26 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Poor Quality CDs for an overall Decent Textbook, February 3, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: Ahlan wa Sahlan: Functional Modern Standard Arabic for Beginners: 10-CD Audio Program (Yale Language Series) (CD-ROM)
These CDs are used with the Ahlan wa Sahlan Textbook. The book is fine but the CDs are shoddy.
The sound quality is poor - room noise, coughing, shuffling of feet - all clearly audible in the background. The track breaks on the CDs correspond to an entire chapter in the textbook. Because each chapter has 4-8 listening exercises, manually advancing to the exercise you want is a pain.
The listening exercises on the CDs are not well timed - to follow along in the book, you MUST frequently pause the recording to keep up.
Overall the CDs complement the textbook's solid content, but poor structure, sloppy production values and an expensive price tag make them feel like a rip-off. Unfortunately if you're using the textbook, the CDs are also essential.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Terrible terrible audio, not compatible with iPod or other players, January 2, 2010
The effort and care put into the creation of the MP3 CD (it is not an Audio CD as a music CD by the way) is literally rubbish, a dog's job from execution to packaging.
Firstly, it is not because the files are in MP3 format that make them ready to use on a iPod. In order for a bunch of MP3 files to be useful and easy to store, find and manage in a player, the publisher (Yale University Press) MUST put some effort to properly tag the MP3s with the following id3 information:
- the freaking name of the album
- the freaking name of the artist (author)
- the freaking TITLE of the track
- the freaking NUMBER of the freaking track
If this information is not provided, the MP3 player won't be able to sort the tracks into albums, sort the order of them against each other and won't display the collection of MP3s in an order that will make sense to humans.
Now multiply the lazy job of Yale University Press by 240 tracks and what you have is a massive mess hindering any attempt for productive learning as you will spend more time trying to find the badly recorded tracks than listening to their crackling, noisy and annoying sound when they are needed.
The geniuses at Yale went a step further to make things even more difficult for us. If it is not enough to completely ignore ID3 tagging, they named the files in the following format:
[track number] [Lesson number (which is from 1 to 24)] [Lesson name] [page number].
Well done Yale, except that by putting the track number before the lesson number you make all the files that start with a track number to bunch up together on an iPod playlist, for example:
...01 - Lesson one - Blah blah - p. 01
01 - Lesson two - Blah blah - p. 21
01 - Lesson three - Blah blah - p. 31
02 - Lesson one - Blah blah - p. 03
02 - Lesson two - Blah blah - p. 23
02 - Lesson three - Blah blah - p. 33
03 - Lesson one - Blah blah - p. 05
03 - Lesson two - Blah blah - p. 25
03 - Lesson three - Blah blah - p. 35...
Oh well, unless you are willing and know how to spend a few hours adding this information manually to 240+ tracks so that the files are organised on an MP3 player such as the iPod, or unless you are going to use the files as they are straight from the CD on a computer but not on iTunes, Winamp or a software that needs ID3 tags to organise tracks, this book will be utterly useless and your learning experience painful and frustrating.
About the book itself, you will need to learn the alphabet before (this is standard and not a fault of the book) nevertheless I have some concerns with regards to its pace and would not recommend it for self-learners until they have done a couple of other books before.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An outstanding textbook..., May 25, 2011
This text is meant to be used after students have made their way through the workbook, released by the same author and publishers. The text is intended to be used in a guided, classroom environment. Potential self-learners should be aware, however, that due to the complexity of its grammar and the difficulties in correct pronunciation, Arabic really isn't suitable (given our current resources available) as a language for self-study. For those for whom classroom study isn't available or practical, I recommend the Wightwick and Gaafar titles as a starting point.
Vocabulary and grammar are introduced in a logical, progressive manner. The print quality is very good, as are the videos. The audio CDs, as others have mentioned, are a bit shaky. Overall, this is simply the best textbook currently available for the first year of Arabic study.
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