kullu tamam!: An Introduction to Egyptian Colloquial Arabic

by Manfred Woidich

There are basically two types of the local vernaculars―which are used in everyday life―and Modern Standard Arabic, which is restricted to writing and to speaking in formal settings. Anyone wanting to have a good command of the Arabic language must learn both varieties. kullu tamam! takes account of this diversity in two it introduces the student to the language by means of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, and provides a basis for those who want to go on to learn Modern Standard Arabic. This is done by using the grammatical terminology common to both varieties of Arabic, by offering many vocabulary items current in both the vernacular and the standard variety, and―in the later lessons―by introducing the Arabic script. kullu tamam! uses a cognitively oriented approach, presents Arabic mainly in transcription, gives grammatical rules, and presents a wide range of pattern drills and translation exercises (with key), as well as vocabulary lists for both Arabic–English and English–Arabic. Illustrative texts are either short dialogues, as may be encountered in daily life in Egypt, or descriptive passages dealing with more abstract topics and using a vocabulary typical of Arabic newspapers. The accompanying online audio files carry recordings of the texts, made by Egyptian native speakers. For over ten years now, the Dutch edition of kullu tamam! has been used successfully as a textbook in first-year Arabic courses at university level in the Netherlands. Now students in the English-speaking world can benefit from its clear, fresh approach. kullu tamam! is also suitable for self-study purposes.

Genres: Linguistics, Egypt

352 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2004

Reviews

[Bob Offer-Westort · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to rate *Kullu Tamām* four stars, & would have, after the first eight units, but the number of errors in the latter half of the book has led me to bring it down to three stars. A good editor could bring the current text in a revised edition up to four stars. It wouldn't take a lot to turn this into a five-start language-learning text.

Here's what's good about *Kullu Tamām*: I arrived in Cairo having finished only the first eight of sixteen real lessons, had no other exposure to Egyptian Arabic, & had only attended four sessions of a class in Qur'ānic Arabic ten years ago. On arrival, I was able to order food, get directions, give directions, talk about a number of basic topics, & understand simple narratives. The result has been that I've had a radically different experience of Egypt than have my US compatriots who have learned Arabic for similar purposes, but from a phrasebook. The difference between 'How much?' & 'How much do you charge for that, boss?' has led to my being constantly offered free food & coffee, & to numerous really interesting conversations with Egyptians about their thoughts about the current political situation, their culture, & the United States. Fundamentally, if your goal is to be able to talk with people in Arabic in Egypt, this book can work for you. The dialogues it uses are good, & represent the way Egyptians actually speak. Additionally, it's the only Egyptian Arabic book I've seen which you can then use to progress into a Modern Standard Arabic book: *al-Kitāb al-mufīd*, by the same authors, picks up for MSA, using the Egyptian Arabic taught in *Kullu Tamām* as a point of reference. I have only just begun using *al-Kitāb al-mufīd*, & cannot speak to its quality. I suppose that if it's no great shakes, then there's really not much to be said for this particular benefit.

With praise out of the way, there are some flaws & failings:

I think it's a mistake not to include Arabic script. Students who already know Arabic will find Egyptian Arabic easier to learn if they can read the words in Arabic, rather than in transliteration. Additionally, if working with an Egyptian tutor, Arabic script will be easier for them to adjust to than will learning a new representation of the language. I think that Woidich & Heinen-Nasr are right to avoid teaching the student the language thru the script, but the situations in which it would be a useful aid are numerous, & it need not be a hindrance. Two weeks ago, I travelled to Upper Egypt, where the dialect is very similar to Cairene Arabic, but has some pronunciation differences. Essentially, in Cairene Arabic, words that begin with vowels in writing have an inserted glottal stop, hamza (ء) is pronounced as a glottal stop, & qaaf (ق) is usually pronounced as a glottal stop. In Sa'iidi Arabic, the first two are true, but qāf is pronounced like English hard 'g'. If you know that the word i'ra'—'read!'—is spelled اقرأ, then you can predict (correctly) that the Sa'iidi equivalent will be igra'. Otherwise, you don't know if it's gi'ra', gi'rag, gigra', gigrag, igrag, i'rag, or i'ra' (all wrong). This similarly would ease transition to other dialects of Arabic in which there is a distinction between hamza & qāf.

The lessons introduce in the vocabulary lists vocabulary which doesn't appear in the dialogues. (I'm referring, here, to the vocabulary lists which appear immediately after each dialogue & reading: not the separate 'Increase Your Vocabulary' lists.) This is frustrating for me: I tend to remember vocabulary best when I learn it in context. I suppose that for others, they may just be extra words. In the latter chapters, several lessons use vocabulary which does not appear in the vocabulary lists. Most of this appears in the glossary at the end of the book, but I recall one case where I had to use an external dictionary.

The exercises are mostly not very good for the independent learner, tho I think they might work well with partners or in a classroom environment. I have found the English-Arabic translation exercises to be the only ones that actually helped me improve my Arabic.

I wish, too, that there were more full example sentences for the rules of grammar. Several rules are given in seemingly arbitrary places, not having been used in the lesson-initial dialogues or readings. In some cases, good examples are given with the rule, but in others, there is only one or two examples, & examples are not in full sentences.

The stress accent rules of Egyptian Arabic are not very complicated, but are very important. It would have been good to include them.

The system of transliteration is pretty simple, but it's also unnecessary: It would have been more helpful to students to use one of the existing transliteration schemes, to allow them easier transition into using reference works like Hans Wehr's literary Arabic dictionary (which uses the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft transliteration) or Martin Hinds' colloquial Egyptian Arabic dictionary. As tacky as Arabizi might look to Euro-American professionals & academics, it's probably the largest textual corpus of written colloquial Egyptian Arabic. That system might even have been a better choice. I think that most students won't have difficulty transitioning from Woidich & Heinen-Nasr's system to the other transliterations, but it would have been nice to eliminate that modicum of work.

Lesson XVII teaches some of the basics of the Arabic script, but uses only material from previous lessons. I don't think it's very effective, & crams too much information in at the tail end of the course. That said, I think it would be nice to familiarise the student with the isolated forms of the letters & the alphabetical order, to allow direct transition to using Hinds' dictionary, which is mostly in transliteration, but uses Arabic roots in Arabic script in Arabic order for the ordering of entries.

When I arrived in Egypt, with the knowledge of Arabic that I gained from *Kullu Tamām* under my belt, I would have strongly recommended this textbook to any other learner of the language. Now, having completed the textbook, I don't think I could do that. There are, unfortunately, not many texts available for self-instruction. Ernest Abdel-Massih's drill-based *An Introduction to Egyptian Arabic* (available for free on-line, along with four follow-up volumes) looks a little dry, but might be a better option. Having been in the country, having used Martin Hinds' dictionary with the latter half of the book, I'm very glad that I learned from *Kullu Tamām*. But your mileage may very well vary.

[Guido Fierlbeck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Still one of the best introductions to Egyptian Arabic on the market - by one of the best specialists. The problems and inconsistencies that another reviewer already has noted seem to arise from the fact that this version is a condensed translation of the German original "Ahlan wa Sahlan - Eine Einführung in die Kairoer Umgangssprache" - during the second half of the English version quite a lot of material is packed into a single lesson each. Also the German version contains more textual materials and more "extend your vocabulary" sections.
The big plus of the English edition is tha accompanying CD with all the texts.
And the big plus of all the editions: good texts that even after only a few lessons present authentic material, an approach that focuses on grammar and precision - quite to the contrary to some newer textbooks that leave the student guessing the rules almost by himself and the transciption only approach - here I stongly disagree with the other reviewer.
So - get yourself the German version plus the English one (because of the CD) and start learning.

[Tinkerreise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Got this after dabbling in MSA for a year, and wanting to pivot to more intensive learning. While I suppose it deserves some praise just for being in Masri (MSA resources dominate the Arabic language learning field), going through this book was very tedious.

While the back of the book claims that the abjad is introduced slowly over the course of the book, this is not the case. The only Arabic script in this book can be found in an 8-page chapter at the very end of the book, right before the glossary. Amusingly enough, the chapter itself makes the same claim as the back of the book, despite there being no Arabic script at all in chapter XI, nor later chapters.

Instead, the entire book uses a transcription system, different to all the other ways I've seen Arabic transcribed until now, with macrons, carons, and the occasional Ayn. While this is very readable and easy to follow along as a learner, it is also not the *Arabic* I wanted to learn. I've been learning Japanese for a long time now, and in Japanese learning circles the idea of learning the language without also learning the script is a common point of ridicule. What this book does, is essentially that. You end up functionally illiterate.

Dialogues are also written "phonetically", with elided vowels removed and so forth. While a precise rendition is welcome, it also makes it virtually impossible to look up words. The vocabulary lists are all in alphabetical order, despite the many prefixes you can add to words, and what is included in the vocabulary lists and what isn't is also (seemingly) random, with some words being introduced in chapters long before they're used, and subsequently missing in the chapter where they're needed. Grammar points that aren't introduced until the very end of the book, like kida, appears in dialogues right away.

To top it off, there are no translations!

This makes for a perfect storm. To a beginner like me, the dialogues are essentially impenetrable black boxes where you can't look up the words in the glossaries provided, nor elsewhere, since resources like Lisaan Masry use completely different methods of transcription which would require you to sit and guess how each unknown word might be rendered in the various systems. Arabic is (hopefully soon) my 5th language; I have not experienced the kind of desperation that I felt reading these stories in any of my other language learning pursuits. As you get deeper into the book and get a better grasp of how words and sentences are structured, the feeling starts to go away, but many of the earliest chapters felt hopelessly difficult to parse.

I started with the intention to rush through the whole book a few times, but my approach ended up being the complete opposite - sitting down with pen and paper, painstakingly copying out all the example sentences I thought were important and annotating them, then going through the dialogue sections in the same way, writing it all down by hand to grind it into my brain. 30+ A4 pages of notes later, it's over. And I am still no closer to my goal of learning to read Arabic than I was when I started...