Living Arabic: A Comprehensive Introductory Course (English and Arabic Edition)

Living Arabic presents an excellent blend of listening comprehension, speaking practice and reading. Each lesson begins with short listening passages that introduce the key words and concepts. Unlike older-style books, there's no expectation that students will memorize the dialogues; rather, the focus is simply to identify the key words. Subsequent exercises reinforce the key words, both through reading and listening. The variety of exercises makes working through the material actually fun. (When does one expect to hear that, with an Arabic textbook?! Examples, so far, include matching cities to countries, a word find, filling in missing numbers or letters, circling the correct word from a pair, identifying which letter was pronounced ... there are lots of different approaches to teaching aural discrimination and reading fluency. After five lessons, both my language tutor and I paused at the end of class, to say how much we're enjoying this textbook.Upon recommendation from others, I purchased Alif Baa, along with Living Arabic. My tutor observed that Alif Baa is a good book for those without any knowledge of the alphabet. But if you've had slightest prior exposure to the letters, it's easy to jump straight into Living Arabic. My Alif Baa has sat on the shelf untouched. Living Arabic covered the alphabet and sounds effectively in a few pages at the start.For reference -- I'm going through the book with a Jordanian tutor. However, the Living Arabic text is designed to make the most of limited time with a native speaker. Both the CD and DVD are excellent, with clear voices. They're wholly integrated with the text and an essential part of all the exercises. I'm VERY glad I picked this text!

I think this book is relatively easy to use because it's based on themes. Dr. Younes also repeats a lot of the vocabulary that you use through out the small chapters. You should have a native speaker if you are using this book, someone who speaks 'amiyat bilad a sham. Essentially, if you have a decent speaker of Lebanese, Syrian, or Palestinian Arabic who also has a decent enough grounding in Modern Standard Arabic then you will do well with this book. I like the cover of this book. I also think it teaches you a lot of practical Arabic that one can use. It also doesn't bog you down with tons of grammar like Mahdi Alosh's book.I like Alosh's book in many ways, because he, like Younes, builds on your knowledge of vocabulary. Al Kitab is a nice book in some ways, but it is too hard since the vocabulary in the various chapters don't really tie to each other, and it's not simple to build practical conversational ability with that book. Unless you have hours and hours of instruction per week (a minimum of 5) I think Al Kitab would be hard to learn from properly and used by a professor, but Living Arabic would be easier to use. It's not so challenging to use. I hope I have been fair. The author of this text is very consientious instructor who cares profoundly about the language and students and values colloquial Arabic and getting people to feel confident in speaking Arabic.

Great book....so glad I found it. I've tried manyArabic books, in fact like many of you I have shelves of them. This the best by far that I've found for learning a dialect, this one is Levantine. I already had a good background in Fusha when I bought it, I started backwards to some by learning grammar first and now dialects. In my opinion it teaches you a lot quickly, take your time and do all the excercises and you will actually learn to Speak Arabic.

The Customer Service was the most considerate found. This resource was highly rated and only available from a few sources. Good to have selected this one. Fully compensated for missing the accompanied CD and book slone is helpful.

This is the program for you if you want to learn to speak as well as read and write in Arabic, and have a lot of fun along the way. Buy "Alif Baa" or another brief program to learn to read and write the Arabic script and acquire a bit of intro vocabulary, but then continue with Living Arabic. In these materials, Younes deftly avoids the complaints leveled at the primary competitor programs in at least two key ways.First, he takes seriously the unique "diglossia" of Arabic, with a formal language for reading and writing (Modern Standard Arabic) and another distinct language for daily speech (in Living Arabic, the Jordanian version of the colloquial dialect family called "Levantine," which includes similar sibling variants spoken in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon, and which in my own opinion is much more attractive and enjoyable than the Egyptian dialect taught in most other programs). Younes never pretends that most language learners would be interested in the spoken form of what is generally called Modern Standard Arabic, which is the form introduced and drilled in most Arabic programs today. Rather than setting forth completely artificial dialogues with phrases like "wither goest thou, and whence cometh thee," (as in the Transparent Language program) Younes clarifies from the outset the distinction between the formal and informal languages, and he offers extremely engaging practice in both. The spoken language appears in audio recordings of discussions of family, work, study, shopping, etc., exactly the types of things most language learners want to learn to discuss, rather than teaching us how to say things like "the horse is jumping over the table," as in the truly horrible Rosetta Stone program. As the lessons progress, the listening selections become audio recordings of well-known folk tales, making the process all the more enjoyable. This program also includes video recordings of realistic dialogues involving an American visitor to Jordan, helpfully contextualized with body language, different accents and speech patterns, local dress, and the geography and culture of the Levant. On the formal side, the reading selections gradually introduce the learner not only to the specific style and vocabulary of Modern Standard Arabic, but to the geography, ethnography, history, politics, and art of the Arab world (including North Africa), without falling into the common trap of becoming unobjective, proselytizing, or propagandistic. All of Younes's exercises, both listening and reading, brilliantly repeat key words and phrases at timely intervals to reinforce the process of vocabulary acquisition. Never does he subject the learner to the frustrating exercise of "guess what the meaning of the following passage might be" with no guidance (as some other college programs do). Each reading passage is followed by necessary new vocabulary, and the Arabic-English glossary contains definitions for virtually every word in the book. All of this makes the process of learning both extremely effective and hardly noticeable. This course is both a brilliantly designed pedagogical tool and a genuinely enjoyable trip through the Middle East and North Africa.Second, Younes clearly empathizes with those who dislike grammar drills. Very few pages of Living Arabic are taken up with grammar notes, conjugation exercises, and the like. A bit of such work is included, but only just enough to crystallize the most essential learning and advance the almost imperceptible process of internalizing the complex and unique structure of Arabic. A perfect example is declensions and the case system. Arabic has such a system, and many contemporary Arabic courses continue to spend substantial time on this grammatical peculiarity. Younes deftly brushes aside the monotonous and unproductive aspects of this infatuation with minutiae; instead, he concentrates on explaining clearly the few aspects of this system that one needs to read accurately (as the case system is essentially irrelevant to the spoken language, unlike in heavily declined modern languages like Russian). For those who wish to delve more deeply into these and other grammatical rules, Younes offers an appendix with a grammar summary, as well as a detailed set of tables laying out the conjugations of the various verb forms.I have already made my way half-way through the intermediate book in this series, and Younes and his colleagues are reportedly in the process of updating the 1999 version of that book, as well. When the updated intermediate book is released as a companion to this fabulous, updated Living Arabic book, Younes's materials will represent the best multi-level Arabic learning program on the market. I spent 4 months studying how best to study Arabic before I undertook this monumental project (self-guided), and Younes's materials stood out as the best (if not the only) example of a modern program that has finally sloughed off the unproductive formalities of older programs used in college courses, as well as the pitfalls of the mass-appeal courses hawked by major bookstores. If you want to learn modern Arabic well, to speak as well as read and write, you can save yourself a lot of heartache and wasted money and effort by beginning with Living Arabic (and continuing with whatever they decide to call the updated intermediate book).