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kullu tamam!: An Introduction to Egyptian Colloquial Arabic

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This book is intended for use in a university with language students, who are used to terms like paradigma and possessive suffix. For people with no linguistic background who want to learn Egyptian, it is not very useful, and the academic lingo can put people off.

Also, it is plainly intended for use inside an environment where there is a native speaker teacher, as there are very few dialogs or texts and most of the book is filled with grammar and grammar exercises. The CDs are not very useful: The student who has a native speaker teacher will learn more from listening to the teacher, the student who attempts to plough through this book alone will have very little use from the CDs as they make no allowances for people whose ears are unused to Arabic: the dialogs are in normal conversational speed which also can be very offputting to students.

The book is thorough and the way the Egyptian Arabic grammar is categorized is unparalleled. But it is only useful in the environment for which it was originally created: For university language students who have a native speaker teacher. For anyone else, I would advise to look for a simpler course that will maybe not enable you to fully grasp the transition of second person plural active to passive; but will let you have a conversation with an Egyptian on the street.

For those used to learning arabic already, the transilitiration will take some getting used to, but in terms of what is available, there is nothing else like this book. My Egyptian friends went through this book with me amazed at how appropriate the vocabulary and grammer is, something you simply will not find in most of the Arabic language books that are available. For teh beginner who does not need to learn the writing (which is something completely different from colloqial Egyptians Arabic anyway) than this book is perfect. Highly reccomended before you begin tackling the MSA if you have the time.

After I was at a fairly advanced level of MSA, I was introduced to this book to improve my ECA. The transliteration was a bit odd considering that most people first start with MSA and then move on to ECA, but it helps those who do it the other way around. The vocab in the book, the transition between lessons and the audio files make this book one of the best resources for learning Egyptian Arabic! I highly recommend it!

I've just finished the last chapter of Kullu Tamam and I have to say that my general verdict of this book is not very positive. Here's why:

1) The recorded dialogues are too short and not at all interactive. The "listen and repeat" exercises, a very common feature of modern textbooks, is totally absent from Kullu Tamam. There is nothing to stop you from hitting the pause button if you do want to repeat or listen to the sentences, but the gaps between the recordings are too short, making this a very tedious process!

2) There are disparities between the recordings and the transcription of the dialogues. Such "quirks" may be slightly amusing for the more advanced student or teacher but is the very last thing a beginner, who expects clarity, wants.

3) The grammatical explanations are unclear, with too few examples given. Typically, you would only get one or two example sentences for crucial grammatical rules, which need a lot of consolidation. The treatment of Arabic verbal conjugation, an extremely important aspect of the language, is crammed into 3 or 4 chapters (IX-XII), with very few examples, paradigms and explanations. Likewise, object suffixes are summed up in one page but of course, students are expected to tackle exercises all throughout the book, which make abundant use of these suffixes!

4) The exercises at the end of each chapter are overambitious considering the inadequacy of the grammatical explanations I've just mentioned. Learners are expected to translate fairly complex sentences from English to Arabic, based on the very sparse and often contradictory examples used in the preceding chapters.

5) Many exercises are often pointless and ridiculous. For example, there are lots of "fill in the blanks" exercises. In the hands of competent authors, these would serve to illustrate how word x cannot be substituted for word y because a particular grammatical or idiomatic point logically excludes this possibility so there is really only one correct answer. In Kullu Tamam, however, learners are basically being asked to second-guess the minds of authors Manfred Woidich and Rabha Heinen-Nasr. Why a particular car should be red and not black, or a child should be tall and not short, or that Samya is going to the market but not to school is just because the authors say so! There is no grammatical or idiomatic reason to make these mutually exclusive! Just try doing these exercises and you'll see exactly what I mean!

6) An extremely irritating aspect of this book is its frequent use of vocabulary and grammar that are only explained or glossed in subsequent chapters. For example, an exercise in Chapter XII requires the use of the active participle in Stem VIII, but this is only explained in later chapters. Bizarrely, the usage of wala and 'ayy are finally explained in Chapter XIII after being constantly used from almost the first chapter.

7) In the Introduction, the authors explain why they have decided to use transcription, mainly because in their view, the phonology of Egyptian Arabic cannot be adequately described for beginners using the Arabic script. This is reasonable enough and I have nothing against this approach but in that case, why bother to introduce he Arabic script at all in the VERY LAST chapter of the book, making it nearly useless?

8) By far the worst aspect of this book is the fact that it is FULL of errors and typos. Kullu Tamam suffers from sloppy and amateurish editing which needs to be addressed urgently should the authors decide to inflict upon us a future edition. Even the answer key contains numerous errata, even more inexcusable given that one of the authors is a native speaker. For example, in Lesson XIV, exercise XV, has a sentence "There is only one orange in the fridge". The answer key has "apple". Lesson X, exercise XVI has 'arfa but the answer key has 'arfin. There is also a nonsense sentence in the answer key for Lesson XI, "mish 'arfin nimam bi_llel", "we don't know how to sleep at night''!?? Page 123, Lesson IX, the authors claim that mediae geminatae verbs "are conjugated the same way as mediae infirmae with an a-perfect which means that when followed by endings which begin with a consonant they receive an additional (long) e". This is flatly contradicted by the preceding page which clearly shows that med.gem are not similar to med.inf but to tert.inf verbs!

In conclusion, I found Kullu Tamam to be a very inadequate and poorly edited "introductory" textbook for Egyptian Arabic with numerous errors and omissions.

I also have mixed feelings about this book. The first thing that got my attention was the peculiar transliteration of the dialogs of the accompanying CD.

Also, it seemed like there are "gaps" between what's on the CD and what's in the book. I had trouble trying to figure out what page I was supposed to

go to to find the next step on the CD. Also, their "rules" for the transliteration were cumbersome and annoying. Particularly in regard to pronunciation.

As it turns out, i listen to the CD far more often than I read the book. But that's also mostly because I'm trying to become accustomed to hearing

spoken Egyptian Arabic.

Also, I ended up buying Kalimni 'Arabi and like it much more. The text for that is in Arabic script and I think it'll help me to learn to read it

rather than waste my time reading silly transliterations that are throughout Kullu Tamaam.

I guess if I had to recommend Kullu Tamaam, I'd say get it if you prefer transliteration rather than learning Arabic script.

But if you want to learn to read written Arabic, then go with Kalimni 'Arabi instead.

This course, which actually is translated into English from Dutch, is so much better than any of its competitors in the field of introductory Egyptian Arabic that it is hard to see them as serious alternatives to it.

The Routledge 'Colloquial Arabic of Egypt' has a good-looking cover, but it doesn't offer a broad-based vocabulary, and the 'Kallimni Arabi' books (also published by American University in Cairo Press), while offering much more substantive vocabulary, are poorly organized and have next to nothing to offer in the way of grammar.

The lessons in this book progress very logically and a beginning student can make fairly rapid progress. The explanations of grammar, while not extensive, don't omit anything that could come back and surprise a student at a more advanced level of the language. The CDs are excellent, and wonder of wonders- they come with the book. My one criticism would be that the Arabic alphabet is not introduced earlier- it would certainly be helpful for a native speaker teaching from the book.

I have not used the book extensively, but I already agree with other reviewers who are somewhat critical of the book and share most of their criticisms.

In my opinion, the book was published too quickly without thoroughly vetting it against real students.

Now to be fair, I'm using it for self-study, and I agree with the reviewer who felt it would be best used in a class with a teacher. I do a lot of self-study and am very critical of textbooks in general for that purpose. Good self-study books need to be very careful to define terms before they use them and to provide well thought out examples that are unambigous and with enough redundancy to help the student resolve any ambigous concepts or typos that slip by.

I've already noticed some typographic curiosities -- in Chapter 1 under "V. Feminine Endings" for example, an accent mark is used over long consonants instead of the horizontal bar that is used elsewhere. This puzzled me for the longest time until I concluded it was a typo, not some new voicing (but I'm still not sure).

In the introduction under "E. Other useful expressions", the Arabic word for both "take" and "give (to me)" is provided as "hat!" (with a long vowel). In the English glossary, "take" is translated as "xad" or "yaxud" (long "a" in yaxud). In the Arabic glossary, there is no "hat", but there is a "hatt" (deep h) meaning "place" or "put". Why the discrepancy? Inexcusable in a language book, especially one that pretends to be as technical as this.

The pronunciation section in the Introduction was also frustratingly incomplete. For some of the consonants, some approximate English word sounds are offered, which is useful. But some are omitted and an Arabic word example is used instead... huh? Even though some sounds aren't in the English language, I've seen other teaching guides do a better job of describing the sound.

After each consonant character (such as h, g, etc.), there is an alternate character in brackets that is unexplained -- an alternate typography, perhaps a universal dictionary notation? This needs to be explained directly above its use.

For the vowels, no English approximations are offered at all, only Arabic word examples... double huh?

There are two vowel "signs" which are not equated to letters... one is called the "hamza", the other is not given a name but described as a "voiced fricative that which is pronounced in the pharynx, as in the word "?arabi" (I'm using the ? for the symbol). Why not give it a name also so we can refer to it? Also, linguistic terms such as "fricative" should be defined somewhere, at least in an Appendix, or don't use them.

The Arabic glossary considers the above two "signs" as letters in the alphabet when it orders the words, so if you want to look up "arabi", you won't find it under words beginning with "a", rather under the words beginning with the sign. That probably is necessary since the authors are trying to avoid using Arabic script, but it makes it hard to find words that you recall the basic sound of.

I agree that the CD is a bare bones addition, although I greatly appreciate it as I feel audio is a must-have feature for a language book. It could be vastly improved though. Each vocabulary word should be pronounced at least twice, once slowly. I agree there should be no discrepancies with the written text, otherwise the student is confounded.

There are infinite possibilities for the CD, and they should at least include some easy enhancements. One would be to have an audio file library of each word in the glossary, with the English word followed by the Arabic word spoken normally and slowly. Also for phrases. I came a cross a military "survival arabic" set of mp3 files that followed that format and it was quite useful. By having a separate audio file for each word and phrase, you can easily repeat the word/phrase as long as you like. By naming the files for the word, you can easily look up and hear a word.

Of course a video DVD would be even better to show dialogs, with actors pointing, holding objects, acting out dialogs, etc. I understand that costs money, but it would be a wonderful addition.

On a positive note, the book does cover actual gramatical issues and goes way beyond your typical tourist phrase books which rarely can help you construct a sentence on your own. So I think this book is worth owning, but could be much improved, at least by careful editing.

In conclusion, the book reminds me of buildings in Cairo -- unfinished.

I know some Egyptian Arabic so the book is somewhat useful for me but the dialog that is written in the book is strange and does not use proper Arabic writing so it is hard to make out how things are said.

The CD that comes with the book does nothing but repeat the words said throughout the book.

This is more of a phrase book than a Book that would teach one how to speak Egyptian Arabic