Al-Kitaab fii Ta'allum al-'Arabiyya: A Textbook for Beginning Arabic, Part One

My Nephew needed this book for school

There's enough said about this book, I just think people should realize that this is the 1st edition and they may have a hard time tracking down the audio that goes with it

The only reason these books sell is that for years, there was no other real option. My Arabic teacher made the best he could of this book in our course (and he had to try valiantly), and as a tutorial the book is a failure. What is so wrong?1. Terribly sophisticated vocab is introduced too early; you learn how to say "United Nations" before "chair." This might be forgiveable if they would only use that vocab once and tell you what it was... but no, you will need to remember these obscure words randomly later on in exercises five chapters later. Good textbooks / teachers / classes / education of any kind use repetition and a gradual increase in difficulty. This book does the opposite. Unforgiveable.2. Example texts are far too difficult. It is completely brain-numbing and demoralizing to look through an example that has dozens of times the text you need - filled with vocabulary you've never seen. Often, they give you an entire page of text and ask you to find the 4% of it - in a script you are still getting used to - that is relevant to the current lesson. This unforgiveable mistake wastes incredible amounts of time.3. Examples are given without translation, completely undermining the utility of the examples. Einstein once said "Example is not a good way to teach; it is the only way to teach." A book that makes examples difficult by using new concepts and obscure vocabulary - and incomprehensible by then not translating - is an embarassment. Translations are missing everywhere they should be - in complete sentences, in verb charts, and even in English explanations of grammar.4. The book has uses an Arabic linguist fetishist approach to introducing grammar, always using the Arabic word for tenses and concepts. I'm sorry, but when English-speaking students are struggling just to get concepts like the jussive, it only makes it harder if we have to learn the Arabic word for "jussive." OK, it isn't so bad to memorize the Arabic words for "masculine," "feminine," and "dual." But "Jussive," "verbal sentence," "nominal sentence," "case endings," "subjuntive," and "verb form?" Come on, we're still stuck on United Nations which you introduced in the first chapter.5. OK so this isn't a flaw, but just a good practice this book skips. There are lots of things that sound very similar in Arabic, such as the words for "fourth," "Arabic," and "spring." There should be special spelling / listening sections that allow for special practice of these words.6. One of the most basic concepts when writing a textbook of any kind (math, language, social sciences) is to introduce simple material and examples early, and then build upon them later on. This book does the opposite. In examples and exercises, it uses grammar you don't learn about until 100 pages later. All the worse, they don't translate anything for you so you don't even realize what is going on. When writing or editing a textbook, it is the job of the authors to make sure that advanced concepts are not included until after they have been explained. A good math textbook doesn't include division in examples that are meant to teach addition. This book does far worse, and it is not a difference of "teaching philosophy," it is just plain sloppy and lazy editing.7. It might seem that the integration of audio, video, and visual image material is a strength of this series. It isn't. These materials seem to have been thrown in there with no regard for the grammar and vocabulary that they contain compared to the grammar and vocabulary the students have been taught. Again lax quality control about what goes in there is to blame.

I used this book to study first year Arabic at the University of Utah. My teacher, a native Arabic speaker, often stated that this was the best Arabic learning course that he had ever seen. After studying Arabic for three years, and trying some other books, I must agree. We used the audio and video cassettes to enhance the learning process, and these were very helpful. (You could probably get by without the video, but it would very difficult to go without the audio cassettes.) While this course is great for studying Modern Standard Arabic (the formal written text used in the Quran) it isn't very helpful for spoken Arabic. I would suggest this course for classroom, group or tutoring use in which a native Arabic speaker is present. If you are using it for self study, I highly recommend that you find a native speaker to help you out with pronunciation and conversation. THE GOOD: It is set up like other good language learning programs. It incorporates multi-media and all language skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking) to help students learn vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. While this may not seem incredible, just try some other Arabic learning courses, and you will see that this is a major benefit of this course. THE BAD: 1) This book assumes that you have already gone through Alif Baa' (the first of three books in this series), and therefore learned how to read and write Arabic. It builds on the foundation started in that book. If you haven't gone through that 6-week course yet then I strongly recommend that you do it first. 2) While the "guess the meaning from context" style of learning is helpful, it can be a bit much in this book. If you do not have the answer key, or a native speaker to help you with the answers, you may not be able to figure out the meanings of some items. 3) Looking back on this book now, I think that the absolute worst thing about it was that it teaches too much Modern Standard Arabic. While this is nice if you plan on studying the Quran, it is not very good for conversing with native speakers in everyday colloquial Arabic. As the series progresses I became very frustrated by the fact that I had studied all this Arabic for all these years, yet native speakers had a hard time understanding me, saying that I sounded like the Quran, or an ancient author. If you supplement this course with conversation (and tons of it) with a native speaker you will benefit MUCH more from the system, and you will probably even learn Arabic! OVERALL: If you are going to study Arabic, then this is the course to use - no doubt about it! If you incorporate the audio and video cassettes, and go through all three books in the series, your Arabic will be MUCH better than if you just use this book alone. Yet the book relies on the multi-national "Modern Standard Arabic", and doesn't give enough support for the colloquial language that is used everyday by native speakers. If you have a native speaker to practice with, I think that you will get the full Arabic experience that the authors had in mind when designing this series.