13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Semi-Private Lesson in Egyptian Sentence Construction, April 23, 2009
This review is from: Michel Thomas Method Speak Arabic Advanced (Audio CD)
Successful language learners know from experience that the most efficient way to acquire a new language is to alternate between: 1) self study with books and recordings, 2) small group lessons, 3) immersion amidst the target language, and 4) one-on-one on conversation practice with a native-speaking tutor. The challenge is to fit all this into your lifestyle with your available time and money. This course will give you a terrific boost up the learning curve.
Becoming adept at verb conjugation is necessary drudgery if you want to become comfortable with conversation in Arabic, Russian, German, or any of the Romance languages, and this skill is best learned in the small group setting. The problem is that this material is just too dry and boring to learn alone as a self-teacher with only books or verb tables. It would also be a drag for a native-speaking tutor to spend a lot of time trying to go through all this material with you, because it is something they learned intuitively as a young child. For a fraction of the cost of even one live lesson, these 5 CDs simulate a small group course given by two of the best language instructors in the world. You learn alongside two virtual fellow students, one male and one female, so you can practice both types of endings.
The reason the small group method works so well for this kind of material is that you find yourself competing with your fellow students to come up with the right sentence constructions very quickly. That pressure to give the correct response promptly is excellent preparation for real-life conversation. It becomes a game. When you are the first to get the right answer, you score. When your fellow students make a mistake, you learn to avoid the same kind of pitfall. If they get it right but you don't, you still learn by being corrected.
Jane Wightwick is a very patient teacher, first giving you the concepts, then quizzing you, then positively guiding you from your initial response to the correct answer. Once the whole sentence is completed, you get the chance to polish your pronunciation, by repeating the native Egyptian pronunciation of instructor Mahmoud Gaafar.
I'm afraid I must respectfully disagree with the other reviewer regarding the criticism that this course did not present more new vocabulary. I believe it would have been counter-productive to the special purpose of this course to do so. The key to success in language learning is continual practice, and the way to stay motivated to keep driving up the learning curve is to really celebrate your incremental progress toward effective conversation. Trying to acquire a whole lot of new words before first building a solid foundation in sentence construction skills would only result in embarrassment in public. Even if you know a lot of vocabulary, if you stumble on elementary grammar constructions, people will become noticeably confused, uncomfortable, or even critical, and the opportunity for having fun with your target language is lost. It is far better to be taught how to fish (i.e. how to conjugate verbs in present, present repeated, past, past progressive, and future tenses; how to use active participles; how to use object pronouns; and how to form negative sentences), than to be given a pile of fish (i.e. too many new words before you know how to put them together).
Whereas the majority of Arabic materials on the market teach MSA vocabulary, half of which unfortunately almost nobody in the Arab world actually uses in daily life, this course gives you practice with a good number of commonly used and understood colloquial terms. Many are completely different from their MSA equivalents, such as: go, come, want, see, car, because, when, where, today, now, yesterday, and lots more. Once you've mastered these constructions, you are ready to springboard to an excellent audio course that focuses on presenting more colloquial words and phrases --
Arabic On The Move( 3CDs + Guide) (Language on the Move), by the same team of educators.
The sound quality on these CDs is top-notch. I find this to be an important factor differentiating the various Arabic audio materials available for purchase. Arabic is tougher than the Romance languages to learn for a number of reasons, one being that it has lots of hard to distinguish sounds, such as ayn versus alif versus fatha, kh versus H versus h, r versus gh, soft versus hard S, D, and T, and single versus doubled consonants. Thus, it really does help to have crisp clear sound on the recordings you work with. You'll especially appreciate being able to hear everything easily on these CDs when you take advantage of two of the best opportunities to use audio-only materials to progress in your target language -- while commuting or exercising.
If you combine these two audio courses with the excellent books by The American University in Cairo Press (
Kallimni 'Arabi Bishweesh: A Beginners' Course in Spoken Egyptian Arabic 1 (Arabic Edition)and
Kullu Tamam! An Introduction to Egyptian Colloquial Arabic), and watch TV series such as Ahmed Etgawez Mona on Rekza.com (Egyptian), Yetraba Fe Ezo on 4cine.com (Egyptian), or Noor on YouTube (Levantine) for immersion, and if you can find a good native speaking tutor near you or online such as through the Arab Academy in Cairo or MyLanguageExchange.com for conversation practice, you will be delighted with your progress in one of the most daunting, and important, languages in the world.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
excellent method, March 28, 2009
This review is from: Michel Thomas Method Speak Arabic Advanced (Audio CD)
The approach is quite different from other methods as we attend a lesson given by 2 teachers, an English speaker, and an Arabic speaker who corrects the students who speak on the CDs. The English teacher gives a sentence or a situation and asks the students how we would say that in Arabic. Notice the focus is on Egyptian Arabic.
It is very easy to grasp the difficult grammatical concepts of the language through tips and visualisation techniques. I gave it only 4 stars because the vocabulary is quite limited (not advanced at all!)and it is a little boring to listen to the students who sometimes struggle with the pronunciation.
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