Product Description
This new edition includes three DVDs bound into the book that feature contextualized vocabulary, cultural background and illustrations, and new listening comprehension materials with each lesson. Newly recorded colloquia… More >>
Al-Kitaab fii Ta’allum al-’Arabiyya with DVDs: A Textbook for Arabic, Part Two, Second Edition
While the al-Kitaab series is not without its flaws–among which must be counted an overemphasis, in this reader’s opinion, on the Egyptian dialect of Arabic–it remains the best of the several offerings available. And this second volume is notable for correcting what was perhaps the most lamentable weakness of the first volume; namely, a lack of attention to the acquisition of vocabulary, which must necessarily underwrite advanced language learning (particularly in the context of Arabic, whose grammar is not especially difficult). Still and all, an attractive and eminently useful course, made the more so by the inclusion of well-designed DVDs to aid in oral comprehension. Recommended, with only very minimal reservations.
Rating: 4 / 5
One thing must be said about Ms. Brustad and Messrs. Al-Batal and At-Tonsi: They do not embarrass easily. Those learners who made it to the end of Book One in this numbingly shoddy trilogy of unedited mediocrity find themselves with another nearly insurmountable obstacle to overcome and very little and inadequate help to do it with.
The flaws in this volume are the same as those in the first, only more so: little explanatory material is offered, and the student is expected to read original materials from Arabic newspapers and magazines without new vocabulary being glossed, so the choices come down to struggling for hours with a dictionary to finish a reading section, skimming the material to get the sense without using a dictionary (which the authors actually recommend) or waiting for a teacher patient enough to spoon feed it in a class. If we knew Arabic well enough to read it on our own, why would we need a textbook?
It is widely considered that Arabic is a difficult language, and in some respects that may be so, but the lagging state of Arabic education in this country has less to do with the complexity of its grammar than it does with the sheer inferiority of the pedagogical materials that are available. There are equally difficult or more difficult languages which have much higher proportions of successful students (Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew- to name just a few)because the textbooks available for their learners present their material systematically and comprehensively. There is no reason why this could not be done for Arabic as well -it is simply an effort that these authors did not choose to make.
Rating: 1 / 5
One thing is for sure – this book should not be used by autodidacts! I have been using a different set of textbooks that are heavy on grammar and vocabulary acquisition and very light on oral comprehension, so I am using this book to review my vocabulary and improve my listening skills. For that purpose the book is great! The texts are mildly challenging and the DVD content is most useful. In just one month that it took me to get through part 2 I made excellent progress.
Nevertheless, I have to note that
1. Grammar presentation is bordering on pathetic, if I did not know all of that stuff already I would have never learnt it from this volume.
2. Vocabulary retention exercises are few and not terribly effective (although the choice of vocabulary items it quite good, just the stuff you need to read a newspaper).
3. The “colloquial Arabic” part is useless at best. I ended up skipping it altogether, if I ever need to learn a particular dialect I will make it a separate project and will find an appropriate source.
4. Was there any meaningful reason to put the answers in a separate book? Did it have to be that bulky?
Unfortunately, I have never found an all-around good textbook of Arabic in any language, although the French and the Russian ones that I initially used were almost decent, they just do not take you very far.
Considering that language instruction is such a huge industry I am constantly amazed by how many products of inferior quality are on the market.
Rating: 3 / 5
I used this book in my college classes and it is very disjointed and disorganized. My professor often apologized for it and found himself re-explaining things that the book failed to adequately describe. Still, though, it has some good things about it, such as the reading passages and DVDs, especially if you have a good teacher who is smarter than the text he or she is using.
Rating: 2 / 5
At my university in California, native-speaking professors are not allowed to teach classes in which the Al-Kitaab series is used unless they’ve received special training to get aquatinted with it. I’ve heard this is a requirement at some other schools as well. When they begin teaching, many complain about the way these books present the Arabic language (and sympathize when students whine the morning after homework). The most frustrating flaw of this book is that there is NO grammar glossary. Grammar (extremely tedious in Arabic) is spread throughout each chapter, so it’s impossible to review unless you literally flip through every page to find what you’re looking for. I often have each finger of one hand holding the page where a related grammar concept is hidden. This makes studying for tests very difficult. I recommend carrying 10 bookmarks.
Be warned that the vocabulary lists in each chapter Al-Kitaab pt. 2 (this book) are about 4-5 times larger than in book one. Some chapters have 60 words to memorize. This volume also changes the order that it presents conjugation charts. Why does this matter? Well, when you’ve been memorizing a year’s-worth of verb forms in a specific form order (in Al-Kitaab pt. 1), to suddenly shuffle that chart order around while introducing more and more forms…doesn’t help at ALL!
Lastly, dialogs are key to learning any language, and this book ignores them completely. Instead, you’ve given mundane texts to translate, which doesn’t effectively teach anything because it just makes you go back to the chapter glossary to look words up. The reason people learn languages better in foreign countries is because of the language is in context. This book does not present anything in context. One positive is that the vocabulary lists are at least usable (with the exception of the word “aesthetic” in chapter 4). These books have potential and try to be helpful ( I’ve met two of the authors, who are both very nice), but lack very fundamental student aids. I recommend searching Amazon for a more user-friendly book, and if you’re not buying this for a class, it would be smart to switch to colloquial Arabic now that you know some basic Modern Standard Arabic (MSA/Foosha). Peace.
ps: The only Maha and Khalid you see in this book are in the colloquial section of the DVDs, which the text doesn’t go into, so most students won’t even know they’re there. You can also say goodbye to the English-Arabic dictionary in the back.
Rating: 1 / 5