Routledge Colloquial arabic of egypt: the complete course for beginners

An amazing material for teaching Egyptian Arabic. Step by step approach.

This book is quite OK for someone who is not too picky about consistent transcription and grammar explanations. Its size the print quality, the typography, contents accompanying audio on the Routledge website all give an excellent learning tool, which is a joy to take in the hands. I used to learn Classical Arabic, and I wanted to refresh my knowledge, and for the sake of fun I decided to learn this time Egyptian Arabic.Here are the main features I loved.(+) Transcription had accent marks, which is terribly important in ECA.(+) The book starts teaching Arabic script, and the dialogs are included in Arabic scripts, too in a separate section (p 278 - 299).(+) Solution/answer keys are given to the exercises (p 300 - 326)(+) English - Arabic and Arabic - English (not the Hans Wehr - a fantastic dictionary - style root order, though) is really useful containing the lesson number where the word is first used.(+) Cultural points in English are refreshingly joy to read.(+) The audio is of very high quality, easy to listen too, not too slow, not too fast.(+) Pages 253 - 275 have a summary of Egyptian grammar, quite useful, but far from the completeness of T.F. Mitchell or M. Woidich.(+) Additional exercises and vocabulary are available on the Routledge website, interestingly in docx format instead of PDF.What could have been done a bit better:(-) A number of words used in the book is simply missing from the glossary. For example, the title of Unit 2 is 9ilti - My Family, but 9ila - family is not in the glossary.(-) It was weird to see that 9 was used for 3ain and "oh" and "ay", were used instead of "oo" and "ee", but I got used to it quite quickly.What could have been made a lot better:(-) Grammar sections are useful, but definitely far from the comprehensiveness of the brilliant T.F. Mitchell (Teach Yourself Colloquial Arabic). The grammar sections in M. Woidich (Kullu Tamam) are more complete and more consistent, too. For example, this book doesn't even mention the concept of "Fronting of a topic" (see M. Woidich p30) aka "Thematic sentences" (see J.R.Smart p136), which is a terribly popular feature in Arabic.(-) The transcription, unfortunately, is not consistent with the actual pronunciation. Some of the phonetic rules are simply ignored. The pronunciation of the native speakers, of course, is accurate, but the transcript is not exactly and precisely what they say. For example, the sg.3rd pers. f. pronoun suffix is [(a)ha] a short a in every book I have on ECA, but this book writes [haa], which absolutely not the way it is pronounced. This leads to examples like [wilaadhaa], which is completely against an important phonetic rule in ECA pronunciation: only one long vowel is allowed in ECA, and it always have the accent/stress. The authors should have given more attention to the Mitchell and other books with excellent ECA grammar. So, this book has really useful grammar sections and phonetic rules, no question, but if you want, precise, consistent grammar and phonetic rules you should go for the Mitchell, Woidich or Abdel-Massih books.(-) The quality of the recording is of very high quality, but the English narrator talks too much. I know that it is part of the methodology, still 60% of the audio is to listen to this lady talking English. What To mitigate the pain, I downloaded the MP3 files, and with my sound editor application I cut out the English narration completely keeping only the Arabic talk, then I merged all the tracks of a unit into one single continuous stream to listen day and night.(-) No Index for grammar terms.So, this book is a fine text book for learning ECA. The other books that are worth considering: M.Woidich: Kullu Tamam, Ernest T Abdel-Massih: An Introduction to Egyptian Arabic (actually it is free, rich content including grammar and ECA texts, but no audio), and, of course, all books from M. Aldrich especially ECA Verbs and ECA Vocabulary and the Big Book of Egyptian Arabic Verbs.When I started my project of learning ECA, first I thought just to watch the dozens of Youtube "Learn Egyptian Arabic with XYZ" channels. They are lovely and fun, eventually, however, I gave up since they are not consistent in content, no grammar, no methodology, they are just random entertaining videos. They cannot replace a real textbook with consistent audio material like this book. Likewise, online monthly subscription learning sites are not my cup of tea either. I love the tangible feel of a high-quality book: It's eternal.

The item is an excellent resource to start to get acquainted with Colloquial Arabic of Egypt. I have the original book, and I also bought in digital format. Why is the book so special? Because Egyptian Arabic is taught in a communicative way. The book consists of different units, each one of them with an introductory dialogue. Then, you have the translation and the transliteration of each one of the lines for those dialogues. Each unit presents their new vocabulary words, and most importantly the corresponding grammar for each lesson. I have been studying Egyptian Arabic for more than a year, and I had never found the pertinent explanations that I was expecting in other books. There is so scarce material for the Colloquial Arabic of Egypt, and believe me, this book really met my expectations in relation to learning the most spoken Arabic dialect of the Arab World, Egyptian dialect. This book has broaden my knowledge of the Egyptian Arabic, and I think there might be a couple of books being compared to this one for the subject that it presents. I have learned a lot and I have made great progress using the instructional tools that this book offers the customer. The only missing thing is the Arabic Script, but it is supplemented by the transliterations. I recommend this book to anyone that is interested in the study of the Egyptian Arabic. You’ll need this book. It is a must.

Purchased the book after listening to the michel thomas course made by the same authors. Definitely worth the price !

I bought this to brush up on my Egyptian Arabic, and overall it is very useful and helpful, but I really struggle with reading the transliterated words into English. Obviously, many students using this book possibly don't read Arabic, and this book is primarily aimed at speaking, what is really a spoken language - so perhaps I am being selfish in wishing for the Arabic script from the start. I can see the difficulties, in that part of the book would have to dedicated to that, it probably also bumps up the printing costs.I also have the CDs which accompany the book - in their CD version , extremely useful to me, as I can listen on my in car CD player, as I drive around and mumble the exercises to myself. Overall, it is a useful book for both beginners and those like myself who need to brush up, after a long period of neglect.