Customer Reviews

Standard Arabic: An Advanced Course

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is exactly the kind of book I have been wanting for a long time! As an advanced course, I feel it would be excellent for someone who has completed 3 years of university study, or for someone who has finished or is near the end of the course at the Defense Language Institute.

This book presents authentic Arabic texts from a variety of sources and on topics about the Middle East. This gives the double advantage of not only learning the Arabic, but also teaching important information about the history, culture, and society of the Middle East. Along with the Arabic texts, pertinent grammar lessons are presented with thorough explanations in English, followed by several examples usage in Arabic. There are also many questions and exercises, presented in both Arabic and English to assist in comprehension.

I have not yet recieved the accompanying cassette, but several of the listening selections come from a series by the BBC called "Pick of the Month". I already have the BBC cassettes and I'm very pleased that the authors chose these as their listening exercises.

Most students of Arabic are aware of the famous "EMSA" Elementary Modern Standard Arabic texts from the 1960's, as these are the standard texts used in many universities. This book is by far the best Arabic text to be published since EMSA/IMSA!

For motivated students, I highly recommend this book as a tool for self-study and maximizing your capabilities in Classical Arabic.

For professors, both at Universities and DLI, I stongly suggest that you consider this book for incorporation into your courses. For DLI, this book covers important grammar that I didn't get, and for the Universities, this offers excellent authentic material to augment the more intensive grammar.

Thank you Dr Dickson and Dr. Watson. This is the book I wish I could have written!

Just to add to the other reviews, this textbook (which I used at 3rd year undergraduate level at Durham) is useful also to the solo student struggling to advance his or her Arabic. Buy the cassettes too, as they're an integral part of the course. I also recommend strongly that the private student buy the Teacher's Handbook too if he has no teacher as this contains - amongst other things - suggested translations and transcriptions of passages on the cassettes.

As a university level professor of Arabic, my profession is constantly on the lookout (or we should be) for textbooks that are relevant, user-friendly, well-constructed and that can serve as a springboard for further studies in Arabic. I recently acquired this textbook intending it for my personal use as a review and as a stimulus for classroom activities. I am very impressed with the overall subject matter content of the book and am really pleased with the size of the print type.

I will caution the prospective buyer, however, that this is definitely not a "teach yourself" manual to be used on your own. Rather, an imaginative, competent speaker of the language who can serve as an instructor or guide is an absolute requisite. Even with advanced degrees in Arabic, I found some of the material at or just beyond my capabilities. Someone who is just starting out in Arabic (that is less than three years of study at the university level) may want to rely on a less comprehensive textbook.

That said, I found the book just perfect for my purposes. The only drawback, however, is that the grammar and stylistics portions of each chapter refer back to examples from previous chapters. It would be helpful if these examples were in closer proximity to the actual texts referenced. These would save the learner the trouble of going back and re-reading these texts to find the examples cited. The lack of vocabulary listings and textual notes tends to compound this problem.

Nonetheless, along with a good dictionary for those hard-to-remember terms, I would recommend this book only to those students with the proper preparation to tackle it.

Simply stated -- A MUST HAVE! If you're a budding intermediate level student of Arabic, you must have this. I use this as a self study course to reinforce my reading foundations, vocabulary and current idomatic useage. I waited MONTHS for the tapes, but they are essential now that they are universally available.

This book is useful for self study, group study or with a (preferably) educated native instructor/tutor. There is also a fine teacher's supplement.

Overall this is a tremendous value. The soft cover and the tapes together are less than 50.00 and there is a mountain of challenging material.

Not to mention a good deal of pragmatic reading in geography, culture and social studies. Each chapter is broken down into the same exercises from reading to classical texts to listening. The classical texts are dealt with deliberately, not haphazardly. The whole thing is, in fact, deliberate and well thought out.

Shouldn't disappoint...

I bought this book after hearing the praise about it; I sold it a few days later. Despite the title, this book isn't much of a course at all. Most of it is just straight Arabic text for you to read, with no translations, so you don't even know if you're reading correctly. The book does a better job of teaching you (if you know Arabic) about the Middle East than it does teaching Arabic.

This is probably the best advanced Arabic textbook I have ever seen. I applaud the efforts of the authors.

I had been looking for an advanced course for some time. I'm completely self-taught in written and colloquial Arabic, and I need to push myself as I felt I was hanging at an "upper-intermediate" level with no progress.

I happened by chance to pick up Dr. Watson's "Lexicon of Arabic Horse Terminology" as I hear she is an avid equestrian. This was a curio, a coffee table book. But then I saw that she was co-author on this text and I was basically sold.

The text:

1. Does not lie to you about the sociolinguistic situation of Arabic and even allows for oral discussion to take place in the dialect of interest. I.e. - it does not try to teach a conversational standard Arabic course. It teaches you standard Arabic in the modalities in which it exists. This is in direct contrast to other works like the Al-Kitab series.

2. Forces the student to direct their own learning by developing their own vocabulary lists. I noticed one review did not like looking up words in an Arabic dictionary as it is apparently "a chore." Well sorry, it's a basic skill.

3. Chooses texts/excerpts in a thematic way - teaching students about religion, politics, language, history, geography in the Middle East. The texts span the gamut of classical texts like Ibn Battutah to newspaper articles.

4. Translation work! Though not all of us are aspiring translators, translating into and out of our native language is excellent practice.

5. Writing and rhetoric! The text teaches structures necessary for building rhetorical skill in Arabic. It has you practice using structures (rather than "grammar" or "vocabulary") in exercises and essays. This is one skill in which I was lacking that I am now developing.

Now maybe they'll write an advanced course for spoken Levantine Arabic. :)

A huge detailed text book of MSA. If you have the stomach for the studying required this book will definitely get the job done.

The most clear definciency of this book, in my opinion, is the lack of a vocubulary list with their meanings and possibly their pronouciations. Finding words in arabic dictionary is a big chore, and I believe any educational book on arabic must have a vocubulary list to alleviate this issue. Beside this, this is a decent book, and it gives you a lot of information about the middle east and Arabic culture. I also bought the beginner and intermediate analog of this book and I liked it much more.