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Complete Spoken Arabic
It's easy to teach yourself spoken Arabic! Complete Spoken Arabic with Two Audio CDs: A Teach Yourself Guide provides you with a clear and comprehensive approach to Spoken Arabic, so you can progress quickly from the basics to understanding, speaking, and writing spoken Arabic with confidence. Within each of the 24 thematic chapters, important language structures are introduced through life-like dialogues. You'll learn grammar in a gradual manner so you won't be overwhelmed by this tricky subject. Exercises accompany the texts and reinforce learning in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This program also features current cultural information boxes that reflect recent changes in society. The accompanying audio CDs include audio exercises--performed by native speakers--that reinforce communicative skills. Features:
400 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2010
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April 7, 2018
The book has high quality content, but is a little scanty on audio recordings, and by no means substantial enough in content to render one much more than an “advanced beginner”.
Given the price one might complain that it is under-packed, but the price reflects the market.
The book features the, in the reviewer's opinion, ideal presentation of a foreign language: uninterrupted dialogues reflecting everyday situations with full translations and helpful explanatory notes, when needed, and, of course, with accompanying high quality audio recordings.
In this book, the Arabic is transliterated into the roman script, and bases the transliteration letter for letter on how this dialect of Arabic would be written in the Arabic script. This has the advantage of being more accessible than pages of arabic script, yet has the disadvantage of not teaching you how to read.
In the end, I think that, since this is an oral language and not a written one, the choice was a sound one.
Note for linguists and otherwise careful students: one should compensate for this letter-for-letter transliteration from the original orthography: it first appears like a transliteration (or just "literation"?) of the sounds of the language but in fact the halfway-house system ignores facts about the phonology of the language that would ideally have been represented (such as the difference between the low-front vowel "a" and the allophonic short mid-front vowel, also written "a" but realised more like "e," or such as the fact that the vowel in the word "al" is just as often pronounced with the allophonic sounds "el", "il" or "ul").
Given a choice between it and the only other mass market option: Colloquial's "Gulf Arabic" by Clive Holes, this book is better presented (in the use of pictures; better positioning of vocabulary lists; more effective typography; cleaner division of sections etc),yet is less well-padded. It is also less diverse in the range of registers of the language. Holes's book features more idiomatic language, more jokes, more expressive dialogues and less typical text-book fare such as a description of a traditional wedding, opinions on the deleterious effect of TV programming on the youth, and a radio drama where a man desires his friend to murder his wife.
This book suffers from frequent proofreading errors to the extent that the book can feel like a rough draft. They are so frequent I can even categorize them according to type:
For Arabic: "nafs ai-bait" on page 97 instead of "nafs al-bait"; or page 125, the plural of "bird," is written "Thyuur" instead of "Tyuur"; or on page 119, the word processor produced combined sentences to create nonsense like "lailatain as-safar min faDhl-ak?," which itself contains the further mistake of "Dh" rather than "DH" for ض; page 213: "ammah", instead of ":-"(ع-) "-ammah".
For English: page 44: "How to ask and tell the time", instead of "ask for"; on p.104: "again: most useful word in Arabic", instead of "again, a most..."
For punctuation: page 121: double end-brackets for the word "furúug", page 213: missing bold type for the number "(10)". Page 162: a list numbered 1-14 lacks "5" "6" or "7," yet still refers to the answer to number 8 with the unprinted answer to "6."
On page 159, a "street map", which is necessary to complete an audio exercise, is absent.
Finally, there are some merely questionable choices of words, such as in page 122's sentence: "when you are talking about things, the adjective takes the same form", when "using the plural" would be a less ambiguous choice of words than "talking about things"; before that on page 113 the text teaches you that the word for "too" is the same as the word for "very" in Arabic, but it does NOT reflect this teaching by translating the word "jiddan" ("very") into "too" in the example sentence).
..."Teach Yourself"'s book IS, however, more insightful into the (non-linguistic) cultural realm of gulf Arabs (holiday destinations, leisure activities, climate and food) and therefore less focused on linguistic rules than Holes's more academic book... Choose according to your preferences, although you’ll probably have to use both books thoroughly to gain a base in this neglected language.
It is fine that this Teach Yourself book does not want to focus so much on grammar, however there is one point which I feel was a mistake. The book employs a classification system of verbs into classes A, B1, B2 and C. It explains that class B1 has unpredictable verb-stems, and accompanies all examples of such with the label "B1." What it forgets to include is WHICH verb stems the verb takes. There is no way to use the book to quickly discover which stems within the category of B1 any given verb might take. Since the book took the trouble to include this classification system, already risking alienating the grammarphobe reader, why wouldn't it include the information needed to make use of this system? What's worse is that verbs within this class are amongst the most common, such as the words for "see," "go", "bring" and "say."
In conjunction with other resources, the book will certainly teach you a lot about basic sentence forms such as “there is” “I / he /she / they have” “it is” “I / he / she / they saw/ did/ went” and “see! Do! Go!” Etc. What is lacking in both books, therefore, is the breadth of structures and shades of meanings needed to give a full portrait of the language, such as that which the proverbial 101 facing-page translations of the "Assimil" books usually provide, however I sympathise that since these books are obliged to cater to absolute beginners, they are limited in the space they can afford to material more relevant to those looking for a more realistic challenge. Even the mighty "Assimil" have made this compromise for their MSA Arabic books, and the reality of the market has meant that we have had no Gulf Arabic edition whatsoever from them.
Given the price one might complain that it is under-packed, but the price reflects the market.
The book features the, in the reviewer's opinion, ideal presentation of a foreign language: uninterrupted dialogues reflecting everyday situations with full translations and helpful explanatory notes, when needed, and, of course, with accompanying high quality audio recordings.
In this book, the Arabic is transliterated into the roman script, and bases the transliteration letter for letter on how this dialect of Arabic would be written in the Arabic script. This has the advantage of being more accessible than pages of arabic script, yet has the disadvantage of not teaching you how to read.
In the end, I think that, since this is an oral language and not a written one, the choice was a sound one.
Note for linguists and otherwise careful students: one should compensate for this letter-for-letter transliteration from the original orthography: it first appears like a transliteration (or just "literation"?) of the sounds of the language but in fact the halfway-house system ignores facts about the phonology of the language that would ideally have been represented (such as the difference between the low-front vowel "a" and the allophonic short mid-front vowel, also written "a" but realised more like "e," or such as the fact that the vowel in the word "al" is just as often pronounced with the allophonic sounds "el", "il" or "ul").
Given a choice between it and the only other mass market option: Colloquial's "Gulf Arabic" by Clive Holes, this book is better presented (in the use of pictures; better positioning of vocabulary lists; more effective typography; cleaner division of sections etc),yet is less well-padded. It is also less diverse in the range of registers of the language. Holes's book features more idiomatic language, more jokes, more expressive dialogues and less typical text-book fare such as a description of a traditional wedding, opinions on the deleterious effect of TV programming on the youth, and a radio drama where a man desires his friend to murder his wife.
This book suffers from frequent proofreading errors to the extent that the book can feel like a rough draft. They are so frequent I can even categorize them according to type:
For Arabic: "nafs ai-bait" on page 97 instead of "nafs al-bait"; or page 125, the plural of "bird," is written "Thyuur" instead of "Tyuur"; or on page 119, the word processor produced combined sentences to create nonsense like "lailatain as-safar min faDhl-ak?," which itself contains the further mistake of "Dh" rather than "DH" for ض; page 213: "ammah", instead of ":-"(ع-) "-ammah".
For English: page 44: "How to ask and tell the time", instead of "ask for"; on p.104: "again: most useful word in Arabic", instead of "again, a most..."
For punctuation: page 121: double end-brackets for the word "furúug", page 213: missing bold type for the number "(10)". Page 162: a list numbered 1-14 lacks "5" "6" or "7," yet still refers to the answer to number 8 with the unprinted answer to "6."
On page 159, a "street map", which is necessary to complete an audio exercise, is absent.
Finally, there are some merely questionable choices of words, such as in page 122's sentence: "when you are talking about things, the adjective takes the same form", when "using the plural" would be a less ambiguous choice of words than "talking about things"; before that on page 113 the text teaches you that the word for "too" is the same as the word for "very" in Arabic, but it does NOT reflect this teaching by translating the word "jiddan" ("very") into "too" in the example sentence).
..."Teach Yourself"'s book IS, however, more insightful into the (non-linguistic) cultural realm of gulf Arabs (holiday destinations, leisure activities, climate and food) and therefore less focused on linguistic rules than Holes's more academic book... Choose according to your preferences, although you’ll probably have to use both books thoroughly to gain a base in this neglected language.
It is fine that this Teach Yourself book does not want to focus so much on grammar, however there is one point which I feel was a mistake. The book employs a classification system of verbs into classes A, B1, B2 and C. It explains that class B1 has unpredictable verb-stems, and accompanies all examples of such with the label "B1." What it forgets to include is WHICH verb stems the verb takes. There is no way to use the book to quickly discover which stems within the category of B1 any given verb might take. Since the book took the trouble to include this classification system, already risking alienating the grammarphobe reader, why wouldn't it include the information needed to make use of this system? What's worse is that verbs within this class are amongst the most common, such as the words for "see," "go", "bring" and "say."
In conjunction with other resources, the book will certainly teach you a lot about basic sentence forms such as “there is” “I / he /she / they have” “it is” “I / he / she / they saw/ did/ went” and “see! Do! Go!” Etc. What is lacking in both books, therefore, is the breadth of structures and shades of meanings needed to give a full portrait of the language, such as that which the proverbial 101 facing-page translations of the "Assimil" books usually provide, however I sympathise that since these books are obliged to cater to absolute beginners, they are limited in the space they can afford to material more relevant to those looking for a more realistic challenge. Even the mighty "Assimil" have made this compromise for their MSA Arabic books, and the reality of the market has meant that we have had no Gulf Arabic edition whatsoever from them.
Displaying 1 of 1 review