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Saudi Arabic Basic Course: Urban Hijazi Dialect
Created by language experts from the US Foreign Service Institute, this course is designed to aid the learner in speaking Arabic at an accelerated rate. Audio is also available for this course (details on website www.fsilanguages.co.cc).
306 pages, Paperback
First published June 29, 2011
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August 11, 2026
I can't remember where I bought this book with its tapes, but I think it was either on Connecticut Ave in Washington, DC, or it was in Bethesda, Maryland. Anyway, I remember that it was a cold December day and I was headed back to Saudi Arabia where I had already learned a smattering of Arabic. I toyed around with it for 2 or 3 years. I could never get serious about Arabic, although I had to learn it, not in Saudi Arabia so much but later when I wound up back in DC working at the Saudi Embassy. As I finally got back into it, I learned to admire the beauty of Arabic, especially its logic and the pronunciation of its expressive vocabulary. Saudis, by the way, have a great sense of humor, and funnily enough we never failed to get each other's jokes whether in Arabic or English. I enjoyed learning Arabic pronunciation which at first had me gagging and biting my tongue and sometimes making my throat ache.
This was a good manual to learn Arabic from; but as I said I had no great desire to learn it, and moreover, as I found out, most Saudis who learn English do not relish learning English either. It's just something you had to do at the time. Farsi and Azeri Turkish was that way for me as well. Mainly, I think, because when you got into conversations with native speakers, not only was it easy to make big mistakes from which you might earn a derogatory nickname (in applied linguistics it's called risk-taking when you plough ahead anyway). The subject matter is usually about US politics and how it affects them, or religion.
It's frustrating to hear other Arabic speakers from Egypt, for example, when they say "gameel" for the Saudi "jameel". There are different dialects even within Saudi Arabia. For example, Hejazi for the western side of the country and Gulf Arabic for the eastern side. You can't go wrong with learning Standard Arabic that every Arab will understand, but that version wasn't available to me that cold December day and I only had a few hours before I had to board a plane for Jeddah.
This was a good manual to learn Arabic from; but as I said I had no great desire to learn it, and moreover, as I found out, most Saudis who learn English do not relish learning English either. It's just something you had to do at the time. Farsi and Azeri Turkish was that way for me as well. Mainly, I think, because when you got into conversations with native speakers, not only was it easy to make big mistakes from which you might earn a derogatory nickname (in applied linguistics it's called risk-taking when you plough ahead anyway). The subject matter is usually about US politics and how it affects them, or religion.
It's frustrating to hear other Arabic speakers from Egypt, for example, when they say "gameel" for the Saudi "jameel". There are different dialects even within Saudi Arabia. For example, Hejazi for the western side of the country and Gulf Arabic for the eastern side. You can't go wrong with learning Standard Arabic that every Arab will understand, but that version wasn't available to me that cold December day and I only had a few hours before I had to board a plane for Jeddah.
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