Colloquial Arabic of Egypt: The Complete Course for Beginners (Colloquial Series)

Description

Colloquial Arabic of Egypt provides a step-by-step course in spoken Egyptian Arabic – the most widely understood dialect in the Arab world. Combining a user-friendly approach with a thorough treatment of the language, it equips learners with the essential skills needed to communicate confidently and effectively in Egyptian Arabic in a broad range of situations. No prior knowledge of the language is required. Key features include: Arabic in romanization form throughout, with optional Arabic script supplements emphasis on modern conversational language with clear pronunciation guidance progressive introduction to the Arabic alphabet to aid familiarity with simple labels and signs grammar section and bilingual glossaries for easy reference stimulating exercises with lively illustrations new e-resources at www.routledge.com/cw/colloquialsoffering supplementary materials for teachers and learners, including extra activities (and answers), vocabulary lists and cultural information, ideas for group activities linked to each unit in the course, listing of the complete Arabic alphabet, notes comparing Egyptian and Standard Arabic and downloadable additional audio tracks. Balanced, comprehensive and rewarding, this new and revised edition of Colloquial Arabic of Egypt offers an indispensable resource both for independent learners and for students taking courses in Egyptian Arabic. By the end of this course, you will be at Level B1 of the Common European Framework for Languages and at the Intermediate-Mid on the ACTFL proficiency scales. Audio material to accompany the course is available to download free in MP3 format from www.routledge.com/cw/colloquials. Recorded by native speakers, the audio material features the dialogues and texts from the book and will help develop your listening and pronunciation skills. Review: Awesome! - Purchased the book after listening to the michel thomas course made by the same authors. Definitely worth the price ! Review: I loved the book right away I opened the parcel and took it in my hands - This book is quite OK for someone who is not too picky about consistent transcription and grammar explanations. Its size the print quality, the typography, contents accompanying audio on the Routledge website all give an excellent learning tool, which is a joy to take in the hands. I used to learn Classical Arabic, and I wanted to refresh my knowledge, and for the sake of fun I decided to learn this time Egyptian Arabic. Here are the main features I loved. (+) Transcription had accent marks, which is terribly important in ECA. (+) The book starts teaching Arabic script, and the dialogs are included in Arabic scripts, too in a separate section (p 278 - 299). (+) Solution/answer keys are given to the exercises (p 300 - 326) (+) English - Arabic and Arabic - English (not the Hans Wehr - a fantastic dictionary - style root order, though) is really useful containing the lesson number where the word is first used. (+) Cultural points in English are refreshingly joy to read. (+) The audio is of very high quality, easy to listen too, not too slow, not too fast. (+) Pages 253 - 275 have a summary of Egyptian grammar, quite useful, but far from the completeness of T.F. Mitchell or M. Woidich. (+) Additional exercises and vocabulary are available on the Routledge website, interestingly in docx format instead of PDF. What could have been done a bit better: (-) A number of words used in the book is simply missing from the glossary. For example, the title of Unit 2 is 9ilti - My Family, but 9ila - family is not in the glossary. (-) It was weird to see that 9 was used for 3ain and "oh" and "ay", were used instead of "oo" and "ee", but I got used to it quite quickly. What could have been made a lot better: (-) Grammar sections are useful, but definitely far from the comprehensiveness of the brilliant T.F. Mitchell (Teach Yourself Colloquial Arabic). The grammar sections in M. Woidich (Kullu Tamam) are more complete and more consistent, too. For example, this book doesn't even mention the concept of "Fronting of a topic" (see M. Woidich p30) aka "Thematic sentences" (see J.R.Smart p136), which is a terribly popular feature in Arabic. (-) The transcription, unfortunately, is not consistent with the actual pronunciation. Some of the phonetic rules are simply ignored. The pronunciation of the native speakers, of course, is accurate, but the transcript is not exactly and precisely what they say. For example, the sg.3rd pers. f. pronoun suffix is [(a)ha] a short a in every book I have on ECA, but this book writes [haa], which absolutely not the way it is pronounced. This leads to examples like [wilaadhaa], which is completely against an important phonetic rule in ECA pronunciation: only one long vowel is allowed in ECA, and it always have the accent/stress. The authors should have given more attention to the Mitchell and other books with excellent ECA grammar. So, this book has really useful grammar sections and phonetic rules, no question, but if you want, precise, consistent grammar and phonetic rules you should go for the Mitchell, Woidich or Abdel-Massih books. (-) The quality of the recording is of very high quality, but the English narrator talks too much. I know that it is part of the methodology, still 60% of the audio is to listen to this lady talking English. What To mitigate the pain, I downloaded the MP3 files, and with my sound editor application I cut out the English narration completely keeping only the Arabic talk, then I merged all the tracks of a unit into one single continuous stream to listen day and night. (-) No Index for grammar terms. So, this book is a fine text book for learning ECA. The other books that are worth considering: M.Woidich: Kullu Tamam, Ernest T Abdel-Massih: An Introduction to Egyptian Arabic (actually it is free, rich content including grammar and ECA texts, but no audio), and, of course, all books from M. Aldrich especially ECA Verbs and ECA Vocabulary and the Big Book of Egyptian Arabic Verbs. When I started my project of learning ECA, first I thought just to watch the dozens of Youtube "Learn Egyptian Arabic with XYZ" channels. They are lovely and fun, eventually, however, I gave up since they are not consistent in content, no grammar, no methodology, they are just random entertaining videos. They cannot replace a real textbook with consistent audio material like this book. Likewise, online monthly subscription learning sites are not my cup of tea either. I love the tangible feel of a high-quality book: It's eternal.