Lonely Planet: Moroccan Arabic Phrasebook

This book proved to be a lifesaver for me. It is extremely well set out, and sub-divided for ease of use. It includes sections that cover areas you are likely to come across on a day-to-day basis such as 'greetings', 'at the market', 'at the post office' and 'emergencies', to name but a few. But as well as useful phrases, it also gives a summary of the chapter explaining in more detail the way of life. For example, before the section on shopping, there is a paragraph covering the art of bartering, and before the 'eating out' section, Moroccan hospitality is explained so the reader is in the know when he arrives at the restaurant or the guest's house. As well as there being a transliteration of the Arabic script with an easy-to-use pronunciation guide to help you read it, the word is also written in Arabic alongside it, so if you find yourself, as I did, sitting next to some Moroccan kids in the town square desperately trying to pronounce a jumble of letters, then you can just as easily point to the Arabic word and get one of them to read it aloud for you. Another thing I found particularly helpful is that the text is in two colours making it that much easy to follow. The language used in the phrasebook is specific to Morocco, and there are also small sections in French (one of the official languages of Morocco), and Berber (a local dialect spoken mainly in the mountain regions). For the more advanced, there is a section covering grammatical points and a brief outline of the structure of verbs. At the end there is a basic English-Moroccan Arabic dictionary and a comprehensive index. Just don't make the same mistake as I did...I only discovered this handy, pocket-sized phrasebook when I went in search of it in an American bookshop in the middle of Rabat, the capital of Morocco.