Modern Iraqi Arabic: A Textbook

Rating:
Summary: Not bad--but not what I expected
Review: (By Edward Trimnell, author of "Why You Need a Foreign Language & How to Learn One," ISBN:1591133343)

This is a good book for those who are already familiar with the Arabic language and simply want to grasp the unique aspects of the Iraqi dialect. It is also good for use in conjunction with a thorough course in standard Arabic. There is a generous amount of audio included on the CDs, and solid example sentences.

The main weak point of the book itself is that it uses transliterations rather than the Arabic script. On balance, I would say buy it--but start with a standard Arabic course.

Rating:
Summary: Buy it and retain your illiteracy
Review: When I first saw this book I was excited to see a text book that specialized in a dialect, whcih has more similarities to the countries that I have studied (Levantine) than Egpytian Arabic. However, I was very disappointed to learn that the book does not use the Arabic alphabet. What the heck?

Granted, spelling is still difficult for me in this language, but I am not going to lay out money for a book which will not help me learn to read like the locals in the dialect that it purports to teach. I thought the point of books was to read. With this approach, that of ignoring the alphabet, you can finish a course and still be an illiterate in the langauge.

Rating:
Summary: Too little of an intro for 60$
Review: Why do so many authors of Arabic textbooks insist on confusing readers with their own idiosyncratic codes of Arabic transliteration when there's a standardized international code that most scholars and students of Arabic are well familiar with, and that is easy to learn for all others?
But my major disappointment with the book is simply that there's too little content to justify either 250 pages or 60 dollars. It is a common enough, if annoying, tactic of authors to inflate a textbook's volume by filling page after page with "exercises" in the form of widely spaced, monotonous lists of near-identical alternating phrases, but al-Khalesi has carried it way too far. The vocabulary and dialogues are fresh and practical, but there's too little of either... on 250 pages, one would expect an author to be able to go deeper into the language than this.