TAC 2015 - eskandar (French, Arabic, Urdu)

[vijayjohn]

Haha, I wonder when/where those textbooks were produced.

I believe this was just after the Iranian Revolution, or around the time of the First Gulf War at the latest.

[eskandar]

That makes sense. The books I'd seen were much more recent. Things have mellowed out since the 80s!

[Meera]

Arabic

Today I finished reading all of Al-`arabiyya bayna yadayk volume 2 (~435 pages) which I started using with my tutor in July. We skipped a lot of the exercises (as they're mostly very easy) and just did the reading sections and the grammar. The advantage of this book is that it's 100% in Arabic, but otherwise I wouldn't recommend it. It's light on grammar, and the readings are almost always so ridiculously conservative and pedantic that they're not much fun to read, unless you like learning about how much better things were in the old days when kids obeyed their parents and women didn't work outside the home.

That sounds awful. I think I wouldn't even be able to finish reading it.

[eskandar]

The only reason I stuck with it is that I'm the one who asked to use it in the first place (instead of Al-Kitaab) since it looked good when I first glanced over it and I liked that it was all written in Arabic. At least it's done now and I don't intend to use the third volume!

[Meera]

The only reason I stuck with it is that I'm the one who asked to use it in the first place (instead of Al-Kitaab) since it looked good when I first glanced over it and I liked that it was all written in Arabic. At least it's done now and I don't intend to use the third volume!

oh ok lol I thought you were using Al-Kitaab too? Maybe it isn't the same one I'm thinking of

[vijayjohn]

That makes sense. The books I'd seen were much more recent. Things have mellowed out since the 80s!

Actually, you know what? I was wrong. The bottom of the first page reads ۱۳۷۱. So 1371 in the Solar Hijri calendar. Wouldn't that be 1992?