The Top 1,000 Words for Understanding Media Arabic

This book is pretty much what everyone says it is. It is a big list of words without a ton of intuitive organization beyond general categories like elections, politics and military. The Army has always based its test and language teaching on items culled from the news, so a book like this would be very helpful for military linguists. It's probably also a decent selection of words for any student who wants to learn how to read the news. It would probably be most useful for people who are the types who like to learn a word a day, or memorize lists. It might be more useful if it were organized like a dictionary.

This book was disappointing. It is extremely unorganized and difficult to use - in fact, I never use it. There is absolutely no organizational method applied to it. It's just a random combination of media words. If it were at least organized alphabetically, you could look up words.

Anyone who has spent significant time studying Arabic on their own will know that 90% of the learning materials out there are, for various reasons, not useful. Unfortunately this book ranks among the least useful of them. Its only justifiable use is for the rote memorization of terms. I bought this book as a reference for translating news articles, and foolishly assumed it would be arranged into some sort of logical order. While the forward claims that a thematic order has been imposed within the subjects of the chapters, and asserts that alphabetization "has a negative impact on the learning of vocabulary lists."
Any decent dictionary or comprehensive vocabulary builder could replace this book in terms of content and usefulness, while offering far more to the user besides. I would not recommend purchasing this book, and will not attempt to sell it for the same reason.

I was excited to receive this book, however as other reviews have said, it is difficult to use as a reference. The words in the book are very useful, relevant, and translated accurately, but are not in a particular alphabetical order that I can tell. I suppose I will use it as a vocabulary list, and just memorize them in order, but I was hoping to use it as a quick reference while reading the news.

If you are at the intermediate level in arabic and are starting to watch the news this book will help you a lot. I found that I knew about 1/3 of the words in the book when I bought it, but it is still more helpful than a lot of other books. It gives you words that are used often in today's news like "suicide attack", "disaster", "flood", "pollution", etc. I wouldn't get this book if you are a beginner and aren't a master at reading and pronouncing the words correctly, but once you've got the basics down pick this book up.