Customer Reviews

Ahlan Wa Sahlan: Functional Modern Standard Arabic for Beginners [With CDROM and DVD] (Book DVD & CD) (Arabic Edition)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I used this book (the new edition) for two terms in teaching basic and intermediate Arabic. The book was poorly organized and much of the vocabulary didn't seem to work with the themes of the lessons. The grammatical explanations were inconsistently thorough or incomplete depending on the grammatical element. For example: Why introduce a complex grammatical element like "laakin/lakinna" in the first chapter when students will most likely use it incorrectly and when students cannot yet fully conjugate the present or past tense or even have a understanding how to ask questions involving "limadha"? They begin by speaking incorrectly from the start and correcting them leaves them with more questions.

It was nice that the online exercises were available, but they only stressed passive skills. Many students could pass them easily just by letter recognition alone and without really assessing their comprehension level. Students would pass the online exercises then not understand why their test and homework performance was so poor.

I had to switch to another Arabic curriculum because there was so much preparation just to make the book useful in class. I don't know how anyone would use this book for self-study since none of the CD files/.mp3 files were labeled clearly. I found the cartoon pictures not only culturally in-authentic but were cheesy and inappropriate for an academic setting. Some of the drills/exercises were useful when we used the book as a supplement to our main curriculum. I'd recommend it as a learning resource but not as a primary text.

Great book.

After reading the other reviews, I realized that it may not be clear that you need to have the accompanying workbook also (this is the material that introduces you to the alphabet, sounds, etc.). Those two together provide an excellent intro to Arabic.

Ahlan Wa Sahlan is a textbook. This fact is important because without the benefit of having an instructor the layout of this book is likely to frustrate people studying independently. Having used this textbook for Arabic 1 and Arabic 2 at the university level I can attest that this book has some serious flaws.

The first thing most people notice when they open Ahlan Wa Sahlan is the typeset and the graphics. The book simply looks old and outdated. Photos are grainy and pixilated and despite some graphic enhancements for the new edition this book still has the look of a textbook 20 years old. The accompanying CD and DVD are well produced but it is apparent that this is the real extent of the "updated" edition. This in itself wouldn't be a problem but the book's also presents fundamental flaws early on. First, Arabic script is introduced in the very first chapter without any transliteration or translation, and this pattern repeats itself consistently throughout the book. This is critical because studies have shown that language learning is often facilitated by side-by-side translations. It is crucial that beginning students of Arabic quickly associate the completely foreign looking alphabet with English equivalent letters, words and sounds.

As with any new subject, repetition is key, but Ahlan Wa Sahlan pays superficial attention to things like Arabic numerals and then jquite humerously simply starts using them. Advanced students often find themselves flipping pages wildly in search of information (barely) covered in earlier chapters. Likewise, the index is confusing with no "quick" guides to grammar rules, vocabulary or useful phrase for basic communication.

On a deeper level, the explanation of the Arabic verbs ya and waw and the explanation of the tamarbutah and consonant-vowel-consonant patterns are glossed over too quickly, too soon which make subsequent grammar lessons that much harder. Arabic speaking countries have vibrant cultures but almost no attention is paid to the culture and pyschology behind the Arabic language. In other language books this might be overlooked but Arabic is completely unqiue in that the essential structure of the language has remained completely unchamged for almost 1,400 years due largley to intense safeguarding by the uluma (Muslim scholars). This not only makes Arabic unique and fascinating, but exploring this facet actually helps the student of Arabic better understand the most basic aspects of the language,

What does the book do right? It emphasizes the writing of Arabic script. In fact, this is about the only thing it consistently hammers home with exercises presented in every chapter.

In the end Ahlan Wa Sahlan suffers from a lack of organizational forethought. As part of a university course this book gets a THREE star rating because a good professor will easily be able to fill in the gaps, but as a self-study tool this book should not even be considered.

Having learned a couple foreign languages and used several primary text books, I recognize a few problems with this one straight away. First, the glossary is only one-way, from Arabic to English, which isn't particularly useful for beginners. Second, the index is also not very useful, considering that it indexes every single mention of a particular word in the course of the book. For instance, "pronoun" has more than twenty entries, most of which are simply the occurrence of the word "pronoun" in the text, and not meaningful instances that instruct on pronoun usage, etc.

But here's the biggest problem - this book delves too steeply into pure Arabic script and vocabulary. Obviously, Arabic will be a very foreign language for most Westerners, and this book begins on page 4 with untranslated Arabic with no phonetic spellings for English speakers. I suppose it is assumed the instructor will teach with other materials for some time before beginning to teach from this book. But that does not excuse the fact that this book pulls no punches with a very difficult language way too soon for beginners to have any hope of absorbing most of what it is teaching. In my case, I spend a lot of time sounding out words and guessing at new, unexplained vocab the authors foist on me when I think it would be more effective to give me some help with pronunciation and understanding the vocabulary early on in the book. Perhaps if you teach it at a more leisurely pace, it will be a better companion text.

The book also includes an audio CD and DVD with situational clips. These, you can take or leave. I prefer not to be burdened with additional gimmicks outside of the classroom, nor did I do it when I instructed foreign language, so I'm not a fan of mandating use of these sorts of supplementary materials with homework. But, for students who are more independent learners, these might prove useful. I find the quality to be good, but also sometimes difficult to navigate, especially the DVD - again, no English translations for beginners, so I spent more time fumbling around rather than learning.

I think the overall quality of the book is fine, but if you intend to teach from it, you will have a lot of work to do with other material before you can have your students crack this open. You will also have to make it a point to go over the vocabulary presented in the book with your students, and not assume that they will be able to make much sense of the lessons presented here during independent study.

The actual book is perfectly fine, It took an awful long time to get to my house. I actually bought the same book from ebay and it came before this one!

I got the book very quickly through the mail and it arrived in brand new condition. It's exactly what I ordered and I couldn't be happier with it!

I bought this workbook (and the accompanying textbook) for a first-semester intro to Arabic class. It is absolutely necessary to study this workbook all the way through before cracking open the textbook. I would not recommend self-study, although you could probably get by using this book and knowing someone who actually knows Modern Standard Arabic to help you out.

The workbook does a good job of introducing the Arabic characters--first it introduces the non-connectors, so students will remember them (it helps that all of said sounds are found in English too). The rest of the letters are introduced by their similarity in form, with the exception of the short vowels (which seem just thrown in their location, but it was as good a place as any). The table in one of the appendices is really useful for remembering what sound goes with which letter. For some of the sounds not found in English, explanations and diagrams of where to produce the sound are given.

That said, the way the characters were introduced as written was off-putting. Many of the more confusing letters have no explanation as to how to write the initial, medial, and final forms (trying to figure out how write the medial form of ' on your own without a calligraphy pen--thank goodness for my professor). If you actually do the writing and dictation exercises, your handwriting will get much better, and there are rather a lot of them.

The CD is of average to poor quality. Many of the tracks do not match up with what is given in the answer guide, frustrating if you're learning on your own, and a few of the later tracks have strange pauses in between dictation words. The DVD is a bit better, although this may just be because we can see the speaker's face (this helps a lot). For both, there is a lot of background noise present that can be either distracting or comforting, depending on the sort of person you are.

The vocabulary lists at the end of each unit correspond for the most part with what was in each section. It is annoying when the heading for each list insists that only the words with characters you have not learned yet are written with Latin characters. Oddly, some of the words mentioned are found only when listening to the CD, and others only in the vocab lists.

Cultural notes on the different dialects kept me very entertained. This workbook is easier to follow if you're already a little bit familiar with the Arab world--fun fact, the vocab list for unit 4 gave the capital of Palestine as Jerusalem and doesn't mention Israel (full disclosure: I support a two-state solution). I go to Brandeis University, which has very Jewish roots, so hilarity ensued in class that day (I call 'hilarity' what happens when two sides refuse to sit down and acknowledge the other; luckily it was only a few people arguing).

I used this workbook in conjunction with what our professor gave us in class, YouTube videos of how to write certain characters, a diagram that my Saudi Arabian friend gave me on the place of articulation for every sound [...], and Google Translate when I could not understand what the man on the CD was saying.

In conjunction with a decent instructor, this workbook is invaluable. Otherwise, I'd recommend getting another text.