Colloquial Arabic of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia

This book is very very good.Arabic is a extremely difficult language to learn, let alone the written version of it, this book really does let one grasp spoken gulf arabic, which is the closest to classical and the written that there is.Holes wasnt implying that the books readers are stupid because he didnt include the written, but it was actually a smart decision, its hard enough learning a new language but double the frustration not only trying to learn the spoken BUT also the written! honestly, its much more useful to learn the spoken, as what u can do with this course and then move on the written and reading.An important note though is that arabic tends to vary depending on which region of the ME/NA you are in so learning Gulf version can be useful but will ultimatly hinder u in some ways if you say, go to Lebanon or Algeria and try to use this dialect.another thing i liked about this book was that he explained the grammer really really well, which can be infinitly confusing and confounding but its fairly basic and laid out well.

I started this book with no knowledge of Arabic whatsoever. It is set up somewhat like a class in that there are lessons and assignments (with answers in the back) but it is at your own pace. After about a month or so of studying, I really began to grasp it. I shocked myself one day when I went into a local Middle Eastern grocery store and was able to understand the conversation between a woman customer and the counter clerk. It was amazing. I disagree with the previous review putting the book down for not teaching us the alphabet. Learning another language is complicated, especially when the alphabet is COMPLETELY different from our own. We learn to speak our native language long before we know how to read or write it-that's part of learning as we grow up. I think it's a natural progression to do the same with another language. If you do want to learn to write it, an excellent companion would be The Arabic Alphabet : How to Read and Write It. But this book was very comprehensive and detailed. I definately would only get this book if you are serious about learning it, because otherwise you will be overwhelmed with information. I highly recommend it.

Some additional caveats to add to the previous reviews: though Holes' book is a respectable text that presents quite a large amount of Arabic grammar well and thoroughly, all material is in transliteration--there is NO Arabic script in this book. (The advantage is that Holes doesn't have to deal with Modern Standard Arabic spellings from which the spoken language deviates; he can also mark stress on all words, a very useful feature of the book.) Also, though each of the 20 units has an Arabic-English vocabulary, there is NO Arabic-English or English-Arabic vocabulary for the entire text at the end of the book--not even an index to the lesson in which a word is first used. (Nor is there a grammatical index.) And despite the length of the text for a Routledge Colloquial, there is only a single cassette--three or four would be better, though it would have pushed the price of the whole into the barely affordable range. All in all, worthwhile only if you have a serious interest in spoken Eastern Arabic AND have other resources for learning Arabic.

Following mutarjim's fair review I feel obliged that as the partner of a national from Bahrain (which was the source of Holes' "local" dialect for this book), to add the warning that some of the dialect presented here is regarded as quaint and even a tad un-educated. Especially, the recorded dialogues which, while authentic of a certain sector of Bahrain at the time they were recorded preserves old village folk using a fair amount of what was even then non-standard Gulf dialect, and is probably even more so today. Yunus

I spent many productive hours working through it. Definitely a volume to be recommended for the person who is serious about speaking Arabic, especially in the Gulf countries. As the jacket explains, the book is designed to provide a SOLID (emphasis mine) working knowledge of the language; it is quite vocabulary-intensive, and the cassette is very valuable. However, although "no previous knowledge of Arabic is assumed," I would argue against using it as an introductory text - I had already completed several semesters of Arabic study, formal and dialectal, before starting with this book, and still found it plenty challenging. I could perhaps wish for a few diagrams, sketches, or photographs of people or places in the Gulf, or some other kind of visual variety to break up the material a little, but it's a very good book.