Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Gulf Arabic (Teach Yourself (McGraw-Hill))

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This is a good introduction to spoken arabic. As the title suggests, the focus is on the dialects of arabic spoken near the Persian Gulf. Very little attention is payed to the script; the emphasis is on conversational speech. This is not the book to read if you want to be able to read the Q'uran or other classical arabic texts. it is primarily a course in spoken arabic, and to that end, it does the job well, although if the book came with a casette tape, it would have been a much greater help. Arabic is a difficult language for a native English speaker, but learning basic colloquial arabic is not really that bad, but due to the odd guturral sounds used, a tape with native speakers on it is indispensible.