90 of 94 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent conversational Arabic and a Reader Too, September 10, 2004
This review is from: Teach Yourself Arabic Complete Course (Paperback)
There are several negative reviews of this book which refer to an earlier edition. The 2003 edition is excellent. It does have English Transliteration to aid with pronunciation but tries to wean you from it quickly by giving you small sections of Arabic text without transliteration. These are great for learning to read and often they are also dialogues covered on the CD's. The book doesn't stop with learning to read signs and newspapers but is a full-fledged primary reader with excerpts from literature.
Make sure you get the CD set with the book. I had to return my first copy (actually fortunate, since that was the earlier edition) when I found the references to a CD that I did not have. There are many exercises which are intended for use with the CD's. There is a key to the exercises in the back.
I don't know how this book would be for a self-study if I didn't have cause to use the language daily. But, I find the conversational phrases are realistic and useful in my regular interaction with native Arabic speakers. Of course, it is a big advantage being partially immersed, but my progress was nonetheless slow and haphazard until I got this book. I had made no serious prior attempts to learn the script, I'm now reading excerpts from the Qur'an, after less than one month of work. I have used a number of learning resources and this is by far the best I have found for all-around knowledge of Arabic. I recommend a dictionary, however, as the glossary is tiny.
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58 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best Arabic Learning Book Proven In Baghdad, April 16, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: Teach Yourself Arabic Complete Course (Paperback)
I was a recon soldier with 1-13 Armor batalion in Baghdad. My mom sent me this book and I studied it religiously for about two hours a day and it got me readind and speaking it in a semi-effective manner in just a few weeks. It is written in such a way that teaches how to speak it well. I am currently in college at the top of my arabic class. We use "AL-KITAAB FII AL TAALUM AL ARABIYYA" It's not that good. This is, the only thing is I recommend a book to learn script to supplement this one. Remember to study hard too this isn't a freebie. GOOD LUCK.
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39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Make sure you understand which edition is which!, June 18, 2003
By A Customer
...For some unfortunate reason, the reviews for the EXCELLENT 2001 edition by Smart and Altorfer are lumped together on the same Amazon page as the reviews for the MUCH WORSE 1992 version (by Smart alone). The two books are TOTALLY different, so make sure you know what edition the reviewer is talking about!...
I stress this because I bought the 1992 version years ago, was so
annoyed by it, and was SO much happier with the 2001 edition... A few of the improvements in the 2001 edition:
(1) The old version had lots of readings about things like the oil trade and Islamic festivals. Interesting in principle, but the problem is, they make you learn words like "crude oil", "delegation", and "fasting" before you have even a basic vocabulary (they haven't given you the words for "foot", "eyeglasses", "throw", "kitchen", etc). These are words you will want to know someday to read a newspaper etc., but they're useless at an intro stage (and hard to memorize because of their comparative abstractness).
The vocabulary choices in the new version seem so much more reasonable, and the readings start off with things like "Sinbad the sailor", which are fun and encourage learning actually useful words like "sea" and "gate".
(2) The descriptions of some of the sounds is still basically wrong in some respects, but it now provides several new useful hints (for example that the letter Haa represents the sound people make when blowing on their glasses to clean them).
(3) In the old version, the pronunciation of a word was often not clear. Sometimes the short-vowel signs were missing or fuzzy (or some random blotch ended up looking like a vowel sign). The alif-maqsuura and yaa were not consistently distinguished (contrary to the author's claim). But in the 2001 edition, romanized transcriptions are provided for all the vocabulary. (Lack of transcriptions is a complaint that many of the reviewers raise, but remember, it only applies to the old edition!!)
(4) The old version had a Arabic-to-English glossary but infuriatingly lacked an English-to-Arabic glossary. The new edition repairs this glaring defect.
(5) The 2001 edition adds an index, albeit a very short one (1 page).
The only serious complaint I can make about the 2001 edition is that it seems to be make with the same binding method as the old edition, which fell apart in no time.
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