Abba Book:

		List Price: $39.95		Publisher: Georgetown University Press Salesrank: 499356
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		Media: Paperback

Al-Kitaab fii Ta'allum al-'Arabiyya: A Textbook for Beginning Arabic, Part One Reviews:
good quality
2009-07-23 - Although the book arrived a bit later than expected, it is quite new. I'm glad and satisfied with the service.

OK but...
2008-11-10 - Never buy the book if you don't have an Arabic instructor. The book lacks answer key!

This is the 1st edition
2007-08-26 - 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

Everyone knows it's awful - but there's no other choice
2007-08-07 - 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.



A horrible experience
2006-04-29 - Looking through the many reviews of this book/series, it's clear that people either love it or hate it; very few see it as "so-so".

I'm in the "hate it" group. I used it for first-semester university Arabic, studied a great deal outside of class, got an A-plus for the first-semester course, and still didn't go on for the second semester despite having wanted to learn Arabic for years. Using this book, with its inane and kindergarten-esque exercises like "see if you can guess what ... means" and "count the instances of .... in this reading selection" was simply too frustrating to even contemplate suffering through another semester. The feelings of my classmates generally seemed to mirror my own, based on the complaints expressed both in and out of class; people dropped out like flies during the course of the semester. (The university went back to the old University of Michigan series the next year, and has reportedly vowed "never again" re Al-Kitaab.)

Arabic is a very difficult, if fascinating, language, and given its cultural and geopolitical importance, it cries out for a good set of initial learning materials. This series (except for the initial book that teaches the sounds and alphabet) isn't it.