Customer Reviews

Spoken Arabic of Cairo

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This book is absolutely my FIRST CHOICE for learning to speak Arabic, if all you want to do is SPEAK it. The book wastes no time with trying to teach you both the spoken and the written word (which are considerably different). It dives right into useful conversations and vocabularies. I learned to speak fluent Arabic from this book. It is used by the American University in Cairo in their Arabic Language program. I highly recommend this!

In eight years of Arabic study, this is the best Egyptian dialect course I have seen. I personally prefer the Arabic script rather than the Romanized script used here, but I have found very few dialect courses use Arabic script as it is a 'spoken language'. This book would probably not be appropriate for a student using a native speaker as an instructor because of the Romanized script. I also would have preferred some tapes to accompany the course. Because of the lack of tapes, a beginner should probably buy an additional basic course with tapes to get pronunciation down, as well as learn the Arabic alphabet well. However, apart from this, I have yet to find a course that hits both all the important words and grammatical constructions in Egyptian dialect. Too many dialect courses give a generic mixture of MSA and several dialects, and never get past a basic teaching. This course goes past this, and has super drills to enforce the lessons. There is a sharp scarcity of intermediate dialect material, almost everything is for beginners, and this comes closest to providing that than any material I have seen previously. In addition, it is priced reasonably to boot.

I haven't finished this text yet but it is so good. I was frustrated at first trying to figure out the transliteration system but after it was smooth sailing. I could watch an Egyptian show and pick up words after going through just a few pages of this book! And unlike Kallimni all the instructions are in English! The copyright year is 1981 so you won't see anything modern like "website" or "internet" but much of those words are borrowed from English anyway. This book will give you a great foundation up to intermediate. My "modern" supplement is the lonely planet Egyptian Arabic phrasebook which I find is excellent as well.

I happened to get a copy of the book from a friend. It's a big shame no tapes come with it, but I have gotten my hands on CDs with Egyptian Arabic, so there goes the problem with pronounciation, plus if you have basic MSA knowledge, it should help with pronounciation. I have books for all major Arabic 3ammiyya (dialects), this one is very good for the begginer student of Egyptian Arabic, all you need to get you started is this book, a native speaker of Arabic, regardless of whether they are Egyptian or not, all Arabs know how Egyptian Arabic is pronounced, and an iron will to learn the language and you're set. I highly recommend this book.