Product Description

"Focus on Contemporary Arabic" is the fifth volume in the "Conversations with Native Speakers" series, which strives to offer pioneering multimedia language materials to students at the intermediate and advanced levels. These programmes consist of a slim, user-friendly student textbook and an accompanying DVD showing interviews with a variety of native speakers filmed in the target language. These speakers represent all areas of the cultural spectrum, offering a realistic view of the diversity of the native-speaking populations of the language in question. The interviews on the DVD broach an assortment of socially and culturally relevant topics and present students of the language with a glimpse into the complexity of both the language and the culture.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #112565 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-10
• Original language: Arabic
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Shukri Abed is chairman of the Language and Regional Studies Department at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C. and a lecturer in Arabic at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is also a historian and a Middle East scholar, and has authored, edited, and translated a number of scholarly books and articles. He is a native of Palestine/Israel and has taught Arabic at all levels at a variety of institutions, including Yale University, the Foreign Service Institute, University of Maryland, and the Middle East Institute. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Customer Reviews

Contemporary Arabic Conversations
Shukri's Focus on Contemporary Arabic is excellent. It is a compilation of dialogues of native speakers discussing a variety of increasngly more complicated subjects. Happily, it is not another vapid audio of survival Arabic for Western tourists in the Middle East. Rather, the DVD provides ample opportunity to improve aural skills for serious students of Arabic and the book contains a complete transcript of the monologues on the DVD -- and more. The author's annotated footnotes provide insightful explanations related to grammar and colloquial speech. Virtually all of the topics are highly interesting, of great contemporary relevance and address important social issues. The book retains the reader's interest throughout. If your Modern Standard Arabic level is upper intermediate, then your frustration level will be low with the book (although listening to the DVD, depending on the speaker, is slightly more demanding in terms of aural skills than is reading the narrations in terms of reading skills). Even the Arabic print is clear and easy to read. Moreover, the book, though paperback, is well-bound, the pages are of high quality paper and the cover is aesthetically pleasing. The book and DVD are well-worth the cost. They are value-for-money.

In certain minor aspects, however, there is room for criticism. All the questions appended to the transcripts in each of the thematic chapters are in English with answers solicited in English. Why? In all likelihood, the reader already has mastery of English and has a passive knowledge of Arabic. The utility of the book and dvd is to promote an active command of contemporary Arabic; accordingly, the questions should have been in Arabic with perhaps model answers of harder questions at the back of the book. In the Exercises, the author asks for a translation of all the questions; translation is another skill set. The exercises at the end of each chapter are all very monotonous in form. For the self-learner in particular, more structured and varied exercises, with answers at the back of the book, would have proven more expedient.

The focus of the conversations is on Levantine speakers generally expressing themselves in a standard spoken Arabic (although a few speakers resort to a more colloquial way of speaking). It is good for the listener to have exposure to different speech patterns in Arabic including contrasting colloquial with standard and the author is to be commended. However, more utile would have been greater geographic diversity; Gulf speakers, for instance, are short-shrifted. Egyptians take a back-seat to Jordanians and Palestinians.

Depending on the elocution of the speaker, there are deviations in the crispness of the sound of the audio; interviews take place in a variety of settings where acoustic quality varies.

A Helpful Book
I am a student studying arabic, and I have recently started using this book and dvd to improve my listening skills. What makes it useful is that it contains a number of monologues accompanied with complete transcripts of what is said by each speaker. You can go through each listening section, and if you miss any of the words you can simply go back to the texts and see what exactly it was that you missed, no guessing. Some of the speakers speak quickly and it is not always easy to catch everything. Overall I like this very much.

A must read for the aspiring Arabic speaker
In 21 concise chapters covering both language and Middle East culture as well as Arab-American relations, Dr. Shukri Abed has finally composed the perfect text for short attention spanned aspiring Arabic speakers.

Complete with DVD, this book provides the reader with the bare essentials they might not necessarily glean in academia. For example, in the text of Chapter One, we are taught how in local dialect to explain where we live, where we grew up, where we studied--all without being able to reveal a non-native accent. The ability to click "rewind" mulitple times on the DVD remote negates the complications language students normally experience in a classroom setting, where other students don't like to be disrupted with extra-pronunciations.

I know that the US government has purchased scores of this book/DVD set for its employees headed toward the Middle East. Dr. Abed, a Harvard PHD, and a seasoned language teacher with the Middle East Institute, has finally gotten the essentials of Arabic language pedagogy down to a science. Bravo to him for this valuable addition.