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36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best grammar for learning Modern Standard Arabic, February 4, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: A New Arabic Grammar of the Written Language (Paperback)
If you want to learn how to read and write Modern Standard Arabic, or develop a base for Classical Arabic, this is simply the best there is. I cannot recommend it too highly. I wasted a couple years trying to struggle through other books, especially Thackston and Schulz, and got nowhere in spite of having had experience with difficult languages in the past. The difference with Haywood cannot be more extreme; from the very first day I made rapid progress. If it weren't for Haywood, I would still not know Arabic. The explanations and examples are very clear--as clear as they can be in a language as different from English as Arabic is. I have friends who are forced to learn with other books in their classes, and repeatedly turn to Haywood to understand what's really going on. It is true that the exercises are sometimes simple (as noted in another comment), but this is because Arabic is a Semitic language and therefore less intuitive than other Indo-European language (like Latin). It's a common frustration of intermediate students of Arabic to face sentences where they know all of the words but still don't know what it means--to bridge the differences between English and Arabic, the authors have to take translation more slowly. This book is comprehensive enough to take the student from no knowledge at all to an advanced intermediate level, where one can start reading widely in Arabic literature (though somewhat laboriously at first). It teaches a large and useful vocabulary of over 4000 words. And because the explanations are so clear and rigorous, it is also a good first-step reference grammar. Later chapters review and provide greater detail to subjects that are sometimes more confusing, like Arabic's numerous particles, many of which look very similar. A note on print quality: on occasion it can be fairly bad. Usually it's just the voweling marks that are obscured, however, and this is only annoying in the beginning, before one develops a sense of what patterns of vowels are common. There are also some typos, but none (that I have found) that really impede understanding. Again, I can't recommend this book highly enough. If I had never come across it, I would have never learned Arabic.
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30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
very well written but beware print quality, February 12, 2002
This review is from: A New Arabic Grammar of the Written Language (Paperback)
i purchased this book based on the reviews here and overall i agree that it's well written and presents the grammar clearly and thoroughly. my one complaint is with the print quality. at times it looks like a xerox of a xerox of a xerox, which can be quite annoying when trying to puzzle out the arabic. [contrast the much nicer but unfortunately unvowelled arabic in Thackston's book.] also, the exercises are of dubious usefulness, since they mostly consist of translating stilted sentences such as "The foreign traveller mounted a swift camel and escaped. For two months he drank camel's milk, and found it very bitter, because he was used to cow's milk." [unfortunately all too typical in traditionally-minded language textbooks: compare Moreland and Fleischer's Latin book, with gems such as "After the torches had been carried into the city gates, the king was able to show the lofty walls to the guests from the province who had come to learn the art of fortifying towns"!!]
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Must-have for student of Arabic, June 3, 2000
This review is from: A New Arabic Grammar of the Written Language (Paperback)
This is the book that all students of Arabic should have on their shelves! It is the most useful grammar of the written language for students at a basic to high intermediate level (most of my lecturers refer to it too!). The students at my university... have found it invaluable as a supplement to course books. The only 'but' is that because the book spans both classical and modern standard Arabic, it is not always clear whether a given word is in current use or not. As a 'teach-yourself' course in conjunction with the companion volume 'a Key to a New Arabic Grammar of the Written Language', which is how I first approached it, I think it is an excellent course for learning classical and modern written Arabic, tho' some may find it dry.
However, I would recommend anyone who wants a quick course on spoken Arabic - very different to Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic - to look elsewhere.
Several people in other reviews have mentioned problems with the print: if you find this a problem, try to get a copy of the old hardback edition (1965 Second Edition) from the 60's and 70's, as the original printing is very much clearer - the current edition is just a reproduction of this earlier edition. The book is also much more usable in hardback, and lighter too.
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