Product Description

Brand-new to the "501" Series comes "501 Arabic Verbs", printed in Arabic script with exemplary sentences in English for each verb. To reflect correct Arabic style, "501 Arabic Verbs" has been printed back cover to front and back page to front. 501 Verbs titles present the 501 most common verbs in their language. Verbs are arranged alphabetically in a table format, one verb per page with English translation, and conjugated in all tenses and forms. Additional features in each book include common idioms with example sentences to demonstrate verb usage and grammar reviews.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13419 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 584 pages

Customer Reviews

Conquering the mountain that is Arabic verbs!
I'm new to Arabic but have 2 years university Hebrew behind me many years back and a few other languages. This is a great value comprehensive guide to climbing the mountain of Arabic verbs. Whatever this author or many others say about Arabic verbs being easy - "all you have to do is learn the rules" (!) - they are plainly difficult. There are 10 verb forms with subtle and not so subtle changes of meaning, subjunctive and jussive voices and complex changes of conjugation depending on double root consonants and "weak" consonants (waw, yeh etc.) Scheindlin provides a thorough, fully vowelled and conjugated list of the verbs you are most likely to use. Each verb form and meaning comes with a relevant and contemporary example. Scheindlin also throws in a brief grammar and summary of the morphology of Arabic verbs and an index at the back (from an Arabic viewpoint). I had no problem navigating the book, and although it is clearly not intended to function as an English-Arabic dictionary it does a give an excellent view of the range of meanings conveyed by each verb in the various forms of the root. A fair amount of general understanding of grammar is required, however.

Useful reference if you can navigate it
I am just beyond beginner level in Arabic and bought this book to help with my understanding of the conjugation of verbs. However, this is a horrible book to navigate. It starts from the back (as you might in an Arabic book) but much of the start is written in English; I find this unnecessarily confusing. In addition, there appear to be some errors in the early verbs and even my teacher has great difficulty finding words; she is a native Arabic speaker! To make proper use of it I have had to compile my own index. This is a useful reference but not an easy one to navigate.

501 Arabic Verbs
The good features of this book are: (1) The large number of verbs included, (2) The indexing of verbs both by whole word and by root order, (3) The introductory notes, (4) The inclusion of exemplary sentences, (5) The inclusion of the English meaning of each verb. The book would have been more user friendly were it to include an index of verbs by type and form and employ a format of one complete verb per page. Both of these features appear in '201 Arabic Verbs' by the same author.