First Thousand Words in Arabic

Usborne First Thousand Words

by Heather Amery, Stephen Cartwright (Illustrator), Andy Griffin (Illustrator)

This bright and amusing book provides a perfect starting point for beginners of all ages. Panoramic pictures of everyday scenes are surrounded by small pictures with their names in Arabic.

Genres: Reference

64 pages, Hardcover

First published October 30, 1987

About the author

Heather Amery was born and brought up in Bath, Somerset. Heather has written over a hundred books for children, including alphabet books, science and history books, craft books, classical fairy tales, a series for beginner readers called Farmyard Tales, Usborne Bible Tales, and Greek Myths.

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I might need to know some Arabic for a project we're currently discussing, and I thought a good first step would be the alphabet; hence this book. It contains several hundred pictures, each one labelled with one or two Arabic words presented both in Arabic and Roman script. So far, I am not really trying to learn the words themselves, just the letters.

Out of the scripts I have previously tried to learn, Korean is definitely the easiest. As everyone who's studied Korean will attest, it is in fact a miracle of simplicity and logic, completely phonetic and arranged so that the appearances of the letters are based on the shapes your mouth makes while pronouncing them. At the other extreme, Japanese is generally agreed to have the most irrational writing system ever devised. Not only do you have to memorize thousands of kanji, as in Chinese; you also have two different phonetic alphabets, and you never know how any spoken word will be written or how any written word will be pronounced. It says a lot about the good qualities of the Japanese people that nearly everyone is literate.

Arabic script is nowhere near as messy as Japanese, but it is towards the unforgiving end of the spectrum. Every letter can be written in three different ways, depending on where it appears in the word, and short vowels are either omitted or added as accent-like characters above or below the line. I am also surprised to see how similar many of the letters are, especially in the reduced forms that occur in the middle of a word. But I am definitely beginning to recognize most of them. Later this week, I think I'm going to make a start on the grammar.

[Felicia follum · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good visual dictionary. Pages are organized topically. Each page has images that are labeled in Arabic script as well as the Roman transliteration. Though I prefer to learn without using English, there are a good number of images that are unclear. There is a short reference dictionary in the back but it's in alphabetical order for English making it tricky to find a quick answer.

This is also a great vocabulary builder for objects but there were not as many verbs, emotions or other parts of speech as I expected.

This book is appropriate for any age level and has English explanations making it a great option for many learners.

If I learn these words and have a native speaker help me come up with sentences for each I will be on my way!

[Peter Gavin · Rating 5 out of 5]

At 999 I was worried but there all there.

[Cindy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pictures to represent every word! This book is amazing! If you are a visual learner and desire to learn Arabic, I recommend using this book as well as whatever other learning tools you have available. This book was obviously designed for children with the style of pictures drawn, but the value is there for adults as well. Simple pictures accompany every word, written in Arabic script and Arabic transliteration.

Some of the topics are a bit hard to understand without any English, but there is a word list with the English, Arabic script and Arabic transliteration at the back of the book, as well as a guide to the Arabic alphabet.