THIS IS NOT A BEGINNING BOOK FOR SELF TEACHERS AND FOCUS IS ON THE ABC'S NOT SPEAKING AND PHONICS.

This book was recommended to me as a good resource for learning Arabic, but after a thorough review of it, I went back to the resources that I already owned. This book is not designed for the truly neophite Arabic student, even though the title and introduction would lead one to believe that. One of the most obvious shortcomings of the book is the tiny font of the printing, which often makes it difficult for the student, who is not familiar with Arabic, to differentiate the new letters & symbols. One advantage of the book is that there are exercises at the end of each section, even though they are more geared for a classroom, not for an individual learner. "The Arabic Alphabet: How to Read & Write It" by Nicholas Awde & Putros Samano, is a much better beginning resource for the complete beginner.

Arabic is an interesting language. There are 200 million Arabs in the world and Arabic is the religious langua franca for at least 1.5 billion Muslims. You would think that with such a language there is a systemic way in which it is taught, right? WRONG!

You can buy a 1,000 Arabic language books versus 1,000 French language books and the thousand French books will pretty much be consistent in their approach and the thousand Arabic books will have 1,000 different approaches. When you learn a Romance language, you start off with the alphabet, then you move on to numbers, then the days of the week, the months of the year, how do you pronounce your name or how do you ask someone else's name, etc. In most Arabic books, you never get that. You get thrown words and sentences as if you know the language. In the Arabic alphabet there are 28 characters. Each has three different forms. A letter can appear one way at the beginning of a word and look another way in the middle and yet another way at the end. So when you learn Arabic you must learn 84 different characters. You think any of these Arabic language authors care to tell you that? Guess again.

Additionally, just when it is getting good, there are three short vowels and long vowels in Arabic. The short vowels are what you really need to focus upon. If you are learning Classical Arabic which is the language of the Holy Quran, you will see the short vowels in each word. In modern Arabic, the Arabs do not mark words with the short vowel, so for non-Arab speakers how do you know how to read and pronounce word that you are unfamiliar with, if the vowels are not included? So you still want to study Arabic?

If you buy this book, you buy it because you are learning Arabic with a teacher and you have had some Arabic before hand. This book will really help you out. If you are trying to learn this language on your own--forget it. Most of these Arabic language books are not structured in that way.

This book has a lot of value to someone who is studying with a teacher and has seen the language before and knows the alphabet. This is not the book for a beginner with no prior experience with Arabic. You would be completely helpless with this one.