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Best book for learning Arabic?

  Tags: Textbooks | Arabic | Book
 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages Post Reply
12 messages over 2 pages: 1
kanewai
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/kanewai
Joined 4889 days ago

1386 posts - 3054 votes 
Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese
Studies: Italian, Spanish

 
 Message 9 of 12
30 August 2011 at 2:36pm | IP Logged 
My problem with Assimil Arab was with the recordings. They sounded far too slow and exaggerated to my ears, with
every syllable being drawn out and over-enunciated.

Which means I've never attempted to finish the course. Did you find that it helped you actually speak with native
speakers?
1 person has voted this message useful



Annett
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Newbie
Germany
Joined 4838 days ago

2 posts - 2 votes
Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, French
Studies: Arabic (Egyptian)

 
 Message 10 of 12
30 August 2011 at 2:45pm | IP Logged 
Does anyone know the series "Kallimni 'Arabi Bishweesh: A Beginners' Course in Spoken Egyptian Arabic" followed by an Intermediate and an Upper Intermediate course each with a CD? That would really be interesting to know.


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liddytime
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Senior Member
United States
mainlymagyar.wordpre
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693 posts - 1328 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician
Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written)

 
 Message 11 of 12
30 August 2011 at 5:11pm | IP Logged 
Annett wrote:
Does anyone know the series "Kallimni 'Arabi Bishweesh: A Beginners' Course in Spoken
Egyptian
Arabic" followed by an Intermediate and an Upper Intermediate course each with a CD? That would really be
interesting to know.


Whoops! It was not "Kullu Tamaam" but "Kallimni 'Arabi Bishweesh: A Beginners' Course in Spoken Egyptian
Arabic"
that I meant to refer to in my previous post. I corrected the post.

The books are produced by The American University in Cairo who knows a thing or two about teaching Arabic to
English speakers. Again, I have not used these myself but I have heard from others that they are excellent for
learning the Egyptian dialect.

kanewai wrote:
My problem with Assimil Arab was with the recordings. They sounded far too slow and
exaggerated to my ears, with every syllable being drawn out and over-enunciated. Which means I've never
attempted to finish the course. Did you find that it helped you actually speak with native
speakers?


This was my experience with Assimil as well ( Both the older English version and the newer French version). The
speech sounded forced and un-natural. I made it up to about Lesson 20 in both before chucking them!

Edited by liddytime on 30 August 2011 at 5:14pm

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Fazla
Hexaglot
Senior Member
Italy
Joined 6262 days ago

166 posts - 255 votes 
Speaks: Italian, Serbo-Croatian*, English, Russian, Portuguese, French
Studies: Arabic (classical), German, Turkish, Mandarin

 
 Message 12 of 12
30 August 2011 at 6:42pm | IP Logged 
kanewai wrote:
My problem with Assimil Arab was with the recordings. They sounded far too slow and exaggerated to my ears, with
every syllable being drawn out and over-enunciated.

Which means I've never attempted to finish the course. Did you find that it helped you actually speak with native
speakers?


It might be just about my personal method of learning languages, which doesn't rely that much on listening but on reading especially in the early phase, but I remember even at the beginning, while I would speak with natives, they tended to praise my pronounciation, and now I would guess it was exactly because of the way audio cds were, i.e. slow and exaggerated. It's my, again personal, thought that audio cds being too slow or over exaggerated are no impediment, because fast talk will eventually show up with experience and time and actually getting a good grisp on the pronounciation at an early phase has it's very good positive effects in the future.

Again, my Arabic comes almost exclusevily from that Assimil course (the new one, in French) the rest coming from songs, chats with natives, songs and videos, words that, as I recognized them as coming from Arabic to Turkish, brought them to my Arabic vocabulary through Turkish (which is much, much better than my Arabic) so having said this, to answer to your question if it helped me with natives, yes indeed it did, now I can chat and talk with natives about simple stuff (university, work, future work expectations, hobbies, family history) although the biggest problem I found in chatting with natives was their peppering of MSA with dialect words/syntax/pronounciation which I found to be a true nightmare, finding somebody who speaks a pure MSA is a win at the lottery

Edited by Fazla on 30 August 2011 at 6:44pm



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