Customer Reviews

A New Arabic Grammar of the Written Language

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4 star:		(5)
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2 star:		(2)
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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.

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"!!]

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.

This book is excellent in explaining the labyrinth of Arabic grammar. It wisely introduces the verb forms in groups that have consistent vowelling and participle formation which is the easiest format I've seen so far. It's explanations are remarkably clear. I think the advantage is since one of the authors is not a native speaker they are able to explain clearly to other non-natives what native speakers probably take for granted. It is also consistently and scrupulously vowelled (essential for a grammar text book.)

As other users have remarked however, the book is not without flaws. The conjugation charts are wretched. Everytime I look at them, I get confused and forget how to conjugate verbs. The print quality, as others have said, is not the greatest. The vocabulary at the end of each chapter is bizarrely not in alphabetical order (English or Arabic) and the order seems quite random so looking up words is a pain (there is a decent root-based dictionary in the back however.) And indeed the sentences in the exercises are quite stilted. Check out this gem:

"We have described all these events to you so that you may know that piety is preferable to despair, and we have put our ideas in our many letters to you during a period of two years."

Come again?? (And this was BEFORE translation.) Still, they are designed to illustrate and reinforce grammatical concepts and they do that quite well. Interestingly my teacher, who is a native speaker, hates the book because of the stilted wording and bad examples-e.g. to illustrate the 10 verb forms, they use some verbal variants that don't actually exist.

Finally, it really bugs me that they use the Egyptian style of printing the final "ya" which means they don't put the dots underneath. Thus, it looks identical to the character alif maqsura. There is a whole chapter about defective verbs (those that end with wow, ya or alif) and the authors actually say "Look how the ya changes to alif maqsura in some of these examples." Well, actually I can't tell guys because you didn't dot your letters. Absolutely unacceptable that a grammar book designed for non-natives would make this omission.

Despite this book's flaws, this is an excellent guide to Arabic grammar especially considering other options and for the Amazon price you'd be hard pressed to find a better deal. If you are studying on your own, there is also a teacher's manual available.

I picked up a copy of this book in 1978 when I was in the Middle East. I taught myself Arabic from this book and T.F. Mitchell's "Writing Arabic." I've worked with and reviewed many other books for learning Arabic since then, and I still feel that this is the best concise one-volume introduction to the subject you'll find. It is true that there are no tapes available for it(at least not as far as I know) and some would consider this a serious drawback. There is, however, a key to the exercises published separately. I cannot recommend it too highly. Even if you are using other books to learn Arabic, this one is worth having for reference purposes.

Recently, I began fulfilling a long-held dream of learning Arabic through my university course. This is the textbook we were told to buy and use.

The most important point to make about this work is that it is a grammar rather than a real "course in the language". As such, there is no focus in the early chapters on useful words or phrases. Of course, Haywood and Nahmad don't pretend that this is something it is not, but this is a warning directed at those who might be tempted to use this (even with the separately-printed Key) as a self-study tool. It can be used as one, but isn't going to work well as the only book you use.

As a grammar, it naturally focuses on the grammatical concepts inherent in Arabic. Many of these are difficult to explain in English, as we simply do not have concepts of "attached pronouns" and "broken plurals", to say nothing of Arabic's highly active case system (Arabic has a genitive case which produces phrases such as "the fork of the mother of the Caliph").

I would contend, however, that it often spends too little time explaining some points and such explanation is often related in grammatical terms rather than "layman's terms". A case in point is the cursory introduction to the three cases followed by a lengthy explanation of the possessive. Two chapters later, an exercise suddenly requires the use of Accusative case, which was mentioned as existing and being marked in a particular way, but no examples of its existence were given. The closest to an explanation of how to recognise its existence is a technical note which basically boils down to "Arabic Accusative isn't the same as Accusative anywhere else".
Explanations of the differing cases with reference to English are provided, however these are buried in chapter 45 or so, significantly after a student (particularly one not systematically taught English grammar) will need them.

The placement of exercises at the end of every chapter is also a problematic idea, as many chapters cover a number of topics and the exercises revise all the concepts covered (in some cases, all the concepts covered in the book so far). Because of the foreignness (for want of a better word) of many of these concepts, the work would be much better served by inserting a series of "drill" style exercises mid-way through some chapters, particularly where the concepts are massively foreign.

As another reviewer has pointed out, this is a grammar which tries to cover both Classical and Modern Standard Arabic. As a result, not only are some words and constructions presented without enough commentary as to whether they are Modern or Classical usage, there is also no indication whether certain grammatical points are still in use (Modern Arabic, it would appear, doesn't use quite as strong a case system, for example).

Another slightly irksome point is that the structure of the book does not appear to be completely designed with learning the language in mind. The first chapter on the Broken Plural, for example, blithely remarks that the student should learn the plural with the singular (a comment made in many other books on this language - for the simple reason that Arabic plurals are quite complex). There is nothing wrong with this assertion, but the fact that the preceding chapters have introduced many nouns, which pluralise in either the Sound (relatively regular) or Broken (relatively irregular) manner without any mention of this concept seems like a fault of editing. The much-vaunted dictionary (one of the reasons this book was recommended to us in the first place) is almost impossible to use until the reader has progressed to the chapter on "How To Use A Dictionary", which requires a fair bit of background understanding by then. Admittedly, this is the case with many Arabic-English bilingual dictionaries, and not one I seriously expected not to encounter here.

In contrast, there are some startling sections which are clearly not designed with the reader in mind. A number of exercises use words which have not been used in the text yet, although admittedly most of these are used in the immediately succeeding chapter.

There are also one or two typographical errors which appear from time to time, mostly to do with misplaced vowel markers (although some dots unaccountably move around as well), which is a little concerning. As other reviewers have also remarked, the paperback edition suffers from almost microscopic Arabic script.

That said, this book is worth four stars as a reference work alone. It still appears - despite its age - to be one of the most comprehensive Arabic grammars on offer. My hat goes off to anyone who can seriously claim to have learned the language fully by studying this book - particularly if they have not supplemented it with experience in Arabic-speaking countries.

This book is simply excellent. I studied this book and used it as a basis of an Arabic course I gave some years back. I was impressed by the result.

The book has excellent excercises and towards the end it give a pointer to materials for further study.

I'll recommend it any day.

A very handy reference grammer. Not as extensive as Wright's with a relatively more modern treatment. Best suited for a beginning student as a reference grammer. More advanced students of classical arabic should consider wrights.

John A. Haywood, the author, spent many years as a British civil servant and academic in Sudan. His grammar is the outcome of a lifetime of study of Arabic. Haywood and Nahmad, as the grammar is affectionately called by students of Arabic, came out in 1965. It is used in universities all over the world, and has been translated into Spanish.

The grammar gives the English grammatical terms, so it is also a useful grammar for anyone teaching English in the Middle East where English can be simplified by pointing out its differences with Arabic. Arabic is a much older language than English and has dropped most of the awkward complexities that English still has in favor of a logical simplicity that was, one might say, codified, in the Abbasid period in Iraq in the 9th century AD. The enumeration of the differences between English and Arabic for the purpose of making English easier for Arabic speakers has yet to be done, but Haywood's grammar would provide a starting point and a skeleton for such an endeavor.

Haywood and Nahmad provide the Arabic terms in brackets (one time) for the grammatical points he mostly describes in English, of course. You have to know your English grammar from the old school pretty well. There are none of the modern English grammar neologisms such as "Demonstrators" for indefinite or definite article, or "helping verb" for present and past perfect. There is no present or past perfect in Arabic. As in yet another language which is older than English, French, these problems have dropped by the wayside in the Arabic language, and Arabic has only the present, the past, the future and the "command" forms. A better example of what I mean by the fact that you have to know the "real" basis of English grammar, and not the neologisms, to appreciate this book, is that you have to know what subjunctive and jussive mean, for example.

Some of the most judiciously researched parts of the book are the introduction and the selections from Arabic Literature. His selection reads like high points of Arab, and thus, "humanity's" culture: Ibn Khaldun, The Arabian Nights, Tawfiq al-Hakim's "Diary of a Country Prosecutor," for example.

I also benefited from his overview of the differences in the Arabic dialects, which included some differences in Sudanese Arabic as well as the more familiar Iraqi, Egyptian, Palestinian and Syrian dialects.

All in all, Haywood and Nahmad is a book one can come back to often and pick up many tidbits one might not have noticed in that first intensive Arabic summer courses.

This is the kind of translation exercise you get in this book. Other reviewers have commented on the stilted language and subject matter, both in English and Arabic. How about, "I have seen many spiders. The beys' and pashas' rooms must be swept afresh," or "Follow the well-known plan and put the olives in the barrels." These are not sentences from 1965, the date of the first edition, but from the British mandate.

If you want to learn Arabic, you need to use a text book, not a grammar book. There are lots of good ones available, and there are lots of grammar books available with more authentic examples.