Customer Reviews

Arabic for Beginners: With a Guide to Arabic Writing (Hippocrene Language Studies)

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Here is the very first sentence the user is asked to read in Arabic (chapter 5): "The class room is a place in which students gather before the teachers, who explain the lessons and write notes on the blackboard with the chalkpiece." This pretty much says it all, I think. This book progresses from teaching the alphabet to unmarked, unglossed Arabic poetry in just 150 pages. Even the titles of the final chapters are in Arabic, with no exercises for using the material. Two possible uses for this material: 1) as a great example in teacher training courses of how not to write a textbook, and 2) for heritage speakers who want to become literate, although this second use is questionable since the material is just so dry.

This book contains about 70 pages of Arabic literature, in Arabic, at the end. Although I've barely started using this book, the presence of so much literary material gives me confidence. I'm not using this text as a sole resource, however. It's clear from the introductory matter that you already need to know some Arabic or Arabic linguistics or both to find your bearings. But I find that a book such as Smart's "Teach Yourself Arabic" relies too much on an "inductive" method and the intelligence and good will of the reader. Learning a language isn't the same as doing a mathematical proof. If anything, the next best thing to immersing yourself in the language's culture is having a book that contains literary matter from which you can deduce certain truths about the language's structure and the culture of its speakers. Plus, I find the author's non-Atlantic background to be refreshing. (He's from India.) Arabic is a complex language and culture, and any presentation of it will be partial and distorted, depending on the circumstances of the presenter's culture. "Arabic for Beginners" is a valuable supplement to other English-language teach-yourself materials on Arabic.

I bought this book as a text book for my arabic class. If you have a teacher this is an alright book, if you don't have a teacher don't plan on learning any real lessons other then some vocabulary. There are supposed to be tapes that come with the book, but no body seems to know where to get them. Their lesson plans focus too much on the writing of the arabic rather then my main purpose of the speaking. By the time you get to the 10th chapter, there isn't any more english written!