wouldn't say that I am 'reading' this book, but it is the book I open most often these days! Made it half way through this book in an intensive summer program.
Not worth the time, especially if you are not in a class, This book will not teach you arabic, If you do happen to be using this book for a class I would recommend some supplemental reading to help with grammar and vocab.
In my first Arabic class, we worked through the first book in this textbook series, and I found it very helpful in learning the Arabic alphabet and some basic initial vocabulary and grammar.
But this second textbook it's still helpful, but it seems more difficult and frustrating than it ought to be, Here are a few reasons:
Vocabulary: The new words in each lesson come from a series of stories about Maha, a university student in New York.
Because of this, the vocabulary sometimes seems oddfor example, learning the Arabic word for "United Nations" in the first lesson.
I felt like I wasn't learning some key terms that I needed at the time when I most needed them.
Dialects: I'm still very timid about my Arabic comprehension, and reading fluency, spelling, and pronunciation are still slow and limited.
So it was not helpful for me to have to start thinking about Egyptian and Levantine dialects as well as MSA at this early stage.
The online supplementary exercises a core part of this textbook requires listening to at least one of the dialects, and for me, this was just extra busywork that I didn't need.
Online exercises: I'm glad that the textbook includes audiovisual exercises and other drills on the companion website.
However, I often felt that the website exercises were needlessly tedious, The first exercises in each lesson are dictation: listening to long sentences that include new vocabulary words, and writing down the sentences.
Especially early in the textbook, this was very hard for me, and having to transcribe a set ofsentences was a really difficult and uninspiring way to begin each lesson.
Also, the whole website has a very Web,feel. The UI is not at all intuitive in current ways, and so using the website was not a pleasure.
Even more than with the first textbook, this one demands a teacher who can guide you through it and help you understand the important points more intuitively.
I was blessed to have a wonderful teacher, and so her classes became my primary means of learning, with the textbook as a supplement.
I do not think this textbook would be suitable for selfstudy, A future edition could be excellentthe raw material is mostly all herebut it needs a major revision.
Best first year Arabic text book! Interesting, and particularly good for the cds that help with sound recognition/pronunciation, but not really for the independent learner.
I much preferred the very traditional approach of the New Arabic grammar or the oldest editions of the Teach yourself books.
The sort that gives you clear grammar points illustrated by written sample sentences, accompanied by a set vocabulary to learn.
Then add in the pronunciation and conversation, once you know your fiy from your kalb, But that's my preference. I am currently learning Arabic, and it is useful, but it is hard to teach yourself, . . but with a professor it is an excellent, . . I don't see why this book has so many negative reviews, It is far and away the best language textbook I have ever seen, The exercises are clearly designed with an understanding of how second languages are actually learned, and the new grammatical concepts and vocabulary are introduced gradually and used repeatedly so that you learn them and then learn them again until you remember them.
Obvious as these points seem, it's amazing how often they aren't done,
The reason this textbook seems to be difficult and unsuitable for learning alone is because it focuses on teaching independent language learning and language using skills, rather than explaining everything exhaustively and getting the student to rote learn it all.
Thus, not all the vocabulary that turns up in a given chapter is present in the vocabulary list at the beginning of the chapter some of it you learn along the way, often simply by seeing its use in context.
Many of the reading and listening texts are "too difficult" in that they are introduced before the student has learned all the vocabulary and structures included in them.
However, this
is done along with explanations of how to deal with the fact that you don't know all the vocabulary and structures included in the texts and like everything else in the book, these explanations are introduced gradually and these skills are developed gradually.
Since in real life, when using a language you are in the process of learning, you will inevitably be faced with situations using vocabulary and structures that you don't know, developing these skills is crucially important.
Similarly, grammatical concepts are frequently introduced without explaining them properly, Although I found this very disconcerting at first as it was completely different to how I had learned languages before, I am now completely converted.
For example, if you know how to say "but", you can suddenly express a whole lot of things you couldn't before, and the fact that "but" in Arabic is part of a class of grammaticalthingieswhosenameIcan'trememberbuttheymakethingsaroundthemaccusative is not a particularly helpful thing to know and will just go in one ear and out the other.
But introducing grammar in this way means that almost from the very beginning you are able to talk about interesting things.
The details of each concept are then introduced later, Being able to express vaguely complex ideas early on makes the whole process of language learning much more enjoyable.
I still have some quibbles about how some specific grammatical concepts are introduced, but this hardly takes away from my appreciation for the general approach.
To my astonishment, I even became invested in the stories of the characters that unfold over the course of the chapters.
I won't spoil the ending, but I actually really want to know what Khalid and Maha think of each other.
All in all, I can't recommend this textbook too highly, If you want to really learn how to use a language and how to learn a language, rather than just how to rote learn endless lists of vocabulary and verb conjugations, then look no further.
This book offers a decent introduction to Modern Standard Arabic, but the authors tend to introduce words in with conjugated / participle form, only later explaining the core grammatical concepts that underlie these surface forms.
It is surprising to me that a textbook on Arabic would not explain the triliteral consonant root verb form pattern relationship until the final third of the textbook.
Knowing this from the start would greatly simplify the process of learning the language,
My other criticism is the tendency of speakers to slip into Egyptian accent / dialect on the included DVD, this needlessly complicates the learning process.
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