Customer Reviews

Using Arabic: A Guide to Contemporary Usage

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This book is well written and clearly presented. There is a long section that reviews how different words are used in Arabic and provides a lot of information I haven't seen in other "textbooks". The section points out differences between English and Arabic usage which is helpful. The last section of the book focuses on grammar, which provides a useful review. I would recommend this book to someone who already is at a high- intermediate level of proficiency.

Alosh's 'Using Arabic' ends up being a somewhat odd book. It has three major sections: a discussion of diglossia in the Arabic-speaking world, a discussion of Arabic vocabulary, and then a review of Arabic grammar. All of these sections are useful, and Alosh's discussion of Arabic diglossia is interesting, but this book ends up feeling a bit insubstantial. The section on vocabulary is frequently just lists of words (although occasionally with helpful distinctions of register), and the section on grammar is basically just a brief recapitulation of lots of the rules of fusha grammar. (If you're looking for a brief discussion of a lot of Arabic grammar, though, this section might be useful to you.)

It's not a bad book, but I had been expecting something more along the lines of Batchelor and Offord's 'Using French', in the same series. The major sections of Batchelor and Offord also cover Register, Vocabulary, and Grammar, but their coverage is in greater depth and with more attention to the specific needs of the English-speaking French student (with discussions of faux amis and differing nuances in French and English, for example, or the always tricky French subjunctive). There are points where Alosh gives that level of interesting detail, but too often he just lists a bunch of information. (It's possible that the more prescriptive nature of MSA makes this kind of book harder to do; I don't know.) But many of the times I've looked to Alosh for discussion of the nuances of a particular subject, I've been disappointed and found more complete information in Ryding's reference grammar.