Colloquial Arabic (Levantine) (Colloquial Series) Review

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Colloquial Arabic (Levantine) (Colloquial Series) ReviewI discovered this book (without the cassette) in my public library a few months ago and liked it enough to track down the full boxed book-with-cassette edition and buy it (on Amazon, of course!).
I was pleased with it and learned a lot from it, but I should say, for starters, that I didn't come to either Arabic or language learning as a total beginner. I had studied literary Arabic over twenty years ago and knew a smattering of words and phrases in various dialects (and had also studied a whole slew of other languages and had no fear of grammatical terminology).
The book is useful if you want a brief survey of colloquial Arabic grammar (I had wondered how verb tenses other than the past worked, for instance, and I'm much less mystified now, thanks to McLoughlin's book) and some fairly interesting, lively, accessible sample texts (the usual greetings and polite expressions, a telephone conversation involving a wrong number, a humorous story about an Englishman who couldn't learn Arabic, a collection of proverbs and [mild!] curses...). I thought the story about the Englishman alone worth what I paid for the book and cassette (which was considerably below retail).
On the authenticity of the language used, I'm not really competent to judge, but clearly the target is spoken Lebanese Arabic; for 'what's this?' the author gives the Levantine "shu haada", rather than the literary "maadha haadha?", or forms used in Egypt or Morocco or somewhere else. The only basis for the statement by a previous reviewer that the author mixes modern standard Arabic with Levantine seems to be the slightly conservative spelling: "kayf" instead of "keef" (in the author's transliteration) for 'how', "ma9a salama" instead of "ma9a salame" for 'goodbye', "jadeed" instead of "jdeed" for 'new', etc. (though the speaker on the cassette uses the more colloquial, Lebanese pronunciations I listed second).
Some of the book's shortcomings are the fact that grammatical forms and vocabulary are really not worked with enough to be mastered, and that the transliteration system is a little odd and not conveniently summarized (for some reason, it uses standard Latin values for the short vowels, but flip-flops to a "SEE-it and SAY-it" sytem for the long vowels and diphthongs). The biggest drawback, though, is that the dialogues and story seem to have been an afterthought; there's no attempt to build up the vocabulary or structures needed for them.
So if you're looking for a single, good textbook (and you're a beginner), this isn't it--though you can learn polite phrases and some basic grammatical structures in the first few lessons. This is a book for someone who's "having more than one". Fortunately, my local library also had three other good items for the dialect: Pimmsleur's CD course in "Eastern Arabic" (Syrian dialect, no book), Hugo's "Arabic in Three Months", and "Just Listen and Learn Arabic" (the last two focusing on Jordanian Arabic).Colloquial Arabic (Levantine) (Colloquial Series) OverviewColloquial Arabic (Levantine) offers you a step-by-step approach to the Arabic spoken in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. Levantine Arabic is widely recognized as one of the major languages of Arabic radio and television. Specially written by an international authority on teaching Arabic as a foreign language, Colloquial Arabic (Levantine) is the ideal course for self-study or class use and requires no previous knowledge of the language.What makes Colloquial Arabic (Levantine) your best choice in personal language learning?Interactive- lots of dialogues and exercises for regular practice.Clear - concise grammar notes.Complete - including answer key and dictionary sectionHelpful - provides invaluable guidance on everything related to language in its social, cultural, and religious contexts.Innovative - the course also teaches the skills of reading Arabic script.Accompanying audio material is available to purchase separately on CD/MP3 format, or comes included in the great value Colloquials Pack.

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