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A Textbook for Beginning Arabic

View my notes (through Chapter 12) and short list of grammar terminology from self-study of ‫الكتاب في تعلّم العربية (الجزء الأول)‬.

Commentary

I have some real problems with this book.

Vocabulary is used in the dialogs and exercises before it is defined.
Grammatical concepts are used before they are defined.
Not all vocabulary used in the text is included in the glossary. This means that if you intend to use this book for self-study, you must first teach yourself the root system and use a dictionary.
It assumes readers have only a minimal understanding of English grammar, with the unfortunate result that grammatical concepts are consistently never referred to in English but in Arabic. This makes learning the grammar unnecessarily abstract. For example, ‫مضارع‬ and ‫ماضي‬ became much more meaningful once I realized they were equivalent to ‘imperfect’ and ‘perfect’.
Because no English grammatical concepts are used, expounding the Arabic grammar becomes unnecessarily complex. For example, p248 has a bizarre footnote that attempts to explain the difference between an adjective and a relative pronoun without actually using those terms.
The introduction of the case system is piecemeal and horribly confused.
Similarly, the verbal moods are introduced using only Arabic grammatical terms. The genitive imperfect is introduced before the indicative.
Some of the dialog on the accompanying cassettes is of poor quality— over-fast and mumbled, and very difficult to follow.
The book considers it a feature that it slowly introduces you to the Egyptian dialect. A book purporting to teach Modern Standard Arabic might be better off without this additional confusion.

201 Arabic Verbs

Here is an index to Barron's otherwise useful 201 Arabic Verbs.

San Mateo College

View some left-over notes from Elementary Arabic 2 at San Mateo College.