Read and Speak Arabic for Beginners

List Price: $16.95 Discount Price: $9.12

Customer Reviews:

Pleased. [Posted on 2007-01-11]
I received this product in a good amount of time and it was in good shape.

A fun introduction to a difficult language! [Posted on 2007-04-23]
This book is a valuable resource as an introduction to Arabic for someone who wants an introduction to the alphabet and some basic volabulary, grammar and phrases. It is well-designed to make learning easy and fun. It is also a great value because it comes with a CD and flashcards to help with pronunciation and script recognition.

I think a weakness of the book is the superficial treatment of script in the middle of the text. However, it is an adequate introduction, but to me learning the script would be easier with a book like The Arabic Alphabet: How to Read & Write It. This is a much more comprehensive, accessible and less intimidating exposure to learning Arabic script and it is still less than 100 pages.

Helpful, but method of introducting Arabic script is problematic. [Posted on 2007-10-18]
This text is useful. It begins from the basics and proceeds at a realistically slow pace. The CD is very helpful for pronunciation. HOWEVER, one big drawback is the way the author introduces written Arabic script. Although she does not SYSTEMATICALLY introduce the script until near the END of the book, she uses the script from the very first lesson, where she blithely - overly optimistically - instructs the student to simply remember the overall SHAPE or appearance of words written in Arabic. I challenge anyone to be able to do this!!! Beyond a few words, that is. Unit exercises often present words in Arabic script only, with no Roman scipt trancription, so you really have to master reading the script to fully paricipate in the program. The solution is to jump ahead to the end of the book, and study the letters first - but you won't get much help with this - there are no graduated exercises. I do not find Arabic script "easy" (much harder than Cyrillic script, for example, although easier/faster to learn than Japanese's three concurrent scripts) and I crave more support than this book offers. (There is a companion book by same author and one other, for learning to write Arabic.)

Bad for Beginners [Posted on 2007-12-29]
I have arabic for dummies and it is better, incl CD for audio. I am a visual learner, so I need to SEE how to say it. Following a CD in this book is not easy, if you can't see it too. I would NOT recommend this book for beginners.

Great Study aid to learning Arabic [Posted on 2008-07-25]
My daughter who is studying Egyptian Arabic used this to get ready to take the course, it helped prepare her for diving head first into a language that she had no prior exposure to! She had just completed a 4 year college course in International Finance & THEN decided she wanted to tackle 1 of the most difficult languages to learn on the face of the earth!! Go figure! College kids!! LOL
Anywho.......... she said it helped prep her for what was to come!!

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