Product Description

These cassettes are recorded by native Arabic speakers and can be used on their own or to accompany the coursebook, helping you with pronunciation and listening skills.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1817527 in Books
• Published on: 1982-01-14
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: Arabic, English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Map

Customer Reviews

A disgrace for Routledge
Unfortunately, I can't recommend this book. There are three Colloquial Arabic books published by Routledge, but only one (Colloquial Arabic of the Gulf) lives up to the high standard in Routledge's Colloquial Series.

What annoys me the most that I interviewed an editor for the Colloquial series in 2001 and we discussed different courses. The editor admitted that Colloquial Arabic (Levantine) was the one book she felt ashamed of and that they would need to come out with a completely new book. Now, in 2009, they present us with the same "course" they felt ashamed of eight years ago. It's the same unsatisfactory content, these are the main reasons you should not even consider buying it.

1. Learning a new language is reasonably hard, and most Colloquial books published by Routledge are about 300-350 pages. This one in barely 100 pages and, what is more, it's smaller than most of the other books. This means that the material in this book compares to 1/5 in another Colloquial book. I don't think Arabic is that much easier...

2. In this very short book, one half deals exclusively with proverbs. No doubt interesting, but that means that the actual page number for grammar and vocabulary is nothing short of scandalous.

3. The grammar is explained very briefly, and you don't get any understanding of it.

4. Very few vocabularies are featured on the tape, so you'll finish this book without being able to pronounce Arabic (nor understand it, nor speak it)

I'm very interested in Arabic, and the Arabic of the Levant in particular, so it's very disappointing that this book don't live up to the most rudimentary expectations. Routledge is renowned as the worlds leading publisher of high quality language courses (justified in 99% of the cases) and I sincerely hoped in 2001 that they would remove this disgrace and replace it with a book worthy their reputation. Instead, they just changed the cover.

If you want to learn Colloquial Arabic, go to Colloquial Arabic of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia.

A strong basic introduction to colloquial Arabic
This small book serves as a good basic introduction to the colloquial Arabic of the region. Although it relies solely on the use of transliteration to present Arabic words, which may be off-putting for the more advanced student, it provides a systematic methodology for learning colloquial Arabic in a series of 20 lessons. This text is best used with the tapes and with occasional recourse to a native speaker. My Palestinian instructor strongly refuted some of the book's pronouncements on what is "common parlance" in the region, so take care !

An essential accompanyment to the book
This tape accompanies the paperback by McLoughlin which introduces Colloquial Levantine Arabic. The tape is particularly useful for students learning Arabic on their own although it is recommended even if the book is being used with a teacher. The pronounciation on the tape is clear and assists in deciphering the form of transliteration used by the authors. I found it particularly play the tape, then record my voice repeating extracts from it in order to compare the two and develop an ear for the accent.