Focus on Contemporary Arabic: With Online Media

I have to fully agree with "Eastern Approaches" on this. I have been trying like the dickens to get this either on my ipod or as a CD to listen in my car. For me, ipod is best because I usually fall asleep listening to language lessons (odd I know, but it's effective). I STRONGLY URGE Yale University Press to make it available on cd or ipod. I too would purchase it again just for that. All that being said, I have studied Arabic for 11 years. I own or have previewed just about every Arabic (among other languages) course book and dictionary you can find. Without a doubt, this is the best Arabic language tool I have come across yet! It is not for beginners, which is a good thing. One of the toughest and most bitter pill an Arabic learner has to swallow is the fact that Arabic contains so many spoken dialects. I attended the Defense Language Institute in the 90s and even the teachers there were hesitant to speak everyday spoken Arabic because the the focus was on MSA; something they didn't always feel comfortable speaking. Hopefully Dr. Abed comes out with a follow-up or a revised version. To make this product or a future product even better I would suggest the following: 1. Make available in CD and/or MP3 format as mentioned earlier 2. List the new vocabulary either alphabetically at the end or beginning of the lesson. Or... list new vocabulary in order of appearance after each segment. I usually highlight the Arabic words in the text and then highlight the English in the vocab list to practice understanding and producing new words. 3. List every word, as a dictionary of sorts (except the most basic words) at the very end of the book. This would help a lot. Dr. Hill does this for his Persian language books and it really helps. The above are really minor critiques, as the book is very, very helpful. If you are a student of Arabic and want something more advanced, you have to buy this, bila shak!

I agree with much of what was written by Mr.Cummings in this thread. I would add that if you have the technical ability, it is very useful to extract the audio for CD and to play it in the car as you travel. (Note: I am not advocating piracy - just playing the audio from the DVD as you drive if you are able). I've found that this was an excellent way to develop my ear training. Read the texts, watch the DVD (numerous times) and listen to the audio over and over whenever driving. It never gets tiresome but instead is revelatory the way you start to develop a better ear and make morphological connections in your own thinking. ("Ah, so that's why you use x word for x" etc) By the way, I contacted Yale and asked whether they would consider releasing the segments for iPod download as videos or just audio. They said that they are considering it but it would be a way off. I hope they do so (I'll purchase it again to replace my rough job) and also that they release follow up editions on more complicated subject areas. This is a really excellent resource for self-study and I recommend it highly.

Shukri's Focus on Contemporary Arabic is excellent. It is a compilation of dialogues of native speakers discussing a variety of increasngly more complicated subjects. Happily, it is not another vapid audio of survival Arabic for Western tourists in the Middle East. Rather, the DVD provides ample opportunity to improve aural skills for serious students of Arabic and the book contains a complete transcript of the monologues on the DVD -- and more. The author's annotated footnotes provide insightful explanations related to grammar and colloquial speech. Virtually all of the topics are highly interesting, of great contemporary relevance and address important social issues. The book retains the reader's interest throughout. If your Modern Standard Arabic level is upper intermediate, then your frustration level will be low with the book (although listening to the DVD, depending on the speaker, is slightly more demanding in terms of aural skills than is reading the narrations in terms of reading skills). Even the Arabic print is clear and easy to read. Moreover, the book, though paperback, is well-bound, the pages are of high quality paper and the cover is aesthetically pleasing. The book and DVD are well-worth the cost. They are value-for-money. In certain minor aspects, however, there is room for criticism. All the questions appended to the transcripts in each of the thematic chapters are in English with answers solicited in English. Why? In all likelihood, the reader already has mastery of English and has a passive knowledge of Arabic. The utility of the book and dvd is to promote an active command of contemporary Arabic; accordingly, the questions should have been in Arabic with perhaps model answers of harder questions at the back of the book. In the Exercises, the author asks for a translation of all the questions; translation is another skill set. The exercises at the end of each chapter are all very monotonous in form. For the self-learner in particular, more structured and varied exercises, with answers at the back of the book, would have proven more expedient. The focus of the conversations is on Levantine speakers generally expressing themselves in a standard spoken Arabic (although a few speakers resort to a more colloquial way of speaking). It is good for the listener to have exposure to different speech patterns in Arabic including contrasting colloquial with standard and the author is to be commended. However, more utile would have been greater geographic diversity; Gulf speakers, for instance, are short-shrifted. Egyptians take a back-seat to Jordanians and Palestinians. Depending on the elocution of the speaker, there are deviations in the crispness of the sound of the audio; interviews take place in a variety of settings where acoustic quality varies.

I am a student studying arabic, and I have recently started using this book and dvd to improve my listening skills. What makes it useful is that it contains a number of monologues accompanied with complete transcripts of what is said by each speaker. You can go through each listening section, and if you miss any of the words you can simply go back to the texts and see what exactly it was that you missed, no guessing. Some of the speakers speak quickly and it is not always easy to catch everything. Overall I like this very much.

In 21 concise chapters covering both language and Middle East culture as well as Arab-American relations, Dr. Shukri Abed has finally composed the perfect text for short attention spanned aspiring Arabic speakers. Complete with DVD, this book provides the reader with the bare essentials they might not necessarily glean in academia. For example, in the text of Chapter One, we are taught how in local dialect to explain where we live, where we grew up, where we studied--all without being able to reveal a non-native accent. The ability to click "rewind" mulitple times on the DVD remote negates the complications language students normally experience in a classroom setting, where other students don't like to be disrupted with extra-pronunciations. I know that the US government has purchased scores of this book/DVD set for its employees headed toward the Middle East. Dr. Abed, a Harvard PHD, and a seasoned language teacher with the Middle East Institute, has finally gotten the essentials of Arabic language pedagogy down to a science. Bravo to him for this valuable addition.