Customer Reviews

Kallimni 'Arabi Mazboot: An Early Advanced Course in Spoken Egyptian Arabic 4

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The Kallimni Arabi series is the best out there for colloquial Egyptian Arabic. This book continues on with the first three volumes and contains excellent recorded dialogues. The biggest problem with the previous books becomes a real issue here - the glossary is very poor. In the earlier books, you could use context to work around the large number of Arabic words that are not in the glossary. Here again, the glossary contains only about half the new vocabulary, but it becomes a big problem at this advanced level. When the words are not defined, you often can't guess what they mean. Note that the text is entirely in Arabic, there is no English in the chapters, so when words are not defined, you're really stuck. I don't know why they don't fix this. With today's searchable word processers, a glossary is not hard to make. If they fix that, this would be a great series, definitely the best on the market.

These books are very well designed - something unusual in Arabic curricula. I only wish there was a classical Arabic program like this.