Customer Reviews

Ahlan wa Sahlan: Functional Modern Standard Arabic for Beginners

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Before criticizing the book its worth noting that Arabic poses several problems to the English speaker. Standard written Arabic is thicket of grammar that makes German look like a walk in the park. Spoken Arabic is a simpler affair but dialects vary from country to country. So teachers of Arabic have to decide whether to start with grammar (A&S's approach) or with conversation (Al Kitab's).

I am using this book at NYU. I, along with my classmates and professor, complain about it's over emphasis on grammar, its typos and questionable organization. The strict grammar rules lend themselves to simple presentation in tables, but the authors generally fail to use this approach. Also note that you will need to buy the CDs. They are appallingly expensive given the poor production quality.

If your goal is to read classic Arabic literature A&S is probably your best bet. But if you want to be able to handle a basic conversation I recommend Al Kitab instead.

I have been tutoring Arabic for 5 years (thearabictutor@gmail.com) & this is the best book I found to be the text book for my students. My students love my lessons & this book is a big part of the good experience.

it does not run over the material, it goes with you step by step, I do not know how Arabic would be learnt without a teacher, it is not like studying French if you know English..the difference starts in the Alphabet (writing & pronunciation) & grows more in grammar. So if you are looking for a gimmick book that will teach you to say parrot's "good morning" & "good night" & "have a nice day" then this is not the book...this is a serious, carefully planned, aiming at well-educated level of understanding & ability to handle this beautiful poetic language.

for those who says it won't help you learn on your own: Arabic is one of the hardest languages to learn, & it is an Afro-Asiatic language so if your 1st language is Indu-European then do not blame the book, & the book is not full of misspelling, probably you were not understanding the language enough to know what you are reading!

for those who do not like the book because of politics: the book is not political, it is a language book, but of course it will call Palestine by its native people given name & by the name Arab call it because it is teaching you Arabic in context! in this book you will follow some Arab students correspondances with their family & friends, & it will give you a background of the culture.

I am a very new beginner. I have found this course to be very easy to understand and follow. (Note--I also have the accompanying tapes which I purchased seperately.) Each lesson is broken down into very easy to digest parts-perfect for someone like me who is doing this in my "spare time." I would have given this 5 stars if I had finished the course and could give a complete review. I can only say that for now, I am hooked and enjoying this process throughly. (This is the book used in the basic Arabic course taught at Rice University in Houston.)

I have been studying Arabic for four years, and this is the best textbook I've seen that is currently available. It is well organized and easy to read. Useful vocabulary and a thorough introduction of the Arabic language are contained within. In this day and age a working knowledge of arabic is highly useful. This book, in turn, will prove highly useful to any student of the Arabic language.

I was intorduced to this book through the Arabic program at Ohio State where Dr. Alosh is currently a professor. The book is easy to grasp with or with out the help of a native speaker and helps the student to also understand the culture in hand with the language. Simple and complete, I would recommend this program to any person wanting to learn Arabic. Salam!

As an aspiring Arabic minor, I found several problems with this book that just miss making it 4 stars.

First, this book is in many ways only a supplemental to the audio cassettes, meaning that any study of the book alone will be unproductive.

Next, the book is bound right to left, like an Arabic book. While this is a touch of authenticity, the fact that the book is not written in Arabic makes this extremely irritating. There is, as it turns out, a REASON why all countries that read left to right bind one way and all countries that read right to left bind it in the opposite way.

These are not severe problems, but they do drop this book from 4 to 3 stars. The contents are vanilla Arabic teaching, no different from any other Arabic book on the market. If you don't have the money to buy the tapes, I highly recommend Teach Yourself Arabic instead.

This is the worst Arabic text book I have ever been forced to use. It wasn't an academic institution that recommended it, but an institute in Washington, DC, where I enrolled in a class to brush up my Arabic.

The vocabulary was completely limited to what only a student or tourist would need to ask as questions mostly for basic survival, and was not the least bit useful for adult context or business scenarios or reading in Arabic periodicals.

Some of the book's answers, which were provided in an appendix were invalidated by the teacher as being incorrect.

The grammar details are the worst on the market, and there was very little oral interaction available with the series to resemble topics that would come up in normal conversation. The stories were not engaging to me, as they all centered around undergraduate student life and the "first time away from home" topics.

Too bad, because it probably has the prettiest cover on the Arabic book market, but if you want to learn Arabic, or if you want you students to find useful vocabulary from your course through an engaging approach, then use "A Textbook for Beginning Arabic."

I have been teaching Arabic for 3 years to my college students using Al Kitaab, with decent success. I recently adopted this book for our new high school Arabic class. Of the two books, I feel like this one is more complete and more useful as a basic Arabic book that covers a little of everything. I'm also a Spanish teacher which means I grew up on excellent textbooks making use of the latest methodology and creative presentations. In reading the teacher's manual and the introductory materials, it is obvious that Dr. Alosh is well versed in modern teaching methods, and in that sense, the book is very good. However, the presentation is very much lacking in comparison to the latest textbooks in other languages. The graphics are of poor quality, the exercises tend to be rather rote and uninteresting, the audio is in a very poor package and there is not a lot of variety in the activities you can use in class. A teacher ends up having to supplement greatly. That being said, the grammar, vocabulary and culture seems to be presented in decent progression and the book appears to be fairly complete, in the sense that it doesn't skip important or useful items. Learning any language on your own from a book is a task that is difficult to impossible for most people, and this book does not change that for Arabic. It's a good choice for classroom use, but I wouldn't buy it expecting to do a self-study. I think that with the addition of more communicative, contextualized, visual, and varied activities that could be used to practice the topics, this could be a top-notch textbook.

**I have just received a flyer about a second edition of this book that is out. It apparently has a DVD and upgraded communicative exercises. I haven't seen the book yet, but from the sample chapter available for viewing on-line, it appears as though many of the shortcomings may have been improved. Try to get the second edition of this book if you can.

***I bought a copy of the second edition here on Amazon. It turns out that it is more or less the same basic material re-packaged with a bit nicer pictures and with the first 4 chapters of the book offloaded into a workbook intended to teach the alphabet. There is also a DVD with little video clips that go along with the lessons. The clips are a bit odd. They use the same actors over and over, some of which are not native speakers of Arabic, but they play different characters each time, so there's no continuity. It seems as though there was an attempt to bring this book more in line with the Alif Baa-Al Kitaab series which is more popular. I still prefer this book's grammar sequence and explanations, but there is also still room for improvement with the videos and exercises in the book.

This textbook is designed to cover the first year of instruction in Modern Standard Arabic. Accompanied by an instructor's manual and an audio program, it will teach students to read, speak, and write Arabic. The text presents an engaging story that involves Adnan, a Syrian student studying in the U.S., and Michael, an American student studying in Cairo. In diaries, letters, and postcards, the two students describe their thoughts and activities, revealing how a non-American views American culture and how the Arabic culture is experienced by an American student. The text also provides information about the geography of the Arab world, prominent characters in history, festivities in Arab culture, the media, daily life, and the family. Exercises in comprehension, vocabulary, grammar, and writing attend to both form and meaning and develop functional abilities and knowledge about the Arabic sound, writing, and language systems. A great advance in the way Arabic is taught and an outstanding new addition to the available materials on the subject. ALSIADI,The State University of New jersey,RUTGERS .

This textbook is designed to cover the first year of instruction in Modern Standard Arabic. Accompanied by an instructor's manual and an audio program, it will teach students to read, speak, and write Arabic. The text presents an engaging story that involves Adnan, a Syrian student studying in the U.S., and Michael, an American student studying in Cairo. In diaries, letters, and postcards, the two students describe their thoughts and activities, revealing how a non-American views American culture and how the Arabic culture is experienced by an American student. The text also provides information about the geography of the Arab world, prominent characters in history, festivities in Arab culture, the media, daily life, and the family. Exercises in comprehension, vocabulary, grammar, and writing attend to both form and meaning and develop functional abilities and knowledge about the Arabic sound, writing, and language systems. A great advance in the way Arabic is taught and an outstanding new addition to the available materials on the subject.MOHAMED A ALSIADI,The State University of New jersey,RUTGERS .