Product Description

This new edition includes three DVDs bound into the book that feature contextualized vocabulary, cultural background and illustrations, and new listening comprehension materials with each lesson. Newly recorded colloquial audio and video materials also accompany each lesson and continue the story of Maha and Khalid and their travels to Cairo with brief explanatory vocabulary and notes provided in the text. The appendices include grammatical reference charts, an Arabic-English glossary, and a grammar index. The materials cover approximately 150 contact hours of instruction, and students who complete Part Two should reach advanced proficiency. Each lesson in Part Two centers on a text that deals with a social, historical, literary, or cultural issue. In addition to the main reading text, students will also find additional authentic texts for reading and listening comprehension, vocabulary and grammar exercises, close listening and speaking activities, and cultural background for the reading. The newly revised and repackaged Part Two has been restructured to reflect pedagogical developments over the last eight years, updated with new authentic reading and listening texts, and expanded with new video materials. In addition to the speaking, listening, and writing skills emphasized throughout each lesson, more time and emphasis is placed on activating vocabulary and structure with new activities for inside and outside the classroom. Features include: provides basic texts of printed media to help students connect the written and aural/oral aspects of Arabic; features intensive reading that is focused on grammar and pronunciation-not just comprehension; contains substantial amounts of drills and exercises to help students memorize and gain active control of an expanded vocabulary; explores the root and pattern system of Arabic grammar and complex sentence structure using vocabulary, complex texts, and translation exercises; develops writing skills at the paragraph level to encourage synthesis of vocabulary and grammar. Features also include: provides explicit instructions to students and instructors on drills and activities, including recommendations on appropriate exercises for inside and outside the classroom; new interactive DVDs contain reading comprehension texts with new material and new listening comprehension material; DVDs present cultural background with illustrations and continues the story of Maha and Khalid using both Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #48032 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-15
• Original language: Arabic
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 452 pages

Customer Reviews

Al-kitaab al-Thaanii
While the al-Kitaab series is not without its flaws--among which must be counted an overemphasis, in this reader's opinion, on the Egyptian dialect of Arabic--it remains the best of the several offerings available. And this second volume is notable for correcting what was perhaps the most lamentable weakness of the first volume; namely, a lack of attention to the acquisition of vocabulary, which must necessarily underwrite advanced language learning (particularly in the context of Arabic, whose grammar is not especially difficult). Still and all, an attractive and eminently useful course, made the more so by the inclusion of well-designed DVDs to aid in oral comprehension. Recommended, with only very minimal reservations.

a stinking corpse
One thing must be said about Ms. Brustad and Messrs. Al-Batal and At-Tonsi: They do not embarrass easily. Those learners who made it to the end of Book One in this numbingly shoddy trilogy of unedited mediocrity find themselves with another nearly insurmountable obstacle to overcome and very little and inadequate help to do it with.

The flaws in this volume are the same as those in the first, only more so: little explanatory material is offered, and the student is expected to read original materials from Arabic newspapers and magazines without new vocabulary being glossed, so the choices come down to struggling for hours with a dictionary to finish a reading section, skimming the material to get the sense without using a dictionary (which the authors actually recommend) or waiting for a teacher patient enough to spoon feed it in a class. If we knew Arabic well enough to read it on our own, why would we need a textbook?

It is widely considered that Arabic is a difficult language, and in some respects that may be so, but the lagging state of Arabic education in this country has less to do with the complexity of its grammar than it does with the sheer inferiority of the pedagogical materials that are available. There are equally difficult or more difficult languages which have much higher proportions of successful students (Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew- to name just a few)because the textbooks available for their learners present their material systematically and comprehensively. There is no reason why this could not be done for Arabic as well -it is simply an effort that these authors did not choose to make.

Hard to understand
I used this book in my college classes and it is very disjointed and disorganized. My professor often apologized for it and found himself re-explaining things that the book failed to adequately describe. Still, though, it has some good things about it, such as the reading passages and DVDs, especially if you have a good teacher who is smarter than the text he or she is using.