Al-Kitaab fii Ta'allum al-'Arabiyya: A Textbook for Beginning Arabic, Part One [Paperback]

Kristen Brustad (Author), Mahmoud Al-Batal (Author), Abbas Al-Tonsi (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0878402918 | ISBN-13: 978-0878402915 | Publication Date: August 1995

Al-Kitaab, A Textbook for Beginning Arabic: Part One develops skills in standard Arabic while providing some material in colloquial and classical Arabic. It covers approximately 150 contact hours of college-level instruction. Students completing the course should achieve intermediate-mid level of proficiency. It contains Arabic-English and English-Arabic glossaries and verb charts.

Product Details

• Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: Georgetown University Press (August 1995)
• Language: English, Arabic
• ISBN-10: 0878402918
• ISBN-13: 978-0878402915
• Product Dimensions: 11.1 x 8.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #477,664 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

118 of 120 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The best Arabic learning course, but still short..., May 4, 2000

By 

Rusty Keele (Salt Lake City, UT United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Al-Kitaab fii Ta'allum al-'Arabiyya: A Textbook for Beginning Arabic, Part One (Paperback)

I used this book to study first year Arabic at the University of Utah. My teacher, a native Arabic speaker, often stated that this was the best Arabic learning course that he had ever seen. After studying Arabic for three years, and trying some other books, I must agree. We used the audio and video cassettes to enhance the learning process, and these were very helpful. (You could probably get by without the video, but it would very difficult to go without the audio cassettes.) While this course is great for studying Modern Standard Arabic (the formal written text used in the Quran) it isn't very helpful for spoken Arabic. I would suggest this course for classroom, group or tutoring use in which a native Arabic speaker is present. If you are using it for self study, I highly recommend that you find a native speaker to help you out with pronunciation and conversation. THE GOOD: It is set up like other good language learning programs. It incorporates multi-media and all language skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking) to help students learn vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. While this may not seem incredible, just try some other Arabic learning courses, and you will see that this is a major benefit of this course. THE BAD: 1) This book assumes that you have already gone through Alif Baa' (the first of three books in this series), and therefore learned how to read and write Arabic. It builds on the foundation started in that book. If you haven't gone through that 6-week course yet then I strongly recommend that you do it first. 2) While the "guess the meaning from context" style of learning is helpful, it can be a bit much in this book. If you do not have the answer key, or a native speaker to help you with the answers, you may not be able to figure out the meanings of some items. 3) Looking back on this book now, I think that the absolute worst thing about it was that it teaches too much Modern Standard Arabic. While this is nice if you plan on studying the Quran, it is not very good for conversing with native speakers in everyday colloquial Arabic. As the series progresses I became very frustrated by the fact that I had studied all this Arabic for all these years, yet native speakers had a hard time understanding me, saying that I sounded like the Quran, or an ancient author. If you supplement this course with conversation (and tons of it) with a native speaker you will benefit MUCH more from the system, and you will probably even learn Arabic! OVERALL: If you are going to study Arabic, then this is the course to use - no doubt about it! If you incorporate the audio and video cassettes, and go through all three books in the series, your Arabic will be MUCH better than if you just use this book alone. Yet the book relies on the multi-national "Modern Standard Arabic", and doesn't give enough support for the colloquial language that is used everyday by native speakers. If you have a native speaker to practice with, I think that you will get the full Arabic experience that the authors had in mind when designing this series.

52 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent texbook for long-term Arabic study, September 19, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Al-Kitaab fii Ta'allum al-'Arabiyya: A Textbook for Beginning Arabic, Part One (Paperback)

I had been trying to learn Arabic for a few years and not getting far when I finally was pointed toward this book. Wow -- our small study group made amazing progress. We're in the final couple of chapters and already bought Book 2 in anticipation of starting it immediately afterwards.

The textbook is set up like a workbook, so with the exception of essay-type exercises you do the writing in the book itself. There's a good balance of all 4 skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking) so it's not just focusing on reading/writing like other Arabic textbooks do. It assumes you already have basic reading/writing skills, plus know a few vocabulary words that are taught in _Alif Baa_. From the beginning they incorporate real-world reading from newspaper & magazine articles. There's a big focus on educated guessing and using context & other clues to get the meaning. This is extremely useful.

You have to get the cassettes if you're serious about studying, but we managed fine without the video. Near the beginning of the book, the speakers on the cassettes stick pretty close to MSA, but near the end you will hear the Egyptian accent much more -- get used to those g's!

The culture sections at the end of the chapters are actually interesting -- Fairuz, Umm Kulthoom, Nizar Qabbani, etc.

The textbook is meant for a classroom, but we are using it in a small study group. Once we got about halfway, we found it useful to have a native speaker tutor join us for our study group to correct our exercises & do the spoken drills with us. Now that we're near the end of the book, it's almost essential to have that kind of support. Without it you'll have no idea whether your answers are correct on the more difficult exercises.

When you get partway, there will be dictionary exercises. It's important to get the right kind of dictionary, because not all of the Arabic dictionaries you find at the bookstore will work for these. I already had 2 sets of dictionaries, neither worked. Get the Hans Wehr dictionary, which has words arranged by roots/patterns.

60 of 66 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The profession can do better, July 11, 2002

By 

Raymond A. Moody (Honolulu, HI United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Al-Kitaab fii Ta'allum al-'Arabiyya: A Textbook for Beginning Arabic, Part One (Paperback)

Review: Alif Baa
Language teaching methods leap from fad to fad with no consideration for empirical evidence supporting the newest assumptions. Alif Baa (first book) and it's companion Al-Kitab, for the most part, follows Steven Krashen's long discredited Input Hypothesis. Although language learning consists of linking sound to meaning, the model assumes that meaning is not required. Learning is actually supposed to happen when meaning is absent, just a little beyond the current state of the learner, that is, when the words and grammar are unknown.
The first volume, Alif Baa, does a fair job of linking sound to letters, with tapes for listening, including dictation, and a bit of discrimination practice. Careful drawings show clearly how the letters are formed. Quite appropriately, meaning, which may distract the learner from the sounds and symbols, is reserved for later. A teacher will need to provide many more listening discrimination drills to teach the contrasts in vowel length and far back and not so back consonants. The book does provide a good start.
Alif Baa and Al-Kitab, like most language texts, are not designed to teach. Instead, they serve as a teacher's reference book and minimal class activity guide that ignore decades of research on teaching, learning, and language.
There are no performance objectives stated, and no sample exams to show what knowledge might be attained. Neither the students nor the teacher have any idea of what is to be learned and how that learning is to be demonstrated. If you don't know where you are headed, you're probably going to end up some place else. With this text, everybody does.
In the second text, Al-Kitab, the major elements of the format of each lesson is as follows: vocabulary list, paragraph with blanks to be filled in from the tape, grammar descriptions with a minimal practice for each element, and, finally, an authentic text for reading.
New vocabulary is liberally sprinkled throughout the drills, including sections where the student is supposed to guess the meaning from the context. More than half of the unknown words do not appear in the glossary. Similarly, new elements of grammar are dropped in without explanation. For example, Al-Kitab (p. 109) presents 5 sentences, and asks the students to "figure out the meaning." There are no translations. Only with the help of a teacher can the students find out if their guesses are correct and that this section deals with comparatives. No explanation and no practice is provided.
The tapes or CDs (with talking head) cover the new vocabulary list at the beginning of each unit, recite the initial paragraph that presents the vocabulary in a context, and pronounce the paradigms for various forms introduced. Usually words are repeated twice with different intonation each time, making minimal pairs when they should not be. The context paragraphs--not conversational dialogs--consist of about 50 words each. The written form has blanks to be filled in by listening alone, with no way to check accuracy unless one has the tape key. Some passages are read a few feet from the microphone, so that some of the words are so muffled they sink into oblivion. The student can save much time and frustration by simply copying from the key and then focusing on puzzling out the meaning.
The grammar descriptions are a hodgepodge of English mixed with Arabic. The key words are left in Arabic. Understanding requires translation. Having a second grammar reference beyond this text is very helpful.
Oral drills amount to answering a few questions, often more appropriate for third year ("Why do you...?"), with answers that are far beyond the vocabulary the students control at this level. The favorite format for drills is written fill-ins. Each grammar point gets 0 (zero) to 15 items for practice no matter how complex the grammar point may be. Rather than serving as learning drills, these exercises provide a very limited set of models for teachers to expand on in their spare time, if they want to insure success. While the vocabulary and grammar is repeated in following lessons, there is no attempt at systematic review.
Another approach to vocabulary in some units is half a page or a full page of pictures with the word or a sentence in Arabic. This assumes that the meaning is clear and that the student will, with only one example, be able to bypass English entirely and plug a new word he/she has seen but never heard into an enormously complex neurological network based on sound and physiological pronunciation processes all linked to native language and cultural meaning, a dynamic, non-Arabic network that took an entire lifetime to develop. Just to begin the pictures need translation.
At the end of each unit, an authentic text provides a flood of unknown and, with this book, unknowable vocabulary in unvoweled form. Authentic pronunciation is impossible. But meaning, according to the theory, emerges automatically, with no effort at all, from sheer exposure to meaningless sounds in a meaningful or meaningless context. We all know this doesn't work.
With Al-Kitab, the enthusiastic student can look forward to long hours of searching for and not finding vocabulary, with mounting frustration. An explanation of how words are organized in Arabic dictionaries finally appears in unit 7, toward the end of the first semester. Only those fanatically dedicated and taking no other classes could be willing to invest in that much puzzlement.
Following the precepts of language learning theories 20 years out of date, this text makes no attempt to teach language learning strategies for the students or teaching strategies for the teacher.
Al-Kitab would probably provide a fair review for someone who already knows lots of Arabic. For a beginning student, there are much better ways to learn.
Raymond Moody, PhD
Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Methods of Language Teaching, and current student of Arabic
University of Hawaii