Focus on Contemporary Arabic (Conversations with Native Speakers)

Hi...I used this book for my intermediate/advanced class of the Arabic Lang. for the whole semester. My students really liked it as it was developing from subject to subject and from level to a higher level. They enjoyed the mixture of MSA and dialects within the authentic dialogues. I recommend this book for the teachers of the intermediate Arabic and for the learners of Arabic after they pass the basic level. The dvd has high quality pictures and the transition between chapters is well done. What my students and I have missed is the need for more covarage of dialects and dialogues that taken from the Arabic streets where people talk about real life issues.

!!!THIS BOOK IS UTTERLY WORTHLESS!!! WITHOUT AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF THESE TEXTS ONE HAS TO GUESS AT WHAT MUCH OF THE ARABIC MEANS, OR WORSE YET, LEAVE IT INCOMPREHENSIBLE!!! BY THE TIME YOU REACH THIS STAGE OF ARABIC YOU CAN ALREADY GET TRANSCRIPTS OF ARABIC SPEECHES ON YOUTUBE AND THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION FOR FREE!!! WHAT WERE THE AUTHORS THINKING??? ALL THEY DID WAS TRANSCRIBE SOME ARABIC CONVERSATIONS - BARELY A SERVICE!!! DON'T BUY THIS BOOK!!!

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.

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.

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.