ISBN158901104X

Al-Kitaab is THE standard for Arabic teaching in a university setting. It beats the pants off of anything else out there. Unfortunately, it's poorly organized and tough to use.

First, do NOT try this at home. Learning Arabic outside of a classroom structure is nearly impossible, and the book covers only a portion of the vocabulary in the audio. You should only be buying this book if you have an Arabic teacher who is going to lead you through it.

The book is broken down into manageable units that jump from theme to theme without apparent rhyme or reason. Verb forms are introduced informally, making it more difficult to master the forms later on. While some vocab is introduced thematically, some words com out of no where and become more difficult to master without an association.

The video production qualities are pretty poor. As with all language-learning videos, don't expect Oscar-winning performances (cough, Destinos in Spanish, cough). But the choice of DVD format was a poor one: it's difficult to navigate and makes repeating drills take unnecessarily long. With the advent of iTunes and video iPods, your best bet is ripping the video to take with you (a major lack of vision on the part of Georgetown University Press).

So why does it get three stars? Because you HAVE to buy it. And you'll be better off for doing it. You'll just have to set aside a gripe session once a week on how poorly arranged and written it is.

First of all, the comment of one reviewer, "The idea that one can learn Arabic on one's own is, quite frankly, insane and just plain stupid. It's not going to happen. And if you're taking an Arabic class, chances are you'll be using this book. There's just no way out of it. " is the most untrue and unproductive comment that could appear for an internet reader who has obviously come here because he/she is interested in learning Arabic! Certainly with that kind of thinking it won't happen. However, the second part is mainly true, you will likely find yourself buying Al-Kitaab if you enroll in an Arabic class.

So how good is it? Not very, especially for one who wants to study Arabic alone. Vocabulary is introduced based on each lesson's dialogue, but includes the most unhelpful words first (ex: "United Nations" and "neighborhood" before "we", "this", etc). Grammar is introduced slowly but in a rather haphazard manner, so if you are a learner who likes to see clearly laid out charts and actually intelligently explained grammatical rules that are easily referenced, you will find yourself rummaging through the book searching for that one page in the middle of a random lesson. Plus, the fact that most of the contents, titles, etc are written in Arabic means that you can't even easily rummage around! Obviously the CDs help pronunciation and listening wise, but that is going to be little solace if you want to focus on learning the written language quickly and efficiently. Finally, for the student committed to learning on one's own, or even the student in class, many of the exercises achieve little other than filling page space. That does not mean the book is hopeless, certainly many have learned Arabic from it. But there are (as opposed to what some reviewers seem to say) other books out there that do a better job of teaching the language. I would strongly recommend getting Haywood and Nahmad's A New Arabic Grammar of the Written Language, which includes the clear grammatical explanations that you won't find in Al-Kitaab, as well as the tried and true translation exercises that have been used in langauge books for the last 100-200 years.

Again, plenty of people enjoy and learn Arabic from Al-Kitaab, and all the power to them. But as a beginner (like myself), you shouldn't feel that it is your only option.

Teachers of Arabic need to learn how to write books for westerners! This isn't bad for a "conversational" type learning tool, as long as you actually have the accompanying DVDs (you'll be institutionalized for insanity without them!), but this publication contains no relativity to standard applications of linguistic educational methods.
There are no structural standardizations of verbs, prepositions, rules, or structural contexts as such. This is a frustrating book for the advanced multi-linguist who immediately looks for verb ending sequences, sentence constructs and grammatical rules. This isn't to say that the books are devoid of rules, just not in a manner that the experienced language student would expect them...
It's not a badly organized tool for the traveling student who wants to advance with social speaking ability, but without proper grammatical constructs, you will not be able to advance without a teacher to clarify many aspects of structure that are absent!
If you want to learn to SPEAK Arabic, the DVDs enhance that aspect of the speaking process with specific linguistic applications and examples by native speakers...(apparently with Egyptian dialect?) Unfortunately, if you are trying to learn to speak gulf Arabic, your Kuwaiti and Iraqi friends are probably going to laugh at you!

I have been a language teacher for 18 years and have been teaching Arabic with this book for the past three. First of all, I have to admit that this is appears to be the top-selling most-used book among the many colleges that are adding Arabic to their curriculum. The authors of the book appear to aware of modern teaching methods and have attempted to incorporate them into their book. The DVDs are, by far the most popular item. The storyline that is presented is popular with students, and there are a number of items which can be adaped for practice outside of class. That being said, there are a number of drawbacks to the book. The book lacks many of the visuals and varied practice exercises found in other language textbooks. It ends up being more of a series of grammar explanations with rote exercises to practice. The vocabulary and topics presented revolve around the stories from the DVDs. While this is good communicative methodology, the way in which it is done leaves the student somewhat limited with regard to vocabulary for other areas. I am using Ahlan wa Sahlan in my high school classes, and while that book does not have the glitzy multimedia materials, it appears to be somewhat more complete and balanced with regard to introducing topics. Either or these two books are probably some of the most popular and best choices available, but any student who has studied Spanish will immediately realize how far behind Arabic is with regard to contemporary materials.

Most of the points about this book's limitations have been made already (Harun ar-rashid's review for example) but I can't resist the urge to point out a few that I find particularly irritating.

--Vocabulary pages and the glossaries are right-justified. This means six inches between the beginning of the word in English on the left and the beginning of its counterpart in Arabic on the right. It's hard to scan across inches of white space between the words without rules under each line.

Vocab lists benefit from being narrow but in this book the words are as far apart as they can possibly get. I draw lines under each entry as a visual aid. Better to have the Arabic word in the left column, right-justified, and the English word in the right column, left justified. So they're back-to-back, as it were. Better still three columns, with the transliteration in the middle column. But...

--No transliteration. It's apparently a crutch that runs counter to the "see if you can figure it out" pedagogical principle the authors have embraced (the "coy" or "where's Waldo" methodology). But that gulf of white space in the vocab listings is a perfect place for a transliteration. I have a Japanese vocab book that does just that. Three columns: the word in English, the Japanese word in romaji, the word in kanji. All in about three inches horizontally. This is non-coy. It allows for different angles of attack. Some people (like me) prefer to get the pronunciation down before tackling the written word. I can memorize the words quickly given the aural cue of transliteration then armed with its sound and meaning, learn the written word. In other words providing the transliteration allows you to break the memorization down into more granular discrete tasks which you can then organize according to your learning style. Also the transliterations should be used within the English explanations of the grammar. Plunking individual words written in Arabic in the middle of English sentences is awkward and unnatural.

--Of course, it's ridiculous that you learn how to say "my maternal aunt is a translator at the United Nations" before you learn how to say "where is the bathroom". "Political science" before "I don't know", etc.

--Inconsistent written Arabic. On page 7 are three different representations of the word "feminine". On the next page is a fourth way. Look it up in the glossary and sure enough, a fifth way. Two ways I can deal with: vowelled first, unvowelled thereafter. No more, please.

--The typography is uninviting, primitive, hideous almost, as if produced using a typesetting system from the 1950s. The Arabic font is smudgy (shadda and hamza are sometimes just blurs), the page layout is atrocious (eg, the tables on pp 24-5).

Jane Wightwick's Easy Arabic Grammar explains the grammar in a much smaller, visually appealing presentation. After finding and puzzling through al-Kitaab's explanations I look at Wightwick for the concise version.

The most useful thing about al-Kitaab I think are the example sentences for the vocab words. But these sentences, which are spoken on the DVD, aren't in the book! They are, however, in the so-called Answer Key. Who knows why--they aren't "answers". They're examples, and useful ones, though of course no translation is provided. Hiding them untranslated in the answer key is in keeping with the "where's Waldo" methodology.

So, here's one way to extract some usefulness out of this beast. There's a CD of the MP3 version of all the files on the DVDs (not easy to find, naturally--it's in Amazon, do a search, same author). Get it, put the MP3s onto the computer, and rearrange them into playlists structured according to what you need. I have the vocab lists and their helpful example sentences in a separate playlist. I copy those sentences from the answer key onto separate sheets. Then on the iPod, put the playlist on repeat while reading the sentences. This is much easier to manage than the clumsy DVDs, and you can listen to them in the car.

Figuring out how to extract useful info from this book is a task in itself. The pity is, that the language is already hard enough, and a book like this makes it harder still.