Customer Reviews

Al-Kitaab fii Ta ^callum al-^cArabiyya with DVDs, Second Edition: Al-Kitaab fii Ta'allum al-'Arabiyya with DVDs: A Textbook for ... Part One Second Edition (Arabic Edition)

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

Some of the people posting seem rather bitter towards Al-kitaab fii Ta'allum Al-'Arabiyya. One poster even mentioned that after the first couple of chapters he could say he was a specialist but not tell somebody his name. That's probably because he didn't use the primer Alif Baa.

I studied Modern Standard Arabic at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California back in 1989 and now that I want to study Arabic again, Al-kitaab fii Ta'allum Al-'Arabiyya is the best resource I have found. Trust me, I've reviewed so many books out there - This is honestly the best one that I've seen. The DVD is a great plus.

If you are trying to learn Arabic on your own, from scratch, I think you will be in for a rude shock. Perhaps you'll learn some tourist Arabic, but that's about it. If you have access to a teacher/tutor of Arabic, then get the book, Alif Baa, go through that and then tackle Al-kitaab fii Ta'allum Al-'Arabiyya.

Good Luck.

PS. A great way to supplement your vocabulary is to use the "Before You Know It" software program from www.BYKI.com (I think that's the URL) - it's the best software program I've seen for building vocabulary as you get to see/hear the word in a flashcard format. I would definitely use this program in conjunction with Alif Baa and Al-kitaab fii Ta'allum Al-'Arabiyya.

Despite being the "new, revised edition", Al-Kitaab 2nd Edition is still lacking. . .

-The majority of vocabulary words are not interrelated, which makes memorizing a list of thirty or forty words rather difficult.

-The grammar concepts are not explained well. In addition to the poor explanation, the book often revises what one has learned in previous lessons later in the book. The order in which grammatical structures are explained is absurd: why would one wait until the 8th lesson to explain word roots? The concept of roots makes memorzing and learning words so much easier -- not to mention the fact that knowing a root allows one to guess new words based on the root.

-The DVDs are a nice feature, but the actors often talk too quickly and there is no script provided so that the student may follow along with the video.

Overall, if you are using Al-Kitaab with a talented instructor, this textbook is tolerable. From sources that I know, the University of Michigan is going to be publishing a much more organized, easy-to-follow introductory level Arabic textbook soon. It might not be a bad idea to wait until that textbook series comes out.

If you are looking to 'teach yourself' Arabic, start with 'Alif-Baa' or some other alphabet book of choice. Even then, I wouldn't recommend 'Al-Kitaab' for self-study. There are simply far too many nuances of the Arabic language that this book fails to address. The poor organization and terrible grammar sections would make self-study with this series torture.

The Arabic language, while difficult for non-native speakers to master, is such a beautiful one: do yourself a favour and find a talented instructor from whom to learn this language (or if you're a self-learner, find a different textbook series).

I wrote a review for the previous edition of this book in March 2004. The new semester has started, we're using this new edition of the book which I picked up last night before class. This is my immediate response.

1. The text looks pretty similar, maybe cleaned up a little, but the vocabulary, the story of depressed Maha, and the overall structure appear to be similar to the first edition.

2. What's not at all similar is the fact that the book now comes with three DVDs. They contain the video material of Maha's story, and they contain audio for the exercises (previously included on CDs which had to be bought separately). Most valuable of all, I think, is that they contain lots of footage of interviews with real Arabic speakers. There are conversations with real people in the street. There are graduate students talking about what it's like to be a TA (mu'iid). There are *real* high schoolers talking about the pressures of al-thanawiya al-'amma (like European high-school diploma, where performance in a few exams determines what college you get into). I think this really helps bring it all to life. I think this material makes it worth far more than the purchase price.

3. The video stories of Maha and her family have been re-shot, with ridiculously beautiful-looking people. It was easier to believe that the somewhat heavy "old" Maha was frequently lonely. Now Maha is stunningly beautiful, like she just got back from filming Baywatch. Difficult to believe she would be lonely. Same goes for everyone else - everyone is beautiful. It's like a daytime soap. Perhaps they were trying to counteract negative stereotypes of Arabs as poor, living in crowded conditions; or as super-rich, living in unbelievable wealth. This family appears to live like an upper-middle-class American family, with slick haircuts, laptop computers, etc. Perhaps they just need to make the story a little less maudlin (Maha's always lonely, Khaled's mother died two years ago,...)

In all, from my cursory examination last night after class, I think this is fantastic. It's so hard to find real Arabic-language material, this is a great resource.

The idea that one can learn Arabic on one's own is, quite frankly, insane and just plain stupid. It's not going to happen. And if you're taking an Arabic class, chances are you'll be using this book. There's just no way out of it.

It's a decent book but previous comments about the grammar instruction are spot-on. While all the guys in my class find Maha 'hot,' both genders agree that she is annoying and pathetic. Khaled is a bit better. The DVDs are great learning tools and the best way to figure out how to accurately pronounce the vocabulary-- if they didn't try to sneak in extra vocabularly throughout the chapter. You do develop a rather strange set of vocabulary without much rhyme or reason to it. Watch the DVDs *before* class to get the most out of them.

Remember two things before you drop your Al Kitaab out the window to fall on the head of some poor unsuspecting German language student:

1) It's called 'the book' for a reason. Right now, this is the best we've got.

2) Arabic is a tough language and it's not at all intuitive to non-natives. In French, you can often guess half the words. Not so with Arabic. Thus, as the preface tells you, you need to be studying 2-3hrs for every hour of class you have. Few people actually put this time in; those that don't suffer the consequences. No textbook can teach you Arabic if you're not willing to do the work yourself.

My recommendation for learning Arabic would be to start with an intensive, find a great teacher, forget you have a real life, make friends with your classmates, and get a tutor. Learning Arabic isn't a summer project-- it's a multiyear commitment. Don't bother with it unless you're really passionate about learning it because the payoffs can be a long time coming. This book, however, can work. I've seen several students go through the sequence and come out with an impressive knowledge of the language. A lot depends on the instructor.

While this book does cover several main grammar points, it is difficult to use and poorly designed. First of all, rather than offer the beginning student examples of useful conversations it offers lectures. So instead of learning how to have a conversation we start out learning about Maha and that her father works at the U.N. ANY beginning language book should be based on daily conversation types of dialogue.

Secondly, the type is rather 'fuzzy' and important short vowel and pronunciation symbols (written above and below the main script) are often either left off or completely illegible. While it is true that in advance Arabic these symbols are often not shown, for a beginner they are very important.

Another poor design charastic of the book is that the table of contents is listed almost exclusively in Arabic so if a beginner needs to make a quick reference to something they can spend hours trying to find where it is located in the book.

The accompanying DVDs are a great idea but not very well done. The language is given too quickly - more at the rate of an intermediate or advanced level - and there is no accompanying written dialogue to help the student figure out what is being said.

The Vocabulary on the DVD often times has a huge, long sentence to show how to use a single, small word. BEginners learn more easily and much more quickly when they are given small, bite size bits that they can easily digest and use in everyday conversations. (I created my own work around to this by having native Arabic speakers record the vocabulary words for me on an MP3 player)

While the grammar concepts tend to be well explained, there are not enough exercises to practice the concepts after the explanation. A really great idea would have been to have lots of exercises WITH answers so that the student could immediately check their work and see if they are on the right track or not. Instead the student has to buy the answer key... and the answer key is very difficult to read!

Also, the end of each chapter should have a brief synopsis of all grammar points gone over in the chapter so if the student wants a quick glance to refresh their memory, they aren't leafing through countless pages of fuzzy, black and white print.

This book seems to be the standard at the moment for a lot of colleges and universities offering Arabic language courses and I'm not sure why it is. In a day of Adobe Illustrator and other text languages it would be fairly easy to create a nice text with color type to highlight important points and other key grammar issues.

In summary:

Lacks practical conversation practice.

Has very poor type quality

Offers no way for students to check their work

Poor table of contents

DVD soundfiles too much for beginner students.

On the plus side, it does explain grammar points well.

I am a university student that began learning Arabic 1.5 years ago and...I hate this book with a passion. For a language so important, Arabic has very few resources...and not very good ones at that. Even sadder is that this book is considered one of the "better" ones.

The DVD is the main highlight:
-They have DVDs, which I noticed the other "competitors" of the series does not have. This way I get to listen to the language. The book and DVDs focuses on the Egyptian dialect, so if this is the dialect that you want to focus on then that is a big plus.
-The DVD uses everything that you have learned in the chapter: vocabulary and grammar

Another good thing:
-The book presents culture (hidden within the DVDs) but on the other hand my professor is the one that pointed out the culture for us to see and took us on field trips.

The bad:
-For the book to be really "effective," a good teacher is needed. This is far from a self-help book.
-I completely agree with an earlier review which said that the vocab is not interrelated
-I would think that vocab should be equivalent to the student's level in the language. For example, I learned how to say "United Nations" before I ever learned something more useful to a beginner, such as "house." (To be fair, there is a book that comes before this book. "Alif Baa" teaches you the alphabet and some basic vocabulary, but still not enough to be by any stretch a prequel to Part 1. But I did not use this book in my first semester of Arabic and I don't think many other Arabic programs do either.)
-It was two weeks of the alphabet and then straight into this book. This was extremely overwhelming for me and others in my class. Parts of the table of contents were in Arabic and already within the first several chapters are full texts in Arabic... Too much of the book is in Arabic--it's like they think I will "catch on" or something
-The grammar is unorganized and often times made no sense.
-The organization of the book is horrible. For example, if I wanted to look up grammar I learned a while back it is difficult to do so both because of the condition of the table of contents and because the text just blends in with everything else (put the grammar in a box, bold it, or something!)
-The glossary absolutely stinks. Some of the words in the book are not listed in the glossary.

Unfortunately, this book has become the standard at the university level and as a result, no matter how bad I think it is and how bad my professors think it is, I'm going to see this series for a long time...I'm starting part 2 out of 3 in a few weeks.

This isn't just a lousy book- this is what is wrong with Arabic education in this country. If I could give it less than one star I would, not for the whiny Maha or the turgid Khalid, but for the carelessness and sloppiness with which it was obviously thrown together and the lack of attention on the part of the authors to either the book's logical organization or to editorial detail- even though this is a second edition.

Everything a would-be buyer needs to know about this book can be found on page 183, where there is a translation exercise (of which there are very few). One of the sentences the student is asked to translate is "my grandfather used to have beautiful pictures of old Kuwait." The problem is that is that the "idafa" form of possession which has been introduced prior to this exercise will not work for this type of sentence, since "Kuwait" is a definite noun and the last term of an idafa is what determines the definiteness or indefiniteness of possessed or modified object. In fact, you will not even know until you are well into Book Two that there even are indefinite idafas, much less how to form non-idafa constructions of that type that are needed to describe old Granddad's photos. Need I say more? Well, explanations of important grammatical points are skimpy at best, important connectors like 'ama', 'fa' and 'qad' rate a sentence or two at most, many words in the text are not included in the glossary at the back, and you will finish Book One without even learning how to form simple imperatives: "Come over here!", "Bring the book!", "Ask your teacher!"
Case endings get to the party late as well, even though from early on they are pronounced on the DVD when nouns take possessive suffixes. By the last quarter of the book the student is left completely on his own to puzzle out difficult texts with little more than the admonition to guess the meanings of undefined words from context by watching for "parallel structure". By the way, if you don't know what "parallel structure" is, don't look for it here- it's yet another thing that these sloppy, pretentious and arrogant authors don't explain to you.

Like someone else said, I agree THERE ARE NO REALLY GOOD ARABIC TEXTBOOKS - (I haven't seen Elementary Modern Standard Arabic but a lot of users complained about it), incosistencies start from page one with this particular one, even with some basic lessons from other textbook I am not able to use this book on my own. I appreciate the efforts put into making this book, though (otherwise I would rate it with one star) - lots of DVD recordings, pictures but the author might want to look at how other languages are taught.

Out of all books I have attempted, I recommend Mastering Arabic (Jane Wightwick and Mahmoud Gaafar), it has some flaws but at least it's usable if you learn Arabic on your own.

May I make some recommendations?

Every text should have a vocabulary, all questions should have answers in the same book, not a separate one. Exercises based on recognising familiar words where 95% of words are unknown are a waste of time! How can you make translation exercises if most words were not introduced yet?

Having studied Arabic at the college level for a year I recently decided--despite some of the negative reviews I'd read--to buy the Al-Kitaab book, part 1. I was glad I had not used the book as the introduction to my Arabic language studies as it is not for [most] beginners. Even having completed the Alif Baa book [the prequel to this book, if you will] was not nearly enough to prepare me for this one. I have used and gone through most of what is known in circles as "The Big Orange Book" [Elementary Modern Standard Arabic, formally] as well as Ziadeh and Winder's An Introduction to Modern Standard Arabic, and found both to be lacking and dated. All of these books have their strengths and weaknesses, but together can give you a well-rounded education. (Along with a native speaker, who can help with pronunciation and conversational dialogues, neither of which can be found in any of the above-mentioned books). The Big Orange book lacks much, as it has several errors and leaves out crucial information. It also is in the Egyptian dialect. Don't even bother with Ziadeh and Winder's book unless you'd like to learn how to sound like an encyclopedia article from the 1950's. (It actually contains sentences regarding the Germans and the war as though they were current!! Can you say revision??)

I also bought a computer program called Learn Arabic Now which is all inclusive as it contains software for Arabic word processing, fantastic listening exercises, as well as reading exercises where you can break down texts word by word. This was extremely helpful in training the ear to pick out words and phrases. It also contains what many books do not: conversations! Finally, you know what to say when you meet someone new for the first time! Very useful program... At over $80 this program isn't cheap, but contains enough games and texts to keep you busy for months!

With all that aside, the Al-Kitaab book and supplementary DVDs prove to be the best learning aid out there, from the many books I've seen. THE DVDs help to facilitate proper pronunciation by native speakers as well as make it interesting. There are interactive listening exercises, conversations, and actual video footage covering cultural events. Yes, Maha is very pretty; I have not seen the supposedly overweight actress in the previous version. But what is important is that she speaks clear Fus-ha [formal Arabic] as well as the Egyptian dialect. (Although a native speaker told me she is Lebanese, as evidenced by her accent.)

But, if you have never studied Arabic before, be sure to at least have fluency in reading Arabic before attempting the exercises. The Alif-Baa book should be your first book, at least in learning the alphabet. You should be quite comfortable in reading/writing Arabic before attempting Al-Kitaab part 1, and even then, hopefully you will have already had some exposure to the language or else you could be left feeling quite intimidated. But, all in all, this is the best book available and it's worth the money. Oh, and there is a supplemental answer key that is worth the few bucks in order to check your answers. Note: only about 85% of the answers are given, so some of the exercises where you input personal information can't be checked. [Ex: Ana ismi ______; My name is _____.]

With this book you will definitely learn to speak Arabic with enough time and dedication to learning it.

Most of the points about this book's limitations have been made already (Harun ar-rashid's review for example) but I can't resist the urge to point out a few that I find particularly irritating.

--Vocabulary pages and the glossaries are right-justified. This means six inches between the beginning of the word in English on the left and the beginning of its counterpart in Arabic on the right. It's hard to scan across inches of white space between the words without rules under each line.

Vocab lists benefit from being narrow but in this book the words are as far apart as they can possibly get. I draw lines under each entry as a visual aid. Better to have the Arabic word in the left column, right-justified, and the English word in the right column, left justified. So they're back-to-back, as it were. Better still three columns, with the transliteration in the middle column. But...

--No transliteration. It's apparently a crutch that runs counter to the "see if you can figure it out" pedagogical principle the authors have embraced (the "coy" or "where's Waldo" methodology). But that gulf of white space in the vocab listings is a perfect place for a transliteration. I have a Japanese vocab book that does just that. Three columns: the word in English, the Japanese word in romaji, the word in kanji. All in about three inches horizontally. This is non-coy. It allows for different angles of attack. Some people (like me) prefer to get the pronunciation down before tackling the written word. I can memorize the words quickly given the aural cue of transliteration then armed with its sound and meaning, learn the written word. In other words providing the transliteration allows you to break the memorization down into more granular discrete tasks which you can then organize according to your learning style. Also the transliterations should be used within the English explanations of the grammar. Plunking individual words written in Arabic in the middle of English sentences is awkward and unnatural.

--Of course, it's ridiculous that you learn how to say "my maternal aunt is a translator at the United Nations" before you learn how to say "where is the bathroom". "Political science" before "I don't know", etc.

--Inconsistent written Arabic. On page 7 are three different representations of the word "feminine". On the next page is a fourth way. Look it up in the glossary and sure enough, a fifth way. Two ways I can deal with: vowelled first, unvowelled thereafter. No more, please.

--The typography is uninviting, primitive, hideous almost, as if produced using a typesetting system from the 1950s. The Arabic font is smudgy (shadda and hamza are sometimes just blurs), the page layout is atrocious (eg, the tables on pp 24-5).

Jane Wightwick's Easy Arabic Grammar explains the grammar in a much smaller, visually appealing presentation. After finding and puzzling through al-Kitaab's explanations I look at Wightwick for the concise version.

The most useful thing about al-Kitaab I think are the example sentences for the vocab words. But these sentences, which are spoken on the DVD, aren't in the book! They are, however, in the so-called Answer Key. Who knows why--they aren't "answers". They're examples, and useful ones, though of course no translation is provided. Hiding them untranslated in the answer key is in keeping with the "where's Waldo" methodology.

So, here's one way to extract some usefulness out of this beast. There's a CD of the MP3 version of all the files on the DVDs (not easy to find, naturally--it's in Amazon, do a search, same author). Get it, put the MP3s onto the computer, and rearrange them into playlists structured according to what you need. I have the vocab lists and their helpful example sentences in a separate playlist. I copy those sentences from the answer key onto separate sheets. Then on the iPod, put the playlist on repeat while reading the sentences. This is much easier to manage than the clumsy DVDs, and you can listen to them in the car.

Figuring out how to extract useful info from this book is a task in itself. The pity is, that the language is already hard enough, and a book like this makes it harder still.