Arabic for Beginners

by Syed A. Ali

Book Overview

International edition of a classic refeence work, first ed, 1970, rev. ed. 1998. This is the latest edition.standard work in the study of Arabic, with lessons, vocabulary This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0781801141
• ISBN13: 9780781801140
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Hippocrene Books
• Length: 204 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Has its virtues

This book contains about 70 pages of Arabic literature, in Arabic, at the end. Although I've barely started using this book, the presence of so much literary material gives me confidence. I'm not using this text as a sole resource, however. It's clear from the introductory matter that you already need to know some Arabic or Arabic linguistics or both to find your bearings. But I find that a book such as Smart's "Teach Yourself Arabic" relies too much on an "inductive" method and the intelligence and good will of the reader. Learning a language isn't the same as doing a mathematical proof. If anything, the next best thing to immersing yourself in the language's culture is having a book that contains literary matter from which you can deduce certain truths about the language's structure and the culture of its speakers. Plus, I find the author's non-Atlantic background to be refreshing. (He's from India.) Arabic is a complex language and culture, and any presentation of it will be partial and distorted, depending on the circumstances of the presenter's culture. "Arabic for Beginners" is a valuable supplement to other English-language teach-yourself materials on Arabic.