative, accusative, and jussive, compared to Greek's eight, Latin and Russian's six (and the vocative case in Latin is hardly ever used), and German's four. The nouns are marked for the single, dual, and plural, which is different from English, which lost the dual inflection like many Indo-European languages many centuries ago. But the books make it clear that in modern spoken Arabic the three noun declensions are pretty much universally ignored, and you don't really learn them. The only time you need to know them is if you're reading classical literature or the Koran, or in academic discourse, where it might be used. However, one difficult thing is that Arabic has many different ways of marking the plural, and here it resembles the complex rules in English for the use of the apostrophe, which causes almost as many problems for native speakers as for foreigners. That having been said, verb conjugations in Arabic are not difficult and are quite regular, unlike Latin and many other languages. Here Arabic resembles Japanese, which also has a very regular verbal system, and you can count the number of irregular verbs in Japanese literally on the fingers of one hand, and also Chinese, which has no conjugation for gender, number, or anything else. In fact Arabic's is so regular that Arabic dictionaries can refer to the verbs by a number system (I-X). So it appears that the main difficulty in Arabic is learning the alphabet, which is more complex than in English since the individual letters alter their form depending on whether they're at the beginning or end of a word, or in the middle. Another similarity between Arabic and Japanese, oddly enough, is that they both lack a true future tense. Overall, a good first grammar on a language that may not be as difficult to learn as I was first thinking. However, I'm about to find out!
Rating:
Summary: attention relatives and friends of muslim inmates
Review: This THIRD edition has two CD audio-discs included
which will be rejected or discarded by the CO @ CF
The older, discontinued (out-of-print) 2nd edition
has two CS audioCASSETTES which are normally Halal
in the eyes of the ever-watchful Package Room CO's
?May I wholeheartedly recommend an alternative? It
is still possible to supply your loved one with an
audioCASSETTE D-I-Y Arabic learning course; get it
by typing the following 10-digit ISBN: 0743529413.
You type (or hightlight & copy & paste) 0743529413
into Amazon's general "Search" box and hit "enter"
Make sure that you order a NEW set (of 4) tapes. I
realize that "used" sets cost less BUT the Package
Room of the Correctional Facility probably notices
on the packing slip that the mint-condition audio-
cassettes are listed as "used" by the Amazon third
party merchant. That would make the inside of them
(the hollow within the shell) S-U-S-P-E-C-T. There
is no need to chisel on the below-20-bucks cost to
risk getting the (perfectly good but "used") tapes
returned or trashed. "Nuff said RE alternatives to
CDs for institutionalized American Muslims. Myself
am a traditional Roman Catholic; nevertheless, God
is ONE (please let's not quibble), and some people
who wish to befriend an American/Canadian detainee
or convict (who has time to learn Arabic) must buy
paperback books or audiocassettes for the material
to be allowed inside the pokey. Hope this helps to
enable a devout North American to learn Arabic for
a better understanding of the Qu'ran. Feedback OK.
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