Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Arabic Complete Course

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

...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.

I've looked at about a dozen beginning Arabic books so far, and this is one of the best I've seen for the complete novice. The introductory Arabic book by Youssif Haddad and Jack Ingle has a much more detailed treatment of the grammar and structure of the language, but you need more familiarity with written Arabic to benefit from it. I enjoy learning the formal grammar more than most people so although I think Ingle's book is a better book on the actual language, since I'm a rank beginner in Arabic I bought this one instead, and will supplement it with the Ingle book.

I also thought the Hippocrene book was good, and it would be my second choice for a [beginner.] About half-way through the book it started including many full paragraphs of material for translation. I have my doubts that the beginning reader would be that advanced by that time but I don't really know. I have the Hippocrene Spanish Grammar and it is the clearest, most concise, and overall best basic grammar I have, out of the four five that I own. One other main strength to this book is that it can accompany the tapes so you can get some idea of the spoken language too.

One thing I was pleased to see was that, although I had heard that Arabic was a difficult language, it is actually much simpler than Latin or Greek or even a contemporary Slavic language like Russian, as far as the grammar is concerned. It only has three cases, the nominative, accusative, and jussive, compared to Greek's eight, Latin and Russian's six (and the vocative case in Latin is hardly ever used), and German's four. The nouns are marked for the single, dual, and plural, which is different from English, which lost the dual inflection like many Indo-European languages many centuries ago. But the books make it clear that in modern spoken Arabic the three noun declensions are pretty much universally ignored, and you don't really learn them. The only time you need to know them is if you're reading classical literature or the Koran, or in academic discourse, where it might be used.

However, one difficult thing is that Arabic has many different ways of marking the plural, and here it resembles the complex rules in English for the use of the apostrophe, which causes almost as many problems for native speakers as for foreigners.

That having been said, verb conjugations in Arabic are not difficult and are quite regular, unlike Latin and many other languages. Here Arabic resembles Japanese, which also has a very regular verbal system, and you can count the number of irregular verbs in Japanese literally on the fingers of one hand, and also Chinese, which has no conjugation for gender, number, or anything else. In fact Arabic's is so regular that Arabic dictionaries can refer to the verbs by a number system (I-X). So it appears that the main difficulty in Arabic is learning the alphabet, which is more complex than in English since the individual letters alter their form depending on whether they're at the beginning or end of a word, or in the middle. Another similarity between Arabic and Japanese, oddly enough, is that they both lack a true future tense.

Overall, a good first grammar on a language that may not be as difficult to learn as I was first thinking. However, I'm about to find out!

Teach Yourself Arabic" sounds like a hokey tourist phrase book or something. Indeed, the "Teach Yourself" series varies a lot, some of the languages are poorly treated, some better. This one is a gem. It is not trivial tourist phrases, but actually goes into grammar, provides good reading comprehension exercises and a fairly well-developed vocabulary. Includes some very useful points like word shapes, a key tool for learning Arabic with its root and measure system. If you are studying Arabic in school, this makes a great supplement. Some of the confusion in textbooks is cleared up here. You need a seperate book to learn the Arabic script, and Awde's "The Arabic Alphabet" is the best.

This book has a lot of good things except it is more constructed as a class text book than a teach yourself book. The tapes are okay, but I wish it was longer. This book DOES NOT have phonetics written out to help the user pronounce the words. The examples are written in Arabic and you will have to decifer what it means by remembering what the Arabic letters sounds like. In other words, the book does not have examples of how to pronounce. You will have to learn the pronunciation of the alphabetics and put it together to form or read words. It wasn't easy for me because I could have been doing it all wrong and wouldn't even know it. The tapes can sometime be hard to mimick because with every language there are always something you are missing when speaking. I would only recommend this book to someone who is somewhat already familiar with the Arabic language, not a beginner who have never been exposed to Arabic.

This book is a much improved version than the previous edition, which I also worked through over less than one year ago. I was surprised to find that the layout was completely different now and that the method was more focused on daily topics and relevant vocabulary for more trivial matters than just literature, history or religion. The author is obviously very focused himself on the Mashrek, the eastern part of the Arab world, but still, I found it a very useful tool which enabled me to really speak and understand Arabic a few days after my arrival in Arabia, which happened last summer. Having learnt Arabic only with Teach Yourself Books and tapes for roughly over one year, the teaching staff at the Arabic language academy I attended there for one month were very surprised I had jumped straight into the lower intermidiate level (I believe my fluency in Hebrew helped, though). I would advise to go through Teach Yourself Beginner's Arabic Script either before going through this very book to get to grips with written shorthand, which is very different to printed script, and it helps you to write the language- maybe the only important point omitted by this practical book. In this way, you will be able to take down notes or copy dialogues and do the exercises, which would be rather awkward otherwise.
It's a very good buy, if you commit yourself to taking a slow, perseverant pace in learning and revise chapters already learnt at least twice.

The main problem here is that this book touts itself as a 'Teach Yourself' book. The meaning of this could be debated, but I really don't think that's what it is.

The book has ten 'chapters' of grammar, and another ten or so of reading exercises... The tapes of the reading exercises are fairly good, but for those first ten chapters, where you really need to learn a lot, and work on pronunciation, the tapes only contain about 10 short sentences per chapter!! But, you're still expected to memorize like 30 or more new vocabulary words per chapter.... well, maybe if you had been exposed to arabic before, but I couldn't do it, especially when there are so few chances to use it.

The explanation of the writing system is also deficient, in that the author really says almost nothing about ligatures, and how to draw the letters, leaving the reader to do a lot of guessing or find another book (which I did).

The best thing about this book, is that it presents the grammar of modern standard arabic in a clear and concise fashion, but this is not very easy to teach yourself from.....

I recommend learning a dialect first, and if you don't have any other in mind, I suggest the pimsleur Eastern Arabic course. After that, you'll be familiar enough with the language to browse any of the 'text only' courses and choose the ones you like best. :)

After having struggled with Arabic with the help of inadequate materials and making no progress finally I came upon the book of John Smart. And finally I started to make real progress in Arabic!!!

Excellent features in this book:

- It is relativelly minimalist so that the student is not overburdened with information and can make the course in relativelly short time
- all Arabic verb forms are meticulously explained when a form is met in the text
- it drops great deal of complex features of Arabic grammar(i`raab) which are not usually marked in the script so that they cannot contribute to the meaning when you are reading. Learning such features can only confuse beginning student
- it does not use transliteration nor Arabic short vowel sounds (harakaat)which also never appear in writing except in the Holy Qur'an. It makes learning a little bit more difficult at first, but you can start aquire right habits of script recognition from the very begining.
- the book is in Litterary Arabic however the style of its texts is kept close to the colloquial. Dialogues in the book are in the litterary language but approximated to the colloquial in a fashion some Arabic playwrights do.
- After finishing this book you can decide whether to go to the
Arab world and to study colloquial Arabic there "from the mouth of people" in noisy bazaars and cafe's or to continue to study litterary language quietly in your room from books and dictionaries.

this was the 1st ever book i got to learn arabic from, having never had any lessons and i found it utterly useless. i could not understand how to write arabic from the instructions in this book and the grammar I found too complicated. however now that i have had several months of actual lessons and can read and write arabic, as well as form basic sentences, i am delighted with this book. i refer to it all the time to demsytify grammar points. it depends on what kind of learner you are, but arabic is so different from my native english that i needed to start speaking arabic by simple imitation, without learning grammatical rules. this book teaches arabic by giving grammatical rules which i found too much coupled with a foreign script and sounds. however this book is invaluable for answering the grammatical questions i began to have as i got a feel for the language. and it does explain grammar in clear, unpretentious language that makes it widely acccessible, i just think that it is best reserved for someone with very basic arabic under their belt already. another thing was that on the tapes (1992 version), an Englishman who i presume is Smart reads some of the arabic examples and you can hear his english accent. it would've have been better to use only native speakers to best learn pronouncitaion.