Customer Reviews

Travel Wise: Arabic

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In addition to the phrasebook, and although it's reflected in a higher price, this book has very high-quality production values and materials for a contemporary paperback book. Paper is nice, high-quality gossy, and pages are sewed in signatures as well as glued into the binding, for years of use. Chapters are color-coded with icons on the page edges. Roman phoneticization of Arabic words is set in blue type. Tables use color, and illustrations are in color. The cover looks like durable, woven canvas with a waterproof, plasticized coat.

The words and phrases show short-vowel markings, normally not indicated in adult books, which will help with the learning of the words, and making this book a good general vocabulary building book for the non-expert in the language. In addition to the phrasebook, there is a guide to the alphabet and pronunciation, a brief grammar section covering some crucial points of the grammar, and a reference section containing tables of weights and measures, expressions of time, days and months, and so on. At the end is a considerable 80-page English-to-Arabic only dictionary that contains about 2300 words. The front and back covers have a map of the Arabic world. Almost no expense appears to have been spared (literally) to make this a quality product.

The phrasebook section is organized in typical fashion with chapters devoted to various useful situations and topics, such as Eating and Drinking, Events/Entertainment, Clothing, Beach/Sports. There is even an "At the Police Station," and "At the Dentist" section, which, hopefully, you will never need! And there is a section with frequently used phrases. I couldn't find a figure for how many phrases are contained in the book, but as I said, there are about 2300 words in the dictionary, providing a fairly substantial vocabulary. This is a very high-quality paperback, which, although that's reflected in the price of 13 bucks, which is anywhere from 50% to 100% more than the comparable Berlitz, Lonely Planet, and Passport series phrasebooks, I think is still reasonable considering the features and the quality you're getting.

This is a well-made, well-constructed book that is easy to use, easy to flip through and stands up to a lot of travel. I definitely recommend this book for those who are traveling through the Arabic speaking countries. One word of caution on dialect though: this book is written primarily in Modern literary Arabic, sometimes referred to as Modern Standard Arabic. This language is different from the "street" language that varies by country across the broad region. While many Arabs you meet will be able to understand you when you say the more formal, Modern Literary Arabic phrase in the book, they may not respond except in their own local dialects, so be prepared for that. It often changes the pronunciation significantly. There are some local dialect words in the book, but they are never identified as to what country's dialect they belong to. For instance the word "generator" has a dialectal word (dynamo) as well as the standard word (muwallid) - but if you say "dynamo" in any of the Gulf countries, I promise you no one will know that you mean generator! Also, the word for "flat tire" is exclusively known in Iraq as "pan-cher" - but that is not mentioned at all in this book which has two words listed for flat tire.

The grammar section is good, for a quick lesson on understanding grammar it touches the bases pretty clearly. I would read that section (near the end of the book) first, and then go back and read it again as you learn more of the phrases in the book, so that the grammar makes sense. As one of my best teachers once said, learning grammar without knowing any of the words is like trying to swim without water.