Customer Reviews

A Reference Grammar of Syrian Arabic (Georgetown Arabic Series)

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I tried to use this book before I traveled to Syria and found it difficult to use. However, after being in Syria for two months and acquiring a basic knowledge of the dialect, I picked it up again and benefited from it greatly.

The strong points of the book are that it is very comprehensive in grammar, vocabulary, and pronounciation. However, it has several drawbacks. First, it is not organized like a textbook. I often found it difficult to find what I was looking for and one should not attempt to read it cover to cover. Second, it is too comprehensive for a novice. Third, it uses a lot of lingustical terms. I found that I would read a section and not get much out of it, but when I came back to it later, after I had improved my Arabic, I would learn a lot from the same section.

I would highly recommend this book to someone who meets all of the following criteria:

1. Has a solid foundation in Modern Standard Arabic
2. Has a basic understanding of the Syrian or another Levantine dialect.
3. Is serious about learning Syrian Arabic and wants to become proficient. If you just want to get the basics this book is not for you.
4. Does not plan to use this as a textbook, but plans to use it as a reference or as a supplement to a class, speaking with a friend, or to another book.

As a note, A Dictionary of Syrian Arabic: English-Arabic is an even better book and makes a great companion to this.

Cowell's book does a great descriptive job, in the sense that it gives lots of data on various aspects of this language.
The data is almost untouched: If you know a bit about modern theories then you can easily ignore the theoretical aspects (old terminology etc) hence its a great place to collect unbiased data.
If you're into language learning/teaching, i dont recomend it as a textbook for SA. Its so old fashioned, it misses lots of important points which are sometimes very obvious.

After studying this specialized philological book, which I borrowed from foreign library, I think that it is suitable, with its formal and contents structure, only for academic study. (I study latin philology and so I was trying to study syrian language as a self-taught person, because I am interested in studying of ancient languages. I did like this grammar-textbook of syrian language very much, but unfortunately I don't have it now. I had to give it back.) I consider it very clearly arranged a understandable.