Alif Baa: Introduction to Arabic Letters and Sounds | Kristen Brustad, Mahmoud Al-Batal, ... |...

Alif Baa: Introduction to Arabic Letters and Sounds | Kristen Brustad, Mahmoud Al-Batal, ... | Reading Arabic Made Easy!

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Alif Baa: Introduc...

	Alif Baa: Introduction to Arabic Letters and Sounds Kristen Brustad, Mahmoud Al-Batal, ... Georgetown University Press, 2004 - 168 pages average customer review:based on 57 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

excellent

I love the book, and the DVDs are incredibly helpful. An excellent buy for anyone who wants to learn Arabic.

Reading Arabic Made Easy!

I got this book a couple of months ago to try and learn to read a little Arabic before I left for a second trip to Cairo. I got through with about half of the alphabet, but I was still able to read signs and packages while in Egypt. I took the book with me so I could look up the letters I had not learned and it was great. It started from square one so I didn't have to know anything about the language. Since I had already learned to speak some Arabic, it was neat to see how the words were written. I can't wait to finish all of the lessons and build my written Arabic vocabulary.

The DVDs are priceless with helping you to sound out the letters and words while you are learning. The visual parts of the DVDs are great too. They show you the movements of the mouth when making the various sounds in the Arabic alphabet. This is very important since several letters are slightly different in sound and you need to see how it is mouthed. The other visuals showing how to write the characters are also fantastic. This has to be the fastest, easiest way to learn to read a foreign language with a completely different alphabet.

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Textbook

This was the textbook used for my beginning Arabic class in college. It is very helpful and straightforward and is not overwhelming. It was the only resource used for my course, it comes with two dvds. My only complaint is that you have to buy the answer key separate, which granted is not very expensive. This is the cheapest textbook I've ever bought.

Nice beginner book

I used this book for my beginners Arabic class. Its a nice introduction to the Arabic alaphabet. The DVDs were ok. I thought the listening exercises were very helpful. You get to see the word in Arabic, and then hear it. The other parts of the DVD, were not as helpful.

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room for improvement

According to the comments this workbook is the best one currently published for learning to read and write Arabic. Even so, it could be improved.

Whether you're in a class or not you need the answer key, period. It should be part of the book but since it's not, get it. Especially to check the result of the dictation exercises. It's best to do the dictation and be able to immediately check your efforts, especially with words containing letters that sound similar. If you have to wait until next class to check your work, you've lost focus on the task and have to pick it up again probably days later when you may not even be able to read your own feeble chicken scratching. Also there isn't necessarily time in class to (tediously) review every exercise in the workbook. I didn't have the answer key for the first few weeks because I didn't even know it existed. You can do without it in the early going but starting with about Chapter 4 many of the drills are simply pointless without it.

Although the book's purpose is not to teach you vocabulary, you are of course encountering vocabulary as you go and it seems to me you might as well learn it, or at least have a consistent place to find it, while you're there. This book is practically coy about the vocabulary--presenting it indirectly (Guess their meaning from the pictues. They include near, far...) rather than simply listing their meanings. The pedagogical principle at play here I guess is that of avoiding the crutch of your own language and instead going directly from an image to the target language, but the effect is undermined by the comically ambiguous nature of many of the illustrations. They saved some money perhaps, using free 80's-style clip art. (Remember clip art?) Examples p 65--sunrise, sun, palm trees? Hand signals--okay? p 82--palace? P 101, rooster, chick? Clones, near and far, big and small? P 119, trouble with contact lens?

Also, it means the book is useless without the DVDs--you can't simply take it with you to the library and use it. Without the DVDs you have no way of knowing what the vocabulary is.

On p 50 a word has NEW next to it. Is this a new word, or is it the word meaning "new". Fishing backwards finds the word on p 44 where it is defined, for the first time, as "new". I think it's because they couldn't find an image to convey "new". Meanwhile on the same page is the word for "news", which is also a new word but it doesn't say so, you have to "guess" its meaning. The result is an inconsistent presentation, on a page containing similar words.

Sometimes words are defined, sometimes not, apparently arbitrarily--"it melts", "he brought", "beige", in early chapters.

The glossary as someone noted is useless as it's alphabetical by English. It should be ordered by chapter and in Arabic, with a page reference, so you have a place to look words up in the order you encountered them. I find myself constantly flipping pages thinking I had seen a word earlier. It is also incomplete.

The scattershot presentation of vocabulary makes a hard task harder since in dictation drills you are being asked to pick up the distinction between similar sounds in the absence of the most useful mnemonic hook a sound can have namely, meaning.

The dictation answers in the answer key should be handwritten, since they are not only exercises in letter recognition but also in handwriting.

The "signs" section of the DVD lessons should include audio. Let's hear an Arabic speaker say what the signs say! Likewise Drill 4 in Unit Nine--let's hear the names of the countries!

Tha audio of the cartoons in Unit Nine is horrible.

Language learning materials have certainly come a long way since I was an undergrad many years ago. So much is now available that the limits of any particular book almost don't matter. What's missing from one book can be gotten from another.

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