Your First 100 Words in Arabic : Beginner's Quick & Easy Guide to Demystifying Non-Roman Scripts [Paperback]

Jane Wightwick (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0844223956 | ISBN-13: 978-0844223957 | Publication Date: August 1, 1999 | Edition: 1

This book is designed to teach the beginner a basic vocabulary of 100 Arabic words—covering 8 everyday topics: around the home/ clothes/ around town (including transportation)/ countryside/ essentials/ opposities/ animals/ parts of the body.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: Arabic

From the Back Cover

Puzzles and Tips to Decipher the Script and Learn Your First 100 Words in Arabic

This Beginner's Quick and Easy Guide is specifically designed to help learners overcome one of the major obstacles to learning Arabic: reading the Arabic script. Whether you're learning on your own or in a class, this workbook and the flash cards contained inside will help you learn Arabic in the same effective way that children first learn to decipher their own language.

Features of Your First 100 Words in Arabic:

• The Introduction provides a helpful insight into the Arabic alphabet and shows you how Arabic letters are joined to form words.
• Scriptbreaker Tips help you focus on how to read Arabic.
• A Pronunciation Guide describes the sounds of Arabic.
• Eight Topic Chapters group the words by theme: Around the home • Clothes • Around town • Countryside • Opposites • Animals • Parts of the body • Useful expressions.
• Each of the 100 Words is clearly presented in Arabic script, with its English meaning, pronunciation, and an illustration to aid memorization.
• Tear-out Flash Cards help you recognize the Arabic words and learn their meaning and pronunciation. Instructions explain how to use the flash cards as an effective learning tool.
• Extensive Games and Puzzles-matching exercises, word searches, and memory tests-provide a fun way to test your ability to read, pronounce, and understand the words in each chapter.
• Finally, a Round-Up chapter enables you to review all 100 words presented in the book. Answers to all exercises are included.

This practical activity book not only gives you a great start to learning Arabic with 100 key words but also provides helpful ways to expand your reading vocabulary.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (August 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0844223956
• ISBN-13: 978-0844223957
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 8.5 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #55,577 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #17 in Books > Education & Reference > Dictionaries & Thesauruses > Foreign Language > Arabic
  • #22 in Books > Education & Reference > Foreign Languages > Arabic > Instruction

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Pair this book up with..., July 17, 2004

By 

Elmsaafir "Ryokojin" (Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Your First 100 Words in Arabic : Beginner's Quick & Easy Guide to Demystifying Non-Roman Scripts (Paperback)

"Read and Speak Arabic for Beginners" for the maximum benefit. I've been teaching myself Arabic off and on since I lived in Egypt in 1994, and these two are the best books for basic learning that I've found. Good basis on the fundamentals of the written language, as well as basic conversational skills. Repetition, the key to learning anything new, is the primary means in these books. However, as you progress, they reinforce the words and language skills learned earlier by forcing you to incorporate them as you get farther along.

I've also found that the Hippocrene series has several excellent Arabic resources too. "Mastering Arabic" by Wightwick and Gaafar, and the companion Arabic-English dictionary and phrasebook are particularly good.

I've yet to find the "perfect" book that combines reading/writing, vocabulary, and grammar all in one useful setting, and Amazon should know...I've bought at least a dozen different books from them in my quest...These 2 give a pretty darn good effort though.

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Works extremely well re script - not so well re sound, December 17, 2005

By 

F. Stewart - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Your First 100 Words in Arabic : Beginner's Quick & Easy Guide to Demystifying Non-Roman Scripts (Paperback)

Original review (prior to formal Arabic instruction): This book was my "ice-breaker" to learning Arabic, for personal interest in Christian-Muslim dialogue, and professional interest in Islamic world view(s). The key to this book's exceptional utility is the ease of associating sound patterns of phonetic transliteration of words for everyday objects (household items, clothing articles, etc.) with the written patterns of Arabic characters. Although I totally lacked familiarity with the Arabic alphabet, the correspondence between "sound and sight" was remarkably easy to decipher, granted the basic level of vocabulary. While I don't expect more advanced vocabulary or grammar to be nearly so easy, the book accomplishes its objective: Removing the intimidation of a completely unfamiliar alphabet. Well done!

As an aside, I've found that the ability to read music (a skill I've only recently acquired) helps significantly. It's a very short "leap" from reading pitches represented by non-Roman characters (musical notes) to reading phonemes represented by a non-Roman alphabet.

Addendum following instruction: Since writing the above review, I've completed a semester in beginning Arabic, and I now have a mild-to-moderate criticism of the book. There are basic sounds and sound patterns that simply cannot be represented by English phoneticisms, period. So for the purpose of learning the *sounds* represented by Arabic *script*, English phoneticisms are misleading in some cases, and flat out wrong in others.

For those already familiar with Arabic sounds, phoneticisms or transliterations are merely "codes" rather than representations. Unfortunately, this book gives the (often false) impression of *representing* the sounds. Readers who get a false sense of confidence in mispronunciations learned from this book (as I did) may be discouraged when they first encounter the difficulties of correct pronunciation. That's where my music reading analogy falls apart: In music training you actually hear the notes represented by the symbols, whereas the edition of this book that I reviewed did not include a CD.

The book still works very well re demystifing Arabic *script*, but the apparent representations of Arabic *sounds* should be taken with a grain of salt. For the English speaker, many Arabic sounds and ways of verbally connecting sounds are totally unfamiliar. To learn to properly pronounce Arabic on even the most basic level, inter-personal instruction is an absolute must. Recordings are good supplements for "ear training," but they cannot provide the correction essential for properly *verbalizing* Arabic sounds.

As an example of why this correction is essential, well into my first semester of very exacting instruction, I could detect the anglicized mispronunciations of acquaintances who've "picked up" Arabic overseas without benefit of intensive instruction. In contrast, on the first day of my second semester, my new teacher, a native *Saudi* Arab speaker, took me aside and remarked on the correctness of my pronunciation. Interestingly, my first teacher was a native *Sudanese* Arab speaker, indicating that modern standard Arabic really is just that - a standardized way of speaking as well as writing across nationalities.

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good - With One Problem, March 18, 2005

By 

zift (Molokai, Hawaii, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Your First 100 Words in Arabic : Beginner's Quick & Easy Guide to Demystifying Non-Roman Scripts (Paperback)

The title is only half true. Yes, this will give you your first 100 words in Arabic, with neat flashcards and some good exercises. For the price it is reasonable, although 100 words is really not much (even if you've never studied French or Spanish, for example, you probably know well over 100 words in each).
On the other side, this book will not teach you the Arabic script. That is OK, since it provides both Arabic and transliterated Arabic on the flashcards. It gives you a chart of Arabic letters and a page with general principles of joining letters. You cannot reasonably go from that to unraveling the Arabic writing. That part of the title should be cut out. You need a book like Awde's "The Arabic Alphabet" a cheap and useful guide for learning the alphabet.