Customer Reviews

Yemeni Arabic Reference Grammar

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I am an intermediate student of Modern Standard Arabic and ordered this book to learn more about the Yemeni dialects, Sanaani specifically. Unfortunately this book assumes no prior knowledge of Arabic, and a lot of space in it is dedicated to explaining grammar and vocabulary that is not specific to Yemen. The book doesn't contain any Arabic script; all the Arabic is transliterated here.

The book is broken up into a series of lessons. Each lesson has a brief dialogue, with an accompanying vocab list and then a series of exercises and some grammar points. The exercises spell out what the teacher and student should do, so it seems to be intended for classroom use rather than independent study, and they are mostly rote repetition-oriented exercises.

It's kind of like a poor man's version of Karen Ryding's "Formal Spoken Arabic" except with a focus on the Sanaani dialect instead of Shami. You do get a few little pieces of Yemen-specific stuff, like how they say "maash" instead of "mish"/"laysa" and "naahi" for "tayyib" and the book gives the Sanaani variations on the more common Arabic greetings. But if you already know MSA and you're looking for a good primer on Yemeni Arabic, it would make more sense to just talk to a Yemeni for awhile.