Formal Spoken Arabic Basic Course with MP3 Files (Georgetown Classics in Arabic Languages and Linguistics)

This was a textbook for my Arabic courses at university. I'm very happy my professor required it and found it quite helpful in every way :)

I was required to purchase this book for my Colloquial Levantine Arabic course at university. I find it to be an extremely good resource for many reasons. The mp3 CD included really helps when it comes to listening and recognizing new vocabulary, as well as helping pronunciation. Also, as opposed to some other Arabic texts, the words in the book are actually in Arabic and not transliterated into English letters, which helps with reading as well. I'm enjoying the class immensely because of this book and the dialogues and teaching methods it employs. Five stars!

There aren't many good Arabic books to learn MSA - so far I've found little - but this one is surely a recommended. I'm now living in one of ME counturies where no proper academia to learn MSA. My tutor who is just graduated from university found this book easier to teach than Kelsey one's so far. Maybe because it's she is a Muslim. She found Kelsey books are yet uncomfortable to deal with. Anyways, this book is highly recommended with a tutor.

took a little while to ship, but the book was in perfect condition and was exactly the edition I wanted.

This is a great course. The dialogs in this course are interesting and sound similar to modern standard Arabic yet they have a more authentic feel. That seems to be the intent of the authors in their using an educated form of spoken Arabic. It is not as dialectal as pure amiyya, and it is not as formal as modern standard Arabic.After learning a dialog one can go back and listen to it in its entirety without having to listen to one sentence spoken in Arabic and the next sentence in English and then back and forth in this manner. This a big plus for me. (There is only a little bit of recorded translation in the opening of the book.)The lessons are very explanitive. The basic dialouges have detailed commentaries. Besides the audio, there is the text written in Arabic (no transliteration into English is found anywhere in the book), a detailed list of vocabulary, and sometimes the audio is given a second time at a slower pace so that one can repeat after the speaker.The matrix dialouge is not explained at all, but it is made easier in that the subject matter is very similar to the basic dialouge's material. It is supposed to be hard, and it forces you to stretch out your ears a bit to try to catch all of the phrases. I found that the matrix dialouge is much easier after completing the unit that it is in, and it often contains the most natural sounding material.There are also drills and grammar explanations. There are no answer keys for the drills, but they should be beneficial anyways.Overall, this is arguably one of the best books for learning Arabic. One should have a fairly decent command of modern standard or classical Arabic before starting the course. (Don't attempt this book if you are a beginner.) It is good for building upon the knowledge of a literay form of Arabic in order to learn a spoken form. It doesn't teach any dialect of Arabic in particular. It is suppossed to be a somewhat neutral/educated form of speaking Arabic, but it does have somewhat of a Levantine feel to it at times.

I would recommend this book to readers who have completed at least Mastering Arabic 1, and the Pimsleur and Michel Thomas Arabic courses, or similar beginners courses. The book contains Arabic script and no answer key. However there are lots of exercises to get you speaking Arabic, and it increases with difficulty at a smooth rate so you do not 'get stuck'.The included MP3 files work well and compliment the course.This is for students who do not want to specialise with a particular dialect yet e.g. Gulf, Egyptian or Moroccan, but want to be able to converse in Arabic.This book gives you a good basic foundation, to make yourself understood across a wider range of topics, when speaking to native Arabic speakers, than the Pimsleur and Michel Thomas Courses, and also more flexibility in your sentence structure.I spent a year internalising this course and used it to good effect travelling through Tunisia. I have also used Formal Spoken Arabic (FSA) when talking to Egyptians and Jordanians and I am understood.FSA uses a simpler grammar system than Standard Arabic, and will get you talking.