Customer Reviews

A Basic Course in Moroccan Arabic with MP3 Files (Georgetown Classics in Arabic Languages and Linguistics series) (Arabic Edition)

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

 

 

The Georgetown series on spoken Arabic varies widely in quality. The Iraqi Arabic course is excellent and so is the Syrian Arabic course, which is available online. By comparison, this book does not deliver much. When they say "Basic", they're not kidding: The vocabulary is very
limited, although useful and with drilling (1960's style repetition) one certainly gets it down. The Lonely Planet Moroccan Arabic book is a good place to go to build on the seven hundred or so words this book offers, and there is also a Moroccan grammar in this same series that gives more grammatical details than the bare essentials offered in this volume. So for an introductory course this isn't a bad place to start.

So why only two stars? Because the audio is very poor, and in this day and age it is hard to see much excuse for that. What is actually on these MP3s is the tapes from nineteen sixty whatever, and seemingly without any attempt to enhance them (or eliminating extraneous sounds),
much less having the book re-recorded by a contemporary native speaker. When I ordered the audio from Georgetown (having already obtained the book) I actually spoke with a woman who told me that her husband was Moroccan. In other words, Georgetown wouldn't have had to look very far if they decided that a badly-needed do-over of their audio was in order.
This is 2009, guys. Get your act together.

For some strange reason that eludes me, many respected publishing houses are in the sad habit of reprinting outdated Arabic courses and grammars over and over again. Arabic is one of the larger languages in the world, and the official language of more than twenty countries. Despite this, the treatment of Arabic could not be more different from the treatment of Italian, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese or other comparable languages. While good, extensive and relevant courses, dictionaries and grammars are published all the time for other major languages, lazy publishers refuse to publish any good courses in Arabic.

This book is a case in point. It is actually a reprint of a book that was published more than 60 years ago! That would not be a problem if it was a good course, but it's not. It is characteristic of its era in that it provides a very limited vocabularu, almost no grammar explanations and no dialogues whatsoever. All it gives you are repetitive drills with the same limited vocabulary over and over again.

Publishers such as Routledge, Georgetown University Press and Cambridge University Press should all three stop pushing out old and outdated books. However, only you as a customer can make them. It is of course cheaper to reprint stuff like this book than to commission someone to write an extensive new book. As long as we keep buying these outdated reprints, no change will come.

The sound quality for the mp3s are not great, actually they are downright crappy - sounds like they were recorded in the author's kitchen. But the drills are helpful if you have the patience and attention span for repetition. Its pretty much an old school way of learning the language, repeating every word you hear about 5 times and moving on to the next word. Considering there are hardly any other moroccan arabic books out there, think it is a good book to get the language into your system. If you can get through the 700+ words repeated 5 times each at the beginning of the book, then you can move on to the exercises. Looks like it builds on previous knowledge. Also, there is no arabic script in the text so if you started learning the sounds that way, you'll have to get used to having everything transiterated in this book's style. A bit daunting but manageable in short sessions as all the drills are clearly marked in the book and categorized in the mp3 library.

If you are out to develop spoken proficiency in the Moroccan dialect of Arabic, I don't think there is any better product out there. I have been working with this book for about 2 months, and feel like I am already gaining a good grasp of the basics of the language. The exercises are generally easy to follow and facilitate learning.

The downside is that the sound quality of the recordings is quite poor (though understandable), and there are some inconsistencies between the recordings and the written exercises that support them.

Also, keep in mind that the book is entirely in transliteration, and as such does not help with learning to read Arabic at all.

It is really boring but it is the only one I found in the market that has the correct dialect.
It needs to improve on helpfull pharases and grammar.
It is better than nothing and unfortunately it does not have all you need.

There are not too may audio materials available for the study of Morrocan Arabic (which it turns out really is very different from standard or egyptian arabic...) That being said, I think that this is the best that I have encountered so far. Maybe the style of teaching is old fashioned, but it really makes it easy to retain what you learn. Too bad that there are no mp3 files to go along with the many practical dialogues in the second part pf the text

So far, this seems like a great book. The lessons I've read so far are very clear in explaining the Moroccan language. The only negative thing I would have to say is that some of the MP3 files sound muffled, but if you're reading along in the book, you can still understand. I would recommend this book to others.

If you are interested in learning Moroccan Arabic this is a very helpful book. The book lays down the basics of the language and is a good starting point in how to pronounce letters and words.