Product Description

The beauty and richness of the history and cultures of the Middle East are matters of increasing interest to the English-speaking world. As nations make their way into this new century, there must be dialogue and understanding--and language is the doorway into that new understanding.

This revised and updated second edition of Al-Kitaab contains new video and audio material on three DVDs, along with revised and updated texts and exercises. Following naturally on the introductory text, Alif Baa, for the Al-Kitaab Arabic language program, this initial Part One text further develops skills in standard Arabic while providing additional material in colloquial as well as classical Arabic.

The audio vocabulary portion of the DVDs allow learners to hear a new word followed by a sentence using it in context along with previously acquired vocabulary and grammatical structures, enabling students to build new vocabulary skills while reviewing previously exercised material. The video portion offers the option of seeing and hearing the video of each lesson in both Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic. The DVDs also contain substantial material exposing the learner to Egyptian Arabic (the most widely used and understood Arabic dialect), a short dialogue in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic appears at the end of each lesson. New video materials also feature subtitled interviews with Egyptians about various aspects of Arab culture, such as gender issues, fasting in the Muslim and Christian traditions, social clubs and their significance, and more.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #30077 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-30
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

Forum for Modern Language Studies, October 2005
This is a revised and updated edition, with new video and audio material and new exercises...An extremely impressive volume.

Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, June 2006
More drills and activities have been worked into the text, giving students more practice in the skills being presented.

Association of Departments of Foreign Languages Bulletin, Fall 2005
The student hears, sees and reads Arabic, and learning is kept close to an authentic linguistic and cultural experience.

Customer Reviews

where's Waldo teaches Arabic
Most of the points about this book's limitations have been made already (Harun ar-rashid's review for example) but I can't resist the urge to point out a few that I find particularly irritating.

--Vocabulary pages and the glossaries are right-justified. This means six inches between the beginning of the word in English on the left and the beginning of its counterpart in Arabic on the right. It's hard to scan across inches of white space between the words without rules under each line.

Vocab lists benefit from being narrow but in this book the words are as far apart as they can possibly get. I draw lines under each entry as a visual aid. Better to have the Arabic word in the left column, right-justified, and the English word in the right column, left justified. So they're back-to-back, as it were. Better still three columns, with the transliteration in the middle column. But...

--No transliteration. It's apparently a crutch that runs counter to the "see if you can figure it out" pedagogical principle the authors have embraced (the "coy" or "where's Waldo" methodology). But that gulf of white space in the vocab listings is a perfect place for a transliteration. I have a Japanese vocab book that does just that. Three columns: the word in English, the Japanese word in romaji, the word in kanji. All in about three inches horizontally. This is non-coy. It allows for different angles of attack. Some people (like me) prefer to get the pronunciation down before tackling the written word. I can memorize the words quickly given the aural cue of transliteration then armed with its sound and meaning, learn the written word. In other words providing the transliteration allows you to break the memorization down into more granular discrete tasks which you can then organize according to your learning style. Also the transliterations should be used within the English explanations of the grammar. Plunking individual words written in Arabic in the middle of English sentences is awkward and unnatural.

--Of course, it's ridiculous that you learn how to say "my maternal aunt is a translator at the United Nations" before you learn how to say "where is the bathroom". "Political science" before "I don't know", etc.

--Inconsistent written Arabic. On page 7 are three different representations of the word "feminine". On the next page is a fourth way. Look it up in the glossary and sure enough, a fifth way. Two ways I can deal with: vowelled first, unvowelled thereafter. No more, please.

--The typography is uninviting, primitive, hideous almost, as if produced using a typesetting system from the 1950s. The Arabic font is smudgy (shadda and hamza are sometimes just blurs), the page layout is atrocious (eg, the tables on pp 24-5).

Jane Wightwick's Easy Arabic Grammar explains the grammar in a much smaller, visually appealing presentation. After finding and puzzling through al-Kitaab's explanations I look at Wightwick for the concise version.

The most useful thing about al-Kitaab I think are the example sentences for the vocab words. But these sentences, which are spoken on the DVD, aren't in the book! They are, however, in the so-called Answer Key. Who knows why--they aren't "answers". They're examples, and useful ones, though of course no translation is provided. Hiding them untranslated in the answer key is in keeping with the "where's Waldo" methodology.

So, here's one way to extract some usefulness out of this beast. There's a CD of the MP3 version of all the files on the DVDs (not easy to find, naturally--it's in Amazon, do a search, same author). Get it, put the MP3s onto the computer, and rearrange them into playlists structured according to what you need. I have the vocab lists and their helpful example sentences in a separate playlist. I copy those sentences from the answer key onto separate sheets. Then on the iPod, put the playlist on repeat while reading the sentences. This is much easier to manage than the clumsy DVDs, and you can listen to them in the car.

Figuring out how to extract useful info from this book is a task in itself. The pity is, that the language is already hard enough, and a book like this makes it harder still.

A good book, but with drawbacks
I have been a language teacher for 18 years and have been teaching Arabic with this book for the past three. First of all, I have to admit that this is appears to be the top-selling most-used book among the many colleges that are adding Arabic to their curriculum. The authors of the book appear to aware of modern teaching methods and have attempted to incorporate them into their book. The DVDs are, by far the most popular item. The storyline that is presented is popular with students, and there are a number of items which can be adaped for practice outside of class. That being said, there are a number of drawbacks to the book. The book lacks many of the visuals and varied practice exercises found in other language textbooks. It ends up being more of a series of grammar explanations with rote exercises to practice. The vocabulary and topics presented revolve around the stories from the DVDs. While this is good communicative methodology, the way in which it is done leaves the student somewhat limited with regard to vocabulary for other areas. I am using Ahlan wa Sahlan in my high school classes, and while that book does not have the glitzy multimedia materials, it appears to be somewhat more complete and balanced with regard to introducing topics. Either or these two books are probably some of the most popular and best choices available, but any student who has studied Spanish will immediately realize how far behind Arabic is with regard to contemporary materials.

Al Kitaab 1-Newer Version of Previous Al Kitaab
Teachers of Arabic need to learn how to write books for westerners! This isn't bad for a "conversational" type learning tool, as long as you actually have the accompanying DVDs (you'll be institutionalized for insanity without them!), but this publication contains no relativity to standard applications of linguistic educational methods.
There are no structural standardizations of verbs, prepositions, rules, or structural contexts as such. This is a frustrating book for the advanced multi-linguist who immediately looks for verb ending sequences, sentence constructs and grammatical rules. This isn't to say that the books are devoid of rules, just not in a manner that the experienced language student would expect them...
It's not a badly organized tool for the traveling student who wants to advance with social speaking ability, but without proper grammatical constructs, you will not be able to advance without a teacher to clarify many aspects of structure that are absent!
If you want to learn to SPEAK Arabic, the DVDs enhance that aspect of the speaking process with specific linguistic applications and examples by native speakers...(apparently with Egyptian dialect?) Unfortunately, if you are trying to learn to speak gulf Arabic, your Kuwaiti and Iraqi friends are probably going to laugh at you!