Teach Yourself Arabic Complete Course Package (Book + 2 CDs) (TY: Complete Courses)

This text stands almost alone among those available purporting to teach Modern Standard Arabic, because the authors (two longtime Arabic teachers)actually went to considerable pains to craft a course that addresses the aspects of Arabic that beginning learners find most difficult. The section on pronunciation is very thorough and gives learners an actual idea of how to make the many sounds of the language that are new (and often difficult). As someone who has labored with materials on many languages where you don't get much more advice than to 'imitate the pronunciation on the CD', this is a feature I particularly appreciate. The treatment of the grammar is not particularly rigorous (Elementary Modern Standard Arabic, the 'big orange' book of Abboud, Erwin, McCarus et al goes into the grammar in much more detail) but regular practice with this book will give a very intuitive sense for making one's own Arabic sentences. The vocabulary is well-chosen, too: early lessons give all the essentials for getting around and asking directions, and from there the book moves on to a number of interesting and useful everyday topics. Two small complaints: a section on how to hand-write Arabic would be helpful, and perhaps some introductory coverage of the case endings that come up in much more formal usage. This book concentrates on a very basic, everyday form of the language, which is fine, but students who want to move on to more advanced materials will be in for an unnecessarily unpleasant surprise if they don't at least know that there are grammatical endings that aren't treated here.

Your delivery time was really short. I have been living in Turkey. And also I satisfief from the book. Nice cover, nice subjects and good teaching are covered.

Learning Arabic on your own is a struggle. Your struggle is harder if textbooks are below standard. Admittedly, the author put a lot of effort into the book but efforts alone don't make this texbook good for self-learning.

There are good sides:
The main texts are accompanied by a rather thorough (sometimes incomplete) vocabulary, literal translation translation, grammar notes and the main thing - audio recordings.

Verb tables are well organised. Although, I am still struggling to understand how some of them work (especially when the refer back to other tables), I think they are useful. Would be good to use more common terminology (e.g. hollow verbs).

If the textbooks had only the above items, then it wouldn't be too bad, although, there is very little repetition and review of the learned words.

The bad sides:
Many exercises starting around the middle of the book are useless, they are not based on vocabulary or grammar learned before and they are missing the new vocabulary and the vocalisation/romanisation. Check the job advertisment chapter - it's awful! Many exercises are similarly unmanageable, even with the answer provided, in my opinion, at least if you do them on your own.

There is a lot of room for improvement:

The vocabulary should be complete and include ALL the words that appear in the textbook, including all newspaper ads, signs, pictures, etc. and provide some guide on which form they appear in (e.g. passive voice).

The exercises should have enough information to enable the learner to complete them without consulting native speakers or Arabic teachers.

The romanisation is consistent but a more common or a standard romanisation would be more beneficial, e.g. no one uses ":" (colon) for `ayn (3ayn).

Despite my critisism, I like the textbook and I will get back to some of the exercises, I wasn't able to complete when I get more knowledge from other books.

Perhaps, Arabic textbook writers need to look how Chinese and Japanese textbooks are organised + more focus on grammar. The approach is not too different.

I bought this book shortly after starting to self-study Arabic using Rosetta Stone software. What I was hoping to find was a well written, useful book the basics of spoken Arabic with effective drills and exercises to facilitate retention. This is not what I found with the Teach Yourself book. Let me highlight some of the glaring deficiencies for you, and then decided if this book is right for you.

1. The Arabic script is barely even touched upon.

2. The Arabic script which is used in the book does not include vowel marks ANYWHERE. This makes learning new words and being able to read new words nearly impossible. It is true, written Arabic seldom includes the vowels in practice, with the only exception being education materials for children because they are just learning the language... ummmmmm isn't that what we are trying to do too?

3. Exercises in the book quickly become worthless due to the issue mentioned in #2. The book asks you to read passages of words you never learned and asks questions you can't possibly answer.

4. The audio exercises do not add much value to the book and suffer similar problems as #3.

5. Many chapters consist of just a collection a phrases used for particular situations. This kind of content should not be the main focus of an educational language book. After all, we are trying to learn how to speak the language, not walk around like a tourist with a travel phrase book.

6. New vocabulary that is introduced is not reiterated nearly enough to allow for retention. In some parts of the book it is like reading from the pages of a dictionary...

I could go on and nitpick at this book a little more, but the important things are mentioned above. Many people have noted some of the points I made in their reviews, but then have ultimately given the book a 4 or 5 star score citing that it does have basic grammar points explained clearly. I would say that is the absolute minimum you would expect from a self teaching language book. That doesn't make it praiseworthy! "Teach Yourself" certainly is what will not be happening with this book. I could only recommend it if you want a extremely mediocre reference book on Arabic. I hope my review is helpful to you.

First warning - there are a lot of Arabics. There is media Arabic (like BBC English), Western Arabic, Egyptian, Levantine (Syrian), and Gulf. This book seems to be kind of media, kind of Egyptian. But don't think these distinctions matter so much. You can learn German from a book; but you have to learn Swiss German, Bayrisch, or Schwabish on the ground. Arabic is like that. (For Iraq and Saudi Arabic, this same series has Teach Yourself Gulf Arabic Complete Course, CD package.

Second warning - you'll need a dictionary. Don't get the big ones yet. Get Arabic Practical Dictionary: Arabic-English English-Arabic (Hippocrene Practical Dictionaries)

Third warning - it is really hard to learn how to read and write Arabic _as_ you learn the language. Do the read and write part first with The Arabic Alphabet: How to Read & Write It

Fourth warning - this book has only about 15 minutes of pronunciation drill on CD. Go on the web and get a free FSI Levantine Pronunciation PDF with 9 1/2 hours of mp3s or buy Arabic (Eastern), Conversational or Conversational Egyptian Arabic

Here's a few suggestions:

This book is laid out differently from others in the Teach Yourself series. It doesn't break out into dialogs, grammar, and exercises. So I find the easiest way to approach it is to do three pages a day, five days a week. This will get through the book in about five months. Two pages, three days a week would work too, if you had less time.

I mark in the book what CD track number and what time on the track each day's lesson is on. If day one ends on track 5, at 2:52, I write that down at the first audio bit in the next day's lesson. I listen to each audio bit at least three times and always until the noise resolves itself into words in my ear and mind.

I write each Arabic phrase, in Arabic, at least three times. I work hard at breaking myself from any reliance on the transliteration because -- bonus warning -- there is no standard transliteration from Arabic into the Roman alphabet. The best one I have seen is in the FSI course but no one else uses that one.

Here's one last suggestion -- don't be too hard on yourself. I've already done the FSI course and the Pimsleur. After this book, I'll do Teach Yourself Arabic Conversation (3CDs + Guide) and then a good Arabic textbook (I haven't picked one yet). But I sure don't expect to be fluent after five months of this book. I figure it will take about four years of plugging along through all the good stuff I can find. Then I still have to learn the real thing on the ground.

Final Caveat ---

I give this book 4 stars because it is pretty good -- for an Arabic text. Arabic is still such a colloquial language, existing in hundreds of dialects and four major branches, that Arabic texts are mostly bad. This one, if you are picky, is kind of bad too. Here are some reasons not to buy:

1. CDs are mostly filler, text's "language patterns" are more or less filler too
2. book lacks a clear strategy of learning
3. way too many words not in glossaries or lesson vocab lists
4. exercises often use unexplained grammar except for the explicit point of exercise
5. nowhere near enough dialogues