Customer Reviews

The Olive Tree Dictionary: A Transliterated Dictionary Of Conversational Arabic (Arabic and English Edition)

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This dictionary is an exceptional reference to spoken Eastern Arabic (the Palestinian dialect). The layout is easy to follow, the usage of the words in everyday sentences is helpful and I have found it adds measurably to my limited Arabic to date. Having gone through levele 1 and 2 of the Pimsleur audio guides I was looking for something to give me a wider vocabulary - this dictionary fits that need.

The Olive Tree Dictionary is a recent update and translation to English of the extremely practical 'Dictionnaire de l'Arabe parle palestinien', first published in French in 1973 by Israeli linguist Yohanan Elihai (ISBN 2-252-02511-5).

This book is at the same time extremely rigorous and faithful to the vernacular spoken by Muslim and Christian Arabs in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, and simultaneously written in a very pragmatic way. The author has found enlightening, original and simple ways to explain the various subtleties of this Arabic dialect (e.g. conjugation, stress changes, etc).

It is mainly based on the urban usages of Jerusalem and Galilee. However, beyond the Palestinian area, this remains a very helpful book for all Levant dialects (western Syria, Lebanon, Western Jordan), both for its accuracy and simplicity, and because the main variations of vocabulary are indicated (e.g. words for "now", "they", etc).

It is thus a very advisable acquisition too make.

I'm studying spoken Arabic in Amman, Jordan. I have not found such an extensive dictionary for spoken Arabic (Levant dialect). This book is a tremendous help since spoken and written Arabic are so different. Bilingual people have told me that the difference between written and spoken is like today's spoken English to Beowulf. The definitions are also full with example sentences. I strongly recommend this to anyone studying spoken (Levant) Arabic.