Teach Yourself Arabic Conversation - Booklet and 3 Audio CDs
Brand New : . 3 CDs
This stand-alone, all-audio course can be used by those who have little or no knowledge of the language, by those who want to learn or brush up basic conversation skills, and by more advanced learners who require extra audio material to complement their current courses. Egyptian and Iraqi voices are used on the recording, so this course can be used with confidence by visitors to the Levant and Gulf areas. Indications are also given of where North African usage diverges.
The ten units or 'conversations' cover the situations you are most likely to find yourself in while on holiday or on business abroad. They are divided into two parts, with a dialogue in each part. The dialogue in Part 2 reuses the vocabulary and phrases from Part 1 in a slightly different context. Both parts start with an introduction to the words and phrases you'll need, followed by the dialogue. Finally it's 'Over to you': you take part in the same dialogues following the English prompts, playing all the roles in turn. So you get lots of opportunity to practise! Frequent track markers divide the CDs up into short, easy-to-use clips.
Vocabulary and phrases in the first two CDs are kept to the basics and are introduced gradually with lots of opportunity to repeat and practise, to improve your confidence in both speaking and understanding. The third CD concentrates on helping you improve your understanding, so that you will be able to hold two-way conversations with people who speak very fast or use words and phrases you do not know.
The course comes on three 75-minute CDs and has an accompanying 48-page booklet which gives the dialogues and the translations of the dialogues, for those who like to see the written word or want additional practice. The Arabic is transliterated into romanized script. The booklet also provides a basic glossary of the words and phrases used.
This is the perfect complement to 'Teach Yourself Arabic', 'Teach Yourself Gulf Arabic' and 'Teach Yourself Beginner's Arabic Script'.
* TEN REALISTIC CONVERSATION SCENARIOS – the words and phrases you'll need
* NO GRAMMAR – make progress fast, without learning boring rules or unnecessary vocabulary
* NO NEW SCRIPT TO LEARN – booklet uses romanized transliteration
* ALL-AUDIO COURSE – use anywhere
* LOTS OF OPPORTUNITY FOR PRACTICE AND REPETITION – improve your confidence
* HELP IN UNDERSTANDING WHAT IS SAID BACK TO YOU - strategies for understanding what you hear, so you can have true, two-way conversations and not be thrown by the replies you get
Table of Contents:
CDs 1 and 2
1. This is my family - Pleased to meet you
2. Taxi! - We've reserved a room
3. Where's the station? - Ordering drinks and snacks
4. Shopping for food - In the souk
5. What is there to see? - Buying tickets
6. Do you like seafood? - In the restaurant
7. My home is your home - What should I wear?
8. Can we hire diving gear? - I don't like boats!
9. What's the matter? - At the chemist's
10. Saying goodbye - Staying in touch
CD3
Skills and strategies for listening and understanding
About the Author(s):
Jane Wightwick and Mahmoud Gaafar are co-founders of g-and-w, publishers and type-setters of materials for the Arab world.
About the Arabic Language
Arabic rabī) is the largest living member of the Semitic language family in terms of speakers. Classified as Central Semitic, it is closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic, and has its roots in a Proto-Semitic common ancestor. Modern Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage with 27 sub-languages in ISO 639-3. These varieties are spoken throughout the Arab world, and Standard Arabic is widely studied and known throughout the Islamic world.
Modern Standard Arabic derives from Classical Arabic, the only surviving member of the Old North Arabian dialect group, attested epigraphically since the 6th century, which has been a literary language and the liturgical language of Islam since the 7th century.
Arabic has lent many words to other languages of the Islamic world, as Latin has contributed to most European languages. And in turn, it has also borrowed from those languages, as well as Persian and Sanskrit from early contacts with their affiliated regions. During the Middle Ages, Arabic was a major vehicle of culture, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy, with the result that many European languages have also borrowed numerous words from it especially Spanish and Portuguese, countries it ruled for 700 years (see Al-Andalus).
"Colloquial Arabic" is a collective term for the spoken varieties of Arabic used throughout the Arab world, which, as mentioned, differ radically from the literary language. The main dialectal division is between the North African dialects and those of the Middle East, followed by that between sedentary dialects and the much more conservative Bedouin dialects. Speakers of some of these dialects are unable to converse with speakers of another dialect of Arabic; in particular, while Middle Easterners can generally understand one another, they often have trouble understanding North Africans (although the converse is not true, due to the popularity of Middle Eastern—especially Egyptian—films and other media).
One factor in the differentiation of the dialects is influence from the languages previously spoken in the areas, which have typically provided a significant number of new words, and have sometimes also influenced pronunciation or word order; however, a much more significant factor for most dialects is, as among Romance languages, retention (or change of meaning) of different classical forms. Thus Iraqi aku, Levantine fīh, and North African kayən all mean "there is", and all come from classical Arabic forms (yakūn, fīhi, kā'in respectively), but now sound very different. |
