Customer Reviews

Colloquial Arabic (Levantine)

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I discovered this book (without the cassette) in my public library a few months ago and liked it enough to track down the full boxed book-with-cassette edition and buy it (on Amazon, of course!).

I was pleased with it and learned a lot from it, but I should say, for starters, that I didn't come to either Arabic or language learning as a total beginner. I had studied literary Arabic over twenty years ago and knew a smattering of words and phrases in various dialects (and had also studied a whole slew of other languages and had no fear of grammatical terminology).

The book is useful if you want a brief survey of colloquial Arabic grammar (I had wondered how verb tenses other than the past worked, for instance, and I'm much less mystified now, thanks to McLoughlin's book) and some fairly interesting, lively, accessible sample texts (the usual greetings and polite expressions, a telephone conversation involving a wrong number, a humorous story about an Englishman who couldn't learn Arabic, a collection of proverbs and [mild!] curses...). I thought the story about the Englishman alone worth what I paid for the book and cassette (which was considerably below retail).

On the authenticity of the language used, I'm not really competent to judge, but clearly the target is spoken Lebanese Arabic; for 'what's this?' the author gives the Levantine "shu haada", rather than the literary "maadha haadha?", or forms used in Egypt or Morocco or somewhere else. The only basis for the statement by a previous reviewer that the author mixes modern standard Arabic with Levantine seems to be the slightly conservative spelling: "kayf" instead of "keef" (in the author's transliteration) for 'how', "ma9a salama" instead of "ma9a salame" for 'goodbye', "jadeed" instead of "jdeed" for 'new', etc. (though the speaker on the cassette uses the more colloquial, Lebanese pronunciations I listed second).

Some of the book's shortcomings are the fact that grammatical forms and vocabulary are really not worked with enough to be mastered, and that the transliteration system is a little odd and not conveniently summarized (for some reason, it uses standard Latin values for the short vowels, but flip-flops to a "SEE-it and SAY-it" sytem for the long vowels and diphthongs). The biggest drawback, though, is that the dialogues and story seem to have been an afterthought; there's no attempt to build up the vocabulary or structures needed for them.

So if you're looking for a single, good textbook (and you're a beginner), this isn't it--though you can learn polite phrases and some basic grammatical structures in the first few lessons. This is a book for someone who's "having more than one". Fortunately, my local library also had three other good items for the dialect: Pimmsleur's CD course in "Eastern Arabic" (Syrian dialect, no book), Hugo's "Arabic in Three Months", and "Just Listen and Learn Arabic" (the last two focusing on Jordanian Arabic).

Unfortunately, I can't recommend this book. There are three Colloquial Arabic books published by Routledge, but only one (Colloquial Arabic of the Gulf) lives up to the high standard in Routledge's Colloquial Series. This book is unsatisfactory since:

1. Learning a new language is reasonably hard, and most Colloquial books published by Routledge are about 300 pages. This one in barely 100 pages and, what is more, it's smaller than most of the other books. This means that the material in this book compares to 1/5 in another Colloquial book. I don't think Arabic is that much easier...

2. In this very short book, one half deals exclusively with proverbs. No doubt interesting, but that means that the actual page number for grammar and vocabulary is nothing short of scandalous.

3. The grammar is explained very briefly, and you don't get any understanding of it.

4. Very few vocabularies are featured on the tape, so you'll finish this book without being able to pronounce Arabic (nor understand it, nor speak it)

I'm very interested in Arabic, and the Arabic of the Levant in particular, so it's very disappointing that this book don't live up to the most rudimentary expectations. Routledge is renowned as the worlds leading publisher of high quality language courses (justified in 99% of the cases) and I sincerely hope that they will remove this disgrace and replace it with a book worthy their reputation.

If you want to learn Colloquial Arabic, go to Colloquial Arabic of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia.

This book is absolutely useless for learning Levantine Arabic! I won't repeat the points made in the other reviews which are all quite good, but I will say that this book DOES NOT feature the Levantine dialect AT ALL! It is simply a vaguely colloquial version of the Classical language, written in Latin script, which bears little resemblance to the actual dialect of the Levant. If you want to learn Classical Arabic (the written language) there are hundreds of books available, if not, try Hussein's 'Levantine Arabic for Non-Natives' if you already know some Arabic, Classical or one of the other dialects. If you don't, try another dialect - Egyptian is very widely understood (although Syrians seem quite amused at Westerners using it) and there is a lot of material available out there to learn it (the Routledge 'Colloquial' course is NOT the best one for that dialect either, though it is much better than this one). Arabs don't expect you to speak a word of their language, and will reward any effort on your part with enthusiastic encouragement which is generally not the experience of the someone who tries out their newly-learned English or French in Paris, London or New York.

You're not going to learn how to speak, read, or write Arabic (Levantine or otherwise) from this book. However, it is an excellent companion to a larger study of the language, especially for those interested in the Levantine dialects and those wishing to learn colloquialisms and expressions.

I have tried to learn many languages with teach-yourself books in the past. I must say this one is the worst book of this kind I have ever found. I only could learn some things from it because I had studied some Egyptian Arabic before. After completing it I found out that the Lebanese it teaches had nothing to do with the language my Lebanese friends speak. Don't even consider buying it

I am studying MSA and Egyptian, and wanted to learn some basics of Levantine dialects as well, and found it very useful in that respect. I also agree with a previous reviewer's statement that the story about the Englishman alone was worth the price I payed for the book. If you're looking for an overview of the dialects of the Levant, than this is a perfect book in my opinion. It's easy to digest, yet covers the basics of grammar, idioms, terms of address, even some mild slang, greetings, general conversation, etc., and all in a small easy to use format. By the end of the book you'll be able to read a short story in Levantine and understand basic conversations, which is all the book claims to do. People are expecting some comprehensive course from a beginning level book, if you want something more advanced try the Syrian Reference grammar and Dictionary by Georgetown, or a more advanced Levantine coursebook. However, for self-study and an enjoyable overview of the dialects of the Levant I highly recommend this title.