Ahlan wa Sahlan: Functional Modern Standard Arabic for Beginners

List Price: $64.00 Discount Price: $42.00

Customer Reviews:

Imcomplete [Posted on 2006-07-24]
The CD's which are required as a part of our class are not part of this book as they would be if ordered through the university bookstore.

Mediocre [Posted on 2006-08-04]
As other reviewers have pointed out, this book is generally mediocre. It teaches you think in a piece-meal, unsystematic fashion...which oftentimes can be a good thing, but here proves to be disorienting and uninstructive. Not only that, but as others have pointed out, at every step it pushes a dopey, anti-Israel political agenda. This book is a joke, botch intellectually and politically.

You can, of course, learn something from it, but avoid it if possible.

They needed an editor [Posted on 2007-03-30]
This is a terrible book. As the other reviewers have said, it's filled with typos, misspellings (in Arabic!), and is completely disorganized. The resolution of the pictures is so bad the pages look photocopied. Most importantly though, it's impossible to learn on your own. You need a teacher's help deciphering what they're talking about. And do you really need to know the word for differential calculus? I'm suprised Yale University Press put out something of such low quality.

for a solid understanding of Arabic [Posted on 2007-04-02]
I have been tutoring Arabic for 5 years (thearabictutor@gmail.com) & this is the best book I found to be the text book for my students. My students love my lessons & this book is a big part of the good experience.

it does not run over the material, it goes with you step by step, I do not know how Arabic would be learnt without a teacher, it is not like studying French if you know English..the difference starts in the Alphabet (writing & pronunciation) & grows more in grammar. So if you are looking for a gimmick book that will teach you to say parrot's "good morning" & "good night" & "have a nice day" then this is not the book...this is a serious, carefully planned, aiming at well-educated level of understanding & ability to handle this beautiful poetic language.

for those who says it won't help you learn on your own: Arabic is one of the hardest languages to learn, & it is an Afro-Asiatic language so if your 1st language is Indu-European then do not blame the book, & the book is not full of misspelling, probably you were not understanding the language enough to know what you are reading!

for those who do not like the book because of politics: the book is not political, it is a language book, but of course it will call Palestine by its native people given name & by the name Arab call it because it is teaching you Arabic in context! in this book you will follow some Arab students correspondances with their family & friends, & it will give you a background of the culture.

Good attempt [Posted on 2008-03-01]
I have been teaching Arabic for 3 years to my college students using Al Kitaab, with decent success. I recently adopted this book for our new high school Arabic class. Of the two books, I feel like this one is more complete and more useful as a basic Arabic book that covers a little of everything. I'm also a Spanish teacher which means I grew up on excellent textbooks making use of the latest methodology and creative presentations. In reading the teacher's manual and the introductory materials, it is obvious that Dr. Alosh is well versed in modern teaching methods, and in that sense, the book is very good. However, the presentation is very much lacking in comparison to the latest textbooks in other languages. The graphics are of poor quality, the exercises tend to be rather rote and uninteresting, the audio is in a very poor package and there is not a lot of variety in the activities you can use in class. A teacher ends up having to supplement greatly. That being said, the grammar, vocabulary and culture seems to be presented in decent progression and the book appears to be fairly complete, in the sense that it doesn't skip important or useful items. Learning any language on your own from a book is a task that is difficult to impossible for most people, and this book does not change that for Arabic. It's a good choice for classroom use, but I wouldn't buy it expecting to do a self-study. I think that with the addition of more communicative, contextualized, visual, and varied activities that could be used to practice the topics, this could be a top-notch textbook.

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