Customer Reviews

Al-Kitaab fii Ta'allum al-'Arabiyya: A Textbook for Arabic, Part Three

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I feel sorry for those reviewers who had nothing good to say about this textbook. I think that their frustration comes not so much from this textbook as it does from the fact that Arabic IS HARD!! I have studied over 10 languages and Arabic is by far the hardest. This book is not perfect; I doubt any textbook could be, but it does what most Arabic textbooks do not--it tackles the language from many aspects: written, spoken, audio, reading, etc. AND gives you a lot of vocabulary to learn. While this can be frustrating at times it is absolutely essential to learning Arabic--it is a vocabulary rich language. As far as the Isalmic slant to some of exercises, what do you expect. Arabic and Islam are inseperable. Even everyday phrases reflect this. A lot of the complaints I read about this book seem to stem from the fact that a lot of students didn't buy the series but instead tried to start with part 1 (without Aleph Baa--the book for learning the alphabet) or part 2 without part 1 etc. These books build upon each other as language learning should. You can't expect to understand what is going on in part 2 without learning what was taught in part 1. This seems logical to me. If you want to learn Arabic get ready for a long haul and buy this book. Buy others as well but for sure buy this book. If you are trying to learn Arabic without the benefit of classroom study buy this book and get ready to be frustrated. Arabic is hard, but so worth the effort.

I can't really add too much to what the more articulate reviewers have already said. I'm really writing this to counter the negative reviews.

I've been using this book for about a month, in a second-semester class (Alif-Baa was used in the first). It's true that it asks you to make leaps of faith, in that you're sometimes given only parts of a verb ('she lives', 'I study'), or apparently inappropriately advanced vocabulary ('My father is a translator for the United Nations' in lesson 1?). On the other hand, it does seem to mimic how we learn our native languages: we learn piecemeal, rather than by memorizing conjugation tables, and we often learn by guessing the meaning, using the word, and re-evaluating based on the listeners' reactions. Also, we learn in several ways, all at once: reading, speaking, listening, watching.

I have studied and achieved various levels of fluency in several languages over the last 30 years, ranging over Indo-European from Irish to Spanish to Russian, with a few others in between. I think you have to accept that, as exotic as any of these languages may seem to an English speaker, you'll have to open your mind to other ways of expressing yourself once you leave that (Indo-European) family.

For a beginner like me, learning Arabic seems like a very long journey. Everyone decides for themselves whether it's worth the time and effort. I think this book goes some way towards making the journey interesting and stimulating.

I am currently taking arabic at my university and we are using this textbook. I find it impossible to use. I am also taking French and the textbook we use is so much better organized. This book orders the information, especially the vocabulary, contextually, which is good in some ways, but overall it leaves me stumped and confused at each exercise. Each problem set takes hours to decifer and the dictionary in the back is not easy to use nor extensive. Pass on this and find another way to learn Arabic.

The book series is not my best bet for a person to learn arabic.The best book on the planet is MASTERNING ARABIC by jane wightwick it is superb combined with the audio tapes .The masterning arabic is superior in content and allows the person to see how words fall into place.Please try this book .The best way to learn arabic is to realise that it is different and varied in the way the words are formed this book shows that to the person who want to learn arabic so good luck