Customer Reviews

Modern Iraqi Arabic: A Textbook with CD (Audio)

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Why do so many authors of Arabic textbooks insist on confusing readers with their own idiosyncratic codes of Arabic transliteration when there's a standardized international code that most scholars and students of Arabic are well familiar with, and that is easy to learn for all others?
But my major disappointment with the book is simply that there's too little content to justify either 250 pages or 60 dollars. It is a common enough, if annoying, tactic of authors to inflate a textbook's volume by filling page after page with "exercises" in the form of widely spaced, monotonous lists of near-identical alternating phrases, but al-Khalesi has carried it way too far. The vocabulary and dialogues are fresh and practical, but there's too little of either... on 250 pages, one would expect an author to be able to go deeper into the language than this.

As you can see by the other reviews, this is not a book for beginners. I wouldn't recommend it for folks new to Iraq or to the Middle East -- there's not enough grammar and no Arabic script.

However, it's one of the few up-to-date resources on the Iraqi dialect available, and I found Prof. Alkalesi's work invaluable in my preparation for work in Iraq.

Note that some of the materials are based around cheerful, tourist-style dialogues. That won't might help you order masguuf (an Iraqi fish) but it won't help you interview folks about their daily lives (i.e. no security, no jobs, no water, no electricity ...) And good luck trying to check in to the Rashid Hotel (one of the chapters).

If you are interested in Iraq and know enough Arabic to transcribe the script, you'll find this a great resource.

I bought this book with CD's recently and had a chance to use it over in Iraq. I believe it would make a decent book for beginners, but some background in Arabic would be helpful. For those proficient in another Arabic dialect who want to learn Iraqi it does tend to be a little basic, but it still gives you a decent grasp of the basic structure of Iraqi Arabic. Overall I found it instructive, but I thought it was pricey ...(you do get the CD's though). Quite a few typographical errors in the book that could throw beginners off.

I ordered this book before I read the reviews here, and awaited its' arrival with some trepidation. Fortunately, I was pleasantly surprised...
To me, the six CD's (about 6.5 hrs)of audio alone are nearly worth the purchase price. The fact that there is no Arabic script accompanying the text isn't as big a deal as it sounds. You are learning a colloquial, SPOKEN dialect of Arabic, that would never be written anyway! Though there are more similarities than differences between spoken and written Arabic, learning to read & write Arabic is a completely different subject.
The author definitely could have squeezed more content into the pages by a little more judicious use of space, but I don't feel cheated...
Definitely worth the time & money!

When I first saw this book I was excited to see a text book that specialized in a dialect, whcih has more similarities to the countries that I have studied (Levantine) than Egpytian Arabic. However, I was very disappointed to learn that the book does not use the Arabic alphabet. What the heck?

Granted, spelling is still difficult for me in this language, but I am not going to lay out money for a book which will not help me learn to read like the locals in the dialect that it purports to teach. I thought the point of books was to read. With this approach, that of ignoring the alphabet, you can finish a course and still be an illiterate in the langauge.