Product Description

There are basically two types of Arabic: the local vernaculars - which are used in everyday life - and Modern Standard Arabic, which is restricted to writing and to speaking in formal settings. Anyone wanting to have a good command of the Arabic language must learn both varieties. kullu tamam! takes account of this diversity in two ways: It introduces the student to the language by means of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, and provides a basis for those who want to go on to learn Modern Standard Arabic. This is done by using the grammatical terminology common to both varieties of Arabic, by offering many vocabulary items current in both the vernacular and the standard variety, and - in the later lessons - by introducing the Arabic script. kullu tamam! uses a cognitively oriented approach, presents Arabic mainly in transcription, gives grammatical rules, and presents a wide range of pattern drills and translation exercises (with key), as well as vocabulary lists for both Arabic-English and English-Arabic. Illustrative texts are either short dialogues, as may be encountered in daily life in Egypt, or descriptive passages dealing with more abstract topics and using a vocabulary typical of Arabic newspapers. The accompanying audio CD carries recordings of the texts, made by Egyptian native speakers. For over ten years now, the Dutch edition of kullu tamam! has been used successfully in first-year Arabic courses at university level in the Netherlands. Now students in the English-speaking world can benefit from its clear, fresh approach. kullu tamam! is also suitable for self-study purposes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #360581 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Manfred Woldich is a professor in the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and is the author of several books on the colloquial Arabic of Egypt. Rabha Henein-Nasr is a lecturer in the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Amsterdam.

Customer Reviews

Full of errors and typos and definitely not for beginners!
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 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.

Learn Egyptian Arabic from scratch !
Contrarily to what the other review says, you definitely need arabic dialects to communicate. I graduated in Arabic and spent 2 months in Yemen to practice it, and believe me, outside the arabian peninsula very few people speak standard arabic.

The egyptian dialect is widely understood, though not as widely spoken, because Egypt produces loads of tv shows and films. And this book really helps.

I bought it after my graduation because I also wanted to speak Egyptian, and I would recomment it to anyone.