Customer Reviews

A Dictionary of Syrian Arabic: English-Arabic (Richard Slade Harrell Arabic Series)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I refer to this book once in a while.Its really neat that I can just think of a word, look it up and voila!....there it is in perfect syrian colloquial arabic.The entries also have example sentences to give you an idea of the context and grammatical syntax with which this word is used.I have noticed however that some very common arabic expressions/words that I hear spoken by Syrians and Lebanese are not included as synonyms for the meanings.Im not sure if this is because this book was compiled in the 1960s and the colloquial slang could be slightly different now in 2005....this sort of thing is very rare, though.I wonder how on earth they compiled such a detailed exhaustive list.This is a lifetime keepsake, if you are as crazy about learning levantine arabic as I am!

This book is superb. Its biggest plus is that it uses thousands of real-life examples of sentences in Syrian Arabic and demonstrate how words are used. It is designed to be a guide to speaking Arabic on a conversational level, and is replete with colloqualisms, figures of speech, and idioms. It is well worth the money.

This is a very good dictionary for the Syrian dialect. It includes broken plurals and it uses most of the words in sentences. Some might complain that it is not written in the Arabic script, but I thought the notation chosen was helpful for pronounciation. One downside is that it is not totally comprehensive, but it contained almost all of the words I wanted to look up.

I was excited about receiving this book, but once it arrived, I opened it up and couldn't even make out the Arabic script because of the (very) poor quality of the print! The English text was even fuzzy. Fortunately the return process went smoothly and I received my money back!

especially useful are the examples given with each entry. it can be seen that an effort has been made to give all the possibilities for each entry. the disadvantage of this dictionary is that many entries are missing. in the short time i've been using it, i could not find at least three english words and not esoteric ones, but words i would expect to find, for instance "wander". all considered, recommended for students of syrian-palestinian spoken arabic at beginner or intermediate level.

A good transliterated dictionary of most of the words you'll ever use.

It's a shame that the Arabic-English part was never completed!! I love this dictionary, it has almost everything it. I actually went through most of it with a Syrian friend, and he agreed that everything in there appears as it is spoken in Syria today. It lacks slang terms, but then again one can learn the slang of Syrian Arabic by visiting Syria, and it's a great country to visit, very beautiful!

This book is not even witten in Arabic. To use it I will have to learn a whole new transliteration system. It is useless for someone transitioning from classical Arabic to spoken arabic.

I'll give it five stars because my background is mostly Syrian. I went there as a vacation this summer and it was fun. Wink*later!