Customer Reviews

Arabic For Dummies

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

 

 

This guide is exactly what it says it is- Arabic for Dummies. If you are not comfortble with the Arabic script, or just want to learn the basics of speech, this is the book for you. This is also great for travelers who want to get beyond just being able to say hello. The book is easy to read, has intresting cultural tips and put together well. As a new arabic student, it was nice to have a guide that was completly transliterated, but if you truly want to understand Arabic you are going to need to write it!

I'm very much in favor of the "X for Dummies" concept. It would be wonderful to be able to simplify Arabic. However, I returned this book to the bookstore shelf after a quick glance at the inside cover, which listed some survival phrases, and a quick thumb-through. The transliteration system is very misleading (that is, the Arabic written phonetically in 'Latin' letters). Actually, there are two transliteration systems in use. In one column is listed the word or phrase in a very scientific and accurate system. In the next column the author gives a supposedly simplified Berlitz-type transliteration such as is used in phrase books for tourists. I had a very tough time interpreting any of the utterances just by looking at the "Berlitz" column. The system used in that column is neither scientific nor an effective "Berlitz"-type system. The most glaring example I saw is his assertion that the "kasrah" vowel-marker is pronounced "like the long 'e' in 'feet' or 'treat'". According to him, the Arabic word for 'girl' is 'bee-neht'. The British picked up this word during their long sojourn in the Middle East, and they spell and pronounce it 'bint', with a short 'i', which is exactly how it should be pronounced, even if it can have a derogatory connotation in British English. Another example with the 'kasrah' is the number 'six', which the author writes 'see-ta'. 'Sit-ta' or even 'sit-tuh' would be more understandable, as without the double 't' sound and short 'i', it just doesn't mean 'six.' His 'kah-leb', 'dog', should be written 'kalb' or 'kelb'.

The author has great credentials, and I have not listened to the CD. Maybe the "X for Dummies" editors imposed the "Dummied down" system on the book. It's too bad when an attempt at simplification makes the subject matter more difficult

I am little more than a beginner and I've seen a lot of Arabic textbooks. Some reviewers were too harsh in my opinion.

First, it's a simple guide and no stress introduction. Dialogs are good, with 2 rates - natural and slow. I'd prefer ALL dialogues to be recorded, not just selected as it is very important.

The simpler version of standard Arabic is chosen with no case endings, which is the feature of spoken dialects.

I wouldn't use 2 versions of romanisation but only one - standard and I would provide the Arabic text as well, at least for reference.


It's not classical or Koranic Arabic but it's a more or less standard Arabic of modern media, also used by many foreign learners and it's not colloquial either (not spoken dialects). It's probably very difficult to choose a version of Arabic to suit all learners.

The story of Macbeth is the story of a great man brought low by one fatal flaw. The story of Arabic for Dummies is the story of a good book brought low by... well, by... a number of small but deadly flaws that could so easily have been avoided.

First, the good points. Arabic for Dummies does an excellent job of laying down the basics of grammar in chapter 2. With irresistible brio, Amine Bouchentouf zips through nouns, adjectives, prepositions, the negative, and both present and past tenses. All with clearly-worked examples and terse, admirably lucid explanations.

In one swoop, the student has enough grammar to carry him through. Compare this to the nervous-Nellie approach of other books: Living Language Ultimate Arabic does not get to the present tense until chapter 6; and the New Arabic Grammar sidles up to the Arabic verb for the very first time in chapter 12.

What's more, the assigned vocabulary consists of useful everyday terms, directly related to the topics at hand. This is a simple principle which nonetheless eludes many Arabic textbook writers.

Now for the bad. The author is not a trained linguist, and sometimes it shows. In chapter 13, for instance, he manages to be profoundly mistaken about tense, mood, and the auxiliary verb, all within the space of three paragraphs.

Moreover, certain assertions in the book are tricky to reconcile with reality. For instance, from chapter 1: "M[odern] S[tandard] A[rabic] is the language that [...] friends and families use to socialize with one another."

Friends and families?! If you want to understand how gob-smackingly improbable that statement is, just read this anecdote:

"Parkinson relates the story a friend who was a passionate supporter of fuSHa [Modern Standard Arabic] and who decided to stick to it exclusively in his family in order to give his children the full advantage of having it as a native language. Getting on a busy Cairo bus with this friend and his three-year-old daughter, the two of them, father and daughter, were separated and the yelling that was necessary to reestablish the contact took place in fuSHa making the entire bus burst out in laughter."
(from http://www.languagehat.com/archives/002788.php.)

But these are merely isolated defects. We have not yet come to the most deadly flaw. You see, Arabic for Dummies does not use the Arabic alphabet. That in itself is fine: it's a valid choice for a beginner text.

But unfortunately the chosen transliteration scheme - fatally, inexplicably - does not differentiate between the letters hamza and ghayn. This is a bit like dropping the letter "d" from the English alphabet and recommending to the student that it be pronounced as "t". That sount like a goot itea to you?

At a stroke, this whimsical decision renders the book's excellent wordlists almost useless to the serious student. It means you will be running to the dictionary every few words to check whether that middle consonant is meant to be hamza or ghayn. You might as well keep that dictionary open, pick up a pen, and write your own damn wordlist.

Oh, and one more thing: Sorry, Wiley Publishing, but learning a language is tough. It's drill, drill, drill. Then drill again. Your readers will not, not ever, absorb the grammar of a lesson if they get one single exercise at the end of the chapter, and that exercise consists of a - fun! try it! - five-item crossword puzzle.

So with all these flaws, you might wonder, why am I granting this book a full two stars, instead of just one?

It's because of the CD. The CD is excellent. Useful dialogs with bang-on vocabulary, clearly spoken by native speakers, using exactly the right amount of pause and repetition. I have played this disk over and over, and learned much from it. If you can afford to, buy this book for the CD alone.

I bought this book the summer before I took my first Arabic class. When I started Arabic class, I found out how useless this book is (by comparison with Arabic in Ten Minutes a Day). Why? Although they cover the same material, Arabic for Dummies contains no Arabic script. Because there is no standard transliteration system for Arabic, learning Arabic in transliteration is like learning no Arabic at all.

When I learned the actual alphabet in class, including the letters, I learned the different sounds Arabic has, including two different types of D, S, H, K and T. The transliteration attempted to express this with capital and lower-case letters, but that doesn't help the mind see the difference as much as two completely different characters does. I can also now read my album covers (of music) and will be able to read street signs and menus when I visit Egypt. Now I'm disappointed in my Arabic for Dummies book because none of the vocabulary is given in the Arabic alphabet. It is not appropriate for supplementing my education because I am trying to learn to read Arabic as well as speak it, and when I speak the words, I want to be imagining the script in my head, not Latin approximations.

Another thing - this book focuses on the religious greetings and doesn't give many alternatives. I learned in my Arabic class that using the religious greetings may offend some non-Muslim Egyptians, and we learned alternative phrases that do not indicate a particular religious standing, such as Merhaba vs. Salaam Aleikum.

As a high-intermediate learner of Arabic, I found that the quality of arabic spoken on the audio cd included was very poor. It sounded as if a group of beginning students and native speakers with poor enunciation of modern standard arabic were carrying out the conversation. This sort of quality may get past the likely beginners who buy this book, but it is poor arabic audio learning material. Furthermore, there was poor correlation of the audio with the english-translation text and the translitered text, thus totally destroying the purpose of having a text to follow the audio (especially if you are a beginner- you would likely be more confused!) Finally, modern standard arabic and spoken arabic are mixed so freely and without any consistency that it serves horribly as any sort of academic text. This is a book that probably would have made a DUMMY feel more likely a DUMMY. I felt lucky that I was able to borrow this at my library rather than shell out even $5 for this book in order to realize that not only was it nowhere near my level, but that it was just a bad arabic audio and text in general! For beginner's, I would recommend LIVING LANGUAGE, ULTIMATE ARABIC (beginning-intermediate).

Although I rate this publication as a "so-so" product, it is somewhat useful to first-time language-learners with no prior background in the Arabic language, which I have. Because of that background, I must disclose that this review of the book is skewed by comparisons with similar publications for self-study of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or the major regional dialects such as Iraqi, Egyptian, Eastern/Levantine, and Saudi/Gulf).

The English transliteration system for Arabic text is awkward. The accompanying CD was OK and matched the lessons in the text. This would be much more useful and effective for self-study if the CD were updated to enable automatic speech recognition and provide active feedback to the user.

Hope this helps.

This is an excellent complement to my other Arabic language learning materials. The fact that it uses transliterated Arabic is not an issue for me; what is more important is that it explains grammar clearly and provides information and explanations in very easy to understand language. I have already learned the Arabic alphabet and their equivalent letters in the alphabet we use for English, so it does not matter that the Arabic in this book is transliterated. In fact, in some respects it is an advantage as I can read through the material more quickly to better focus on the grammar points I am trying to learn and understand. I test myself by transliterating the transliterated Arabic back into Arabic script so the book serves two functions.

I usually think the "Dummies" series is incredibly helpful.... but I have not used one for a foreign language before so perhaps the series is simply not suitable for learning a language.

My main problem was that the CD did not follow the way the transliteration was spelled! Reading the other reviews, it seems that perhaps this has to do with the difference between MSA and how real people speak - which while understandable, does make learning rather impossible for a beginner!

The speakers were also way too fast - the first reviewer says there were two settings on the CD - where?!!

Lastly, I think the text jumps around too much - it's as though the author is not clear whether the book is for tourists or for beginning serious students.

Sorry, but anyone who claims that standard Arabic '''''' is actually used in conversation by friends and families in relaxed settings is misrepresenting the language completely (which is a nice way of saying he's a complete liar).

You can't start to learn a language based on lies. You can I suppose start with some simplifications. Also not distinguishing between hamza and 'ayn? Really? Give me a break. Go spend your money elsewhere. I don't care how good the CD is.