Customer Reviews

Read and Speak Arabic for Beginners

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

There are lots of learn Arabic books out there. For your money's worth, many can provide you with much more information.

So why this choose this one?

It's fun. Never underestimate the importance of enjoying learning, because, if you're doing it on your own and it's not fun, it's very easy to give up, or at least take a (long) break. Studying needs to be interesting and captivating. This book is just that. It provides basic lessons, with useful vocabulary and grammar - not too much, not too little - and allows you to practice it in the book and using the CD, in a fun and engaging way. It has interactive conversations on the CD, cut-out games and flash cards in the book, and the typical textbook exercises are not long, tedious, or repetitive. The book provides the reading portion and the CD teaches the proper pronunciation.

One of the best parts of this book is the fact it forces you to learn the alphabet, by making you read simple words in the script. It doesn't introduce the alphabet, which is why I would suggest reading a book like "The Arabic Alphabet" by Awde & Samano, but it's very difficult to memorize an alphabet without actually applying it, as this book makes you do.

Although the book does not leave you with a large vocabulary or much grammar, in an easy and fun manner it gives you the basics to work from. I would definitely recommend it.

Now, I am speaking from the point-of-view of a person who has a native command of the Arabic language and tutors people in Arabic. I would strongly recommend you find someone to tutor you if you want to learn the language rather quickly and hopefully from someone who is good at both English and Arabic. At least someone who will get you through deciphering the alphabet. The book that says the 100 words in Arabic by the same authors would be a necessary companion to this book. If you don't get it, at least you will need a good book that explains the alphabet and if you do not pull something off the net and you will fine. This book is written rather well, has good pictures, captivates the interest of the reader, has a CD. I just would have liked if they had the alphabet in the beginning, but at least they have it in the back of the book if you look. So I would recommend this book if you want a quick introduction to useful Arabic for a Westerner going to an Arabic country and needing how to ask for directions, order food, ask about someone's family...

This is a good book for people starting to learn Arabic. It has useful phrases and explains the language well. A good trick the book uses is to write names like "Jane" in Arabic. It's much easier to learn to read Arabic if you work with words you know.

On the downside the flashcards that come with the book aren't very good. They are too small and printed on paper that is too thin.

This book is a valuable resource as an introduction to Arabic for someone who wants an introduction to the alphabet and some basic volabulary, grammar and phrases. It is well-designed to make learning easy and fun. It is also a great value because it comes with a CD and flashcards to help with pronunciation and script recognition.

I think a weakness of the book is the superficial treatment of script in the middle of the text. However, it is an adequate introduction, but to me learning the script would be easier with a book like The Arabic Alphabet: How to Read & Write It. This is a much more comprehensive, accessible and less intimidating exposure to learning Arabic script and it is still less than 100 pages.

This book is wonderful to start out with. It is quite large, the size of a standard notebook, so as to make it easy to write and practice in. However it does not explain to well the back ground of the Arabic language, the follow alog CD and writting exercises makes learning Arabic farely simple.

Great little book, easy to follow and understand. Excellent for someone just starting or wanting simple phrases to travel. Overall, a great way to grasp the idea as well as quick and easy.

My daughter who is studying Egyptian Arabic used this to get ready to take the course, it helped prepare her for diving head first into a language that she had no prior exposure to! She had just completed a 4 year college course in International Finance & THEN decided she wanted to tackle 1 of the most difficult languages to learn on the face of the earth!! Go figure! College kids!! LOL
Anywho.......... she said it helped prep her for what was to come!!

Jane Wightwick and Mahmoud Gafaar have done it again. They really make learning Arabic fun! This book just adds to their Michel Thomas method Arabic Foundation Course and Advanced Course as well as their Conversational Arabic CD set. These are all available on Amazon. It's great to listen to them on the CDs and practice reading with this book.

I have arabic for dummies and it is better, incl CD for audio. I am a visual learner, so I need to SEE how to say it. Following a CD in this book is not easy, if you can't see it too. I would NOT recommend this book for beginners.

This text is useful. It begins from the basics and proceeds at a realistically slow pace. The CD is very helpful for pronunciation. HOWEVER, one big drawback is the way the author introduces written Arabic script. Although she does not SYSTEMATICALLY introduce the script until near the END of the book, she uses the script from the very first lesson, where she blithely - overly optimistically - instructs the student to simply remember the overall SHAPE or appearance of words written in Arabic. I challenge anyone to be able to do this!!! Beyond a few words, that is. Unit exercises often present words in Arabic script only, with no Roman scipt trancription, so you really have to master reading the script to fully paricipate in the program. The solution is to jump ahead to the end of the book, and study the letters first - but you won't get much help with this - there are no graduated exercises. I do not find Arabic script "easy" (much harder than Cyrillic script, for example, although easier/faster to learn than Japanese's three concurrent scripts) and I crave more support than this book offers. (There is a companion book by same author and one other, for learning to write Arabic.)