Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #200060 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-30
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 90 pages

Customer Reviews

Big list
This book is pretty much what everyone says it is. It is a big list of words without a ton of intuitive organization beyond general categories like elections, politics and military. The Army has always based its test and language teaching on items culled from the news, so a book like this would be very helpful for military linguists. It's probably also a decent selection of words for any student who wants to learn how to read the news. It would probably be most useful for people who are the types who like to learn a word a day, or memorize lists. It might be more useful if it were organized like a dictionary.

Not a reference book, and not much else.
Anyone who has spent significant time studying Arabic on their own will know that 90% of the learning materials out there are, for various reasons, not useful. Unfortunately this book ranks among the least useful of them. Its only justifiable use is for the rote memorization of terms. I bought this book as a reference for translating news articles, and foolishly assumed it would be arranged into some sort of logical order. While the forward claims that a thematic order has been imposed within the subjects of the chapters, and asserts that alphabetization "has a negative impact on the learning of vocabulary lists."
Any decent dictionary or comprehensive vocabulary builder could replace this book in terms of content and usefulness, while offering far more to the user besides. I would not recommend purchasing this book, and will not attempt to sell it for the same reason.

Media Arabic
I was excited to receive this book, however as other reviews have said, it is difficult to use as a reference. The words in the book are very useful, relevant, and translated accurately, but are not in a particular alphabetical order that I can tell. I suppose I will use it as a vocabulary list, and just memorize them in order, but I was hoping to use it as a quick reference while reading the news.