Customer Reviews

Arabic (Teach Yourself)

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

 

 

Unlike many Teach Yourself books, which can be more attuned to the prospective tourist who wants to get familiar with the language and be able to travel using it rather than a student of the language, this book covers Modern Standard Arabic in a traditional "grammar" sense - it starts with nouns, then adjectives, some verbs, various clauses, etc. and really gets you feeling how to express things in Arabic, even without the vocabulary - it is more or less a grammar reference, with sample dialogs and readings on Arab culture serving as backup to the points in each unit that Smart wants to impart. A great starting point, not at all too weighty, and a good reference for the beginner or intermediate student. One plus: he omits the noun endings (genitive, etc.) which are mainly unvoiced but indeed the realm of the proper, highly-educated Arabic speaker in reading and writing. Although this may leave out a large part of Arabic grammar, Smart is pragmatic in that leaving this out early on will get the student familiar with the basics of grammar, and then move onto that next if he chooses (depending on what level he wants to study or use the language.) Other texts either introduce the endings and "heavy" grammar early, alienating the student, or go all out and focus on a colloquial dialect, which means you can't read a newspaper or listen to the media without confusion, although you can order your falafel effortlessly in the souq. The usual dilemma for the Arabic student, but Smart helps you start without much pain. A must for the elementary/intermediate student.

I first bought this book four years ago and I still refer back to it from time to time. After learning the structure of the Arabic language using this book, i'm now able to make up complete sentences and converse in the language. No other book has been easier to understand yet still comprehensive enough to carry a person beyond the intermediate level.

I had this book for over a year and plateaued around chapter 5. Then, after reading Barry Farber's "How to Learn Any Language...", I went back to it with a fistful of determination and excitement and devoured the chapters like a hungry Muslim on the first day of 3id al-adHaa.

Starting fresh from the beginning, I found everything to be well organized from chapter to chapter. Progressing in a logical, intuitive order, Smart covers the Arabic alphabet and the pronunciation of the letters and brings you to the doorsteps of Arabic newspapers. Without the aid of the optional tape, the book does a fantastic job at instructing you on how to reproduce all of the sounds. Some of the more difficult sounds ('ayn, ghayn, qaf) were described well enough that Arabs have complimented me on my ability to produce the "hard" sounds. Saad, Daad, DHaa', and Taa' however, I got only with the help of Arabs that I have met using the Arabic from this book.

Talking to Egyptians is much easier than to anyone else, as the book is geared more toward Egyptian dialect than any other, but I understand and have been understood by all of the African Arabs (min Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, and Sudan. Colloquial Levantine Arabic still gives me great difficulty and the Levantine Arabs never understand me; the Gulf region is 50/50. I understand Gulf Arabs about 50% of the time, but they always understand when I speak.

This book has been invaluable to my ability to communicate with the Arab population in my city and read online newspapers like BBC [...].

Comprehensive, absorbing, essential to the do-it-yourself beginner. A very handy reference to keep throughout your studies!

This is an excellent book on the Arabic Language. It covers all the basic Arabic Grammar as well as giving an up to date vocabulary. The layout style makes it very easy to read and absorb a lot of information. My father who is a Professor of the Arabic Language at Harvard University reccomends his students to buy this book along with the book 'Arabic Made Easier' written by Dr. Mustapha Muhammad and published by Awakening Publications () Both of the above books will enable a new student to learn the Arabic language effeciently and quickly.

This is an excellent reference work, filled with easy to follow exercises and tests. You can't have enough grammar books as each has its strengths and weaknesses, I refer to all of them when I'm not sure of something and one of them always has the answer: it's usually this one! There are no tapes available for this book so go to books and tapes published by Georgetown Univ. Press by Kristen Brustad for that level of learning.

I am loath to recommend this book to anybody. It seems to fairly dance across the surface of what is in fact a very difficult subject. It certainly tends to make learning Arabic appear to be a lot easier than it really is.

Possibly this book will be a useful refresher for the student who already has some Arabic and needs to brush up painlessly. But for a beginner to start here would be a true deception. You certainly can't learn to speak Arabic from this book, but that's not the problem; you can't learn to speak Arabic from any other book that exclusively covers the literary language. The problem is that you can't really learn to read Arabic from it either, except maybe for the selections prepared for this book. If you're serious about learning literary Arabic on your own, start elsewhere, preferably with either Thackston, Cowan or Haywood and Nahmad.

This book is a must for studying Arabic. Make the effort to buy it in the book/cassette package. The cassette is not very good, but why short-change yourself?

"Teach Yourself Arabic" is for the serious student. As a serious student knows, one cannot learn Arabic from just one book. I have a large collection of Arabic instruction materials and can tell you that most books on the subject are worthless. "Teach Yourself Arabic" is the exception. I use it frequently as a reference and as a tool to jumpstart me on to the next level of study.

The book is very concise and the user must find other tools to learn and practice concepts presented in the text. This book is worth three times the asking price because of its contents.

Caution: Arabic is a very difficult language. If you have never studied a foreign language, I suggest you begin with something closer to your native tongue. When you do study Arabic, you will be able to approach the language having already developed language learning skills.

This is not a book on spoken Arabic. It is a book on the written language of newspapers and formal speeches, Modern Standard Arabic, but nobody coverses in this language. That is why this book is more like a grammar text than a conversational kit. If you have ever learned Latin, or Classical Greek or Hebrew, the methods you used are probably similar to those used in this book. The grammar is treated as far more important than the vocabulary, which left me feeling very bored. I really don't care about resource extraction, government ministries, etc. when I don't even know how to ask for Houmous at a restaurant. If your goal is to be able to read Arabic texts with a dictionary then this book is quite good, and I recommend that every Arabic student learns at least very basic Modern Standard Arabic. But for conversation skills you will want something else. There's one called Teach Yourself Gulf Arabic (by the same author I believe) which is very good for conversation.

This program seems to be more for a person who has had training in Arabic and needs review. I am a beginner, and all that I've really been able to learn from this program so far is the Alphabet. They don't "explain" things a whole lot. Sometimes they just expect you to catch on to things, which is very hard when studying a language like Arabic, because it is completely different from English. I've had this program for a year, and I find it very hard to stay with it because it moves too fast. I plan on buying a computer program to help me, and then maybe I can use this program again one day.