Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Hey everyone, I wrote a review for this about five years ago when I was first starting in Arabic. I’m now on my last year of my Arabic studies in University. I have since finished both parts of Al-Kitaab and I wanted to UPDATE my review. Since going through the whole thing I can give a more honest review. Has it gotten any better? Unfortunately no. This has to be the worst language textbook of all time. In my university career I have also done Japanese and Hindi/Urdu, and seeing the books used for them compared to Al-Kitaab is astounding. I am language learning fanatic and have used many different books. I have used bad books and I still think this one is the worst. I’m wondering if this is why so many people drop out of Arabic courses. This book is TERRIBLE. During my classes I learned practically nothing from Al-Kitaab, I had to use other resources (which I will list at the end of the review). I could seriously pick apart this book from each chapter explaining how bad it is. By the way the authors do not tell you, you have to buy the access to the companion website. In my first Arabic class there was a girl who could not afford the website, and she could not do half of the exercises. Anyway, there are so many problems with this book. I apologize in advanced for my long review, but I feel these points need to be made. I will list the main points. 1) Frist off, as I said in the previous review the book Alif Baa that precedes this is excellent. It teaches you some basic greetings and the letters. It is a cute and fun book, and I would recommend it for anyone wanting to learn then Alphabet. However the jump to from Alif Baa to Al-Kitaab is way too big! You are learning things like “hi, how are you?” in Alif Baa to “my dad works as a translator in the United Nations,” in lesson 1 of Al-kitaab. By the first chapter they expect you to memorize all the grammatical terms in Arabic and throughout the book they will never use English for those grammatical terms again. For example they teach you the words for “noun, verb, and masculine feminine” and expect you to know it by the first chapter. So if you forget what it means you constantly have to look back. By the way the full table of contents is all in Arabic so if you need to look up something real fast for reference good luck trying to find it. 2) Throughout the book you follow four characters (depending which dialect you are doing). For Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian you follow Maha and Khalid. For Levantine you follow Tariq and Nasreen. Plus there are other dialogues in dialect with different characters. These are all great, one positive thing about Al-Kitaab are the videos. But nowhere in the book are these dialogues written down! They don’t even write them in the answer keys. This book is supposed to be for beginners. Plus as you progress the dialogues get quicker and at natural speed, you have no idea what they are saying! Even in the book the authors state that you shouldn’t understand all of it. How does this help? How are we supposed to pick up new words if they aren’t written anywhere or are nowhere in the book. Like I said this is a beginner book that is supposed to take you to an intermediate level. Students do not have the skills yet to look up words they hear in a dictionary. The book does not write any of the vowels on any of the vocabulary. This is a huge deal in Arabic because although vowels are never written in most texts, beginning students need them to be able to pronounce the word. 3) This leads me to my next point, the authors really like the guessing method and they barely explain anything. Most grammar explanations are usually less than a page long. They are super vague. Like most things with this book you have to guess. The book assumes you will pick it up naturally. Unfortunately for a language like Arabic this is not helpful. You need detailed explanations. And after explaining it they give you the examples in Arabic without a translation. Sometimes they give examples not even with a complete sentence. I had to buy a grammar and literally look up every single grammatical explanation the book gives, even things I have already done and were easy for me, this book confused me with its horrible explanations. For example in chapter 7 it teaches you the superlative, which is super easy in Arabic, but here they only give you one example of one superlative and it doesn’t even go into comparisons in the same chapter. 4) The exercises are not enough. I know it sounds weird that I’m asking for more exercises. But the exercises are not enough and the ones they do give you are terrible. First of all most the exercises are fill in the blank. You are very rarely required to write a full sentence in Arabic. I’m not sure how many of you on here are familiar with the Genki series but it is the standard book used for Japanese college classes. The book is excellent, but one of the things with that book is that it gives you tons of exercises in the main book and extra exercises with a workbook. For example I randomly opened to chapter five in Genki, and after the main lesson it has 20 drills and all different from the previous lessons which means it is tailored made for that lesson. And you have a variety of different exercises, some require listening, verb conjugations, telling about someone’s day and changing things to negative and writing full sentences in Japanese. In Al-kitaab it is always the same, you fill in the missing vocabulary, you have to write down audio sentences (that mostly uses vocabulary you haven’t learned yet!), and you will of course have the videos and other fill in the blank exercises. There is nothing else. You rarely practice the grammar or vocab you have learned. But the exercises in the book are horrible. There is one exercise called “ask your colleague” it is one of the rare ones that require you to write full sentences in Arabic. However they use vocabulary you have not used yet and require grammar constructions you have not used yet. The one in the first chapter requires word order that you have not used yet. There are reading exercises throughout the book they expect you to read. Most people in my classes skipped these because no one knows what it said. None of the vowels are written, there is no glossary or translation. And these aren’t little paragraphs either, for example one reading is about political parties in Jordan, another one is about Ayatollah Khomeni and a former king of Egypt. As I said before this is a book for beginners who have just come from learning the alphabet. As I mentioned before I really think the video stories are a great tool. But I will say the video stories and dialogues are not interesting at all. We have Maha talking about how lonely and depressed she is. Then we have Khalid who talks about how his mother died in a car accident and his first love dumped him for a richer man. It then goes on to bring Maha and Khalid together but then never tells you if they end up together or not. The book just ends. 5) Like everything else in the book the culture sections are as equally as vague. They are less than a paragraph long and often do not specify which country they are talking about. The Arab is quite big, over 22 speak Arabic. But for example when they talk about the evaluation or the exams students have to take they never tell you what country they are talking about or if there any exceptions to it. 6) The organization and set up is really bad. The vocabulary they give you is very random and way too advanced for the level this book is aiming at. They teach you words like “anthropology” “political science” “united nations” “appointment” “army” and “officer”. I understand that many people majoring in Arabic are interesting the government, united nations and etc. But it doesn’t teach you how to say basic things if you were living or studying in an Arabic country. Like ordering food and drink, asking for directions or even just teacher commands. You don’t even learn how to tell time until Chapter 9! My professor actually had to give us handouts for extra vocabulary this book does not teach. The order of the lessons seem to teach grammar randomly with no logical order. They even seem to hide aspects of the language and won’t explain it until much later. \ The one good thing about this book is the inclusion of Egyptian and Shaami. It was great to actually be able to understand both, except if you really want to focus on either dialect there is much better books for that. The premise of this book is basically like throwing you into the middle of a river without knowing how to swim and expecting you to figure it out. That doesn’t work with language books. I really hate giving a negative review because I'm sure the authors put so much work into it, but it's awful. If you want to study Arabic I suggest Living Language's Ultimate Arabic: Ultimate Arabic Beginner-Intermediate Although it's not perfect, it's much more user friendly than Al-kitaab and has lessons in Egyptian, Levantine, Iraqi and Saudi. It's pretty old fashioned but I've been using it and I love it. I'd also suggest Mastering Arabic: Mastering Arabic 1 with 2 Audio CDs (Hippocrene Mastering) These two books are much easier to deal with then al-kitaab if you want to learn Arabic. I'm using them on my own and getting much further than with Al-kitaab. Sorry that my review is so long but I wanted to try to mention everything I thought about Al-Kitaab.