Al-kitaab fii ta callum al-arabiyya: A Textbook for Beginning Arabic (Al-kitaab Arabic Language Program)

by Kristen Brustad, Mahmoud Al-Batal, Abbas Al-Tonsi

Genres: Nonfiction, Language

448 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2011

About the author

Kristen Elizabeth Brustad

Reviews

[Meera · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm a college student and I love learning different languages. So I decided to take Arabic classes in college. The first book in the series we used called Alf Baa was great, I have no complaints at all about that book but this one makes me want to pull my hair out! First of all the jump from Alf Baa to this one is way too big. We are going from very little baby words in Alf baa like colors, numbers, how are you, to words like The United nations, area, literature, translator, specializing and admissions in Al-Kitaab. The exercises are very frustrating. For example in the first chapter they ask you to translate a bunch of sentences and it didn't provide any examples of word order and only how to conjugate verbs before hand, which wouldn't help because word order is different in Arabic. all the grammar sections so far are very vague and don't go into much detail. Also everything in Arabic is written without vowels, and although Alf baa teaches you to read, it is still hard to read without the vowels if you don't know the word, they should show the word at least once with vowels if they aren't going to put in a transliteration. The organization is horrible, especially on the DVD which doesn't even have files named properly, for example in on Maha's video it is labeled as Nasreen and on Nasreen's video it's labeled as Maha. The online site costs extra but the authors don't tell you this before you buy either Alf Baa or Al Kitaab. One girl in our class said she didn't want to pay for the online material and is struggling because most of the homework is online. The online site is nice and much better than the DVD, however some of the Levantine videos do not work and it runs slow sometimes. But the online content is worth getting. If you are learning on your own, reconsider buying this book, because it's frustrating with a class, I can't imagine trying to use it without one. My teacher is very good and helping us through, she said she is thinking of not using Al-Kitaab anymore because of how frustrating it is for her and her students. There are some good things about the book however, which is the Egyptian and Levantine dialects and the videos along with them. Although sometimes the videos are maddening because they don't tell you some of the vocabulary and you can't see it written out. And this isn't supposed to be for intermediate speakers. I really hate giving a negative review because I'm sure the authors put so much work into it, but it's awful. If you want to study Arabic I suggest Living Language's Ultimate Arabic:

Ultimate Arabic Beginner-Intermediate
Although it's not perfect, it's much more user friendly than Al-kitaab and has lessons in Egyptian, Levantine, Iraqi and Saudi. It's pretty old fashioned but I've been using it and I love it. I'd also suggest

Mastering Arabic:Mastering Arabic 1 with 2 Audio CDs (Hippocrene Mastering)

These two books are much easier to deal with then al-kitaab if you want to learn Arabic. I'm using them on my own and getting much further than with Al-kitaab. Sorry that my review is so long but I wanted to try to mention everything I thought about Al-Kitaab.

I wrote this review two years ago on amazon, and I uprgaded to two stars because of the online content and the videos. I learned a lot from that class, but I think it was mainly due to the great teacher. But other than that this book is horrible.

[Rachel Edney]

انتهيت منها الحمد الله

[Hank Pin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am surprised that this site actually has textbooks available for review. All I have to say is that after spending so much time on this book for first year Arabic, I still have no idea as to how they arrange the vocabulary (do we really need to know the vocab "United Nations" in Ch.1) or come up with the story/text (I can't believe how many chapters of Maha and Khalid's complaining that I have to sit through).

The major problem with this edition though is that Ch. 14 through 20 from the second edition has been cut. To my knowledge, the 3rd edition for book 2 hasn't been released yet. For incoming 2nd year student, this is quite problematic since the current Book 2 assumes that you know the information of Ch. 14-20 from 2nd Edition Book 1. It feels like this revision was not thought out, or executed, well.