Kallimni ‘Arabi Mazboot: An Early Advanced Course in Spoken Egyptian Arabic 4 Paperback – 15 Oct. 2009

I'm currently half way through this book working without a teacher, and I'm really pleased with it. Every so often there's something I have to clarify with an Arabic speaking friend (grammar exercises mostly, and sometimes I wish that all the vocab in the book was in the dictionary in the back - it'd really help) but on the whole this is a great book, which recycles vocabulary and grammar in a very well structured, incremental way through well designed dialogues (using different accents, which is a bonus). For my money, this is by far the best Egyptian Arabic course because it introduces grammar and vocab in context, using and then reusing it in increasingly complex situations, rather than the using old style approach of giving enormous lists of vocab and overly-complex grammar explanations followed by random out of context exercises (as if knowing a rule in theory would somehow magically unlock the ability to communicate in a language - e.g. the dreadful 'Kullu Tamam'). I've tried out all the Egyptian Arabic textbooks I can get my hands on and so far this is the most up to date and intuitive in terms of teaching method at this level and the only one that is part of a complete course of books. I can't wait to get to the next book (and then I'm going to try the 'Arabi Liblib series, which I've got on preorder for when it comes out... really hoping it's going to help fill in the gap after the end of the Kallimni 'Arabi series)P.S. If anyone's just starting out Egyptian Arabic from scratch without a teacher and trying to work out which books to go for, I can recommend combining the brilliant 'Colloquial Arabic of Egypt' by Jane Wightwick and Mahmoud Gaafar with the audio-based 'Pimsleur Egyptian Arabic' course. 'Colloquial Arabic of Egypt' explained all the basics (of grammar particularly) extremely clearly and in English script (so I could tackle the extra barrier of learning a new script once I'd got my communicative confidence up and running - worked really well) while the Pimsleur Egyptian Arabic course got me speaking and gave me a feel for the language and pronunciation that was hard to get in any other way as a beginner. NB Pimsleur also has a very clever way of teaching reading the script which is second to none and v. quick - this was how I learned and I hardly noticed it. When I wanted to learn to write I used 'Mastering Arabic Script' by Jane Wightwick, which gave loads of space for practice etc. Switching over to the Kallimni 'Arabi course at this stage was great for me. Everybody's different but hope this is helpful.

Only after buying this book together with the whole series I discovered that YOU CAN MAKE LITTLE USE OF IT WITHOUT A TEACHER. This is stated by the author in the book itself, but when you have the book in your hands it's already too late. Why this is not clearly indicated by AMAZON in the book presentation?