Hugo: Arabic in Three Months
Spoken Arabic. Levantine, I guess. No script, no dialogues, but I guess it's better than nothing for a dialect course.
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There's quite a number of books of better quality for Levantine dialects than this book you mention, but I've no intention to make a comprehensive list of them...Shadad wrote:Hugo: Arabic in Three Months
Spoken Arabic. Levantine, I guess. No script, no dialogues, but I guess it's better than nothing for a dialect course.
Serafín wrote:There's quite a number of books of better quality for Levantine dialects than this book you mention, but I've no intention to make a comprehensive list of them...Shadad wrote:Hugo: Arabic in Three Months
Spoken Arabic. Levantine, I guess. No script, no dialogues, but I guess it's better than nothing for a dialect course.
Mark Cowell's A Refernce Grammar of Syrian Arabic with audio CD (based on the dialect of Damascus) is outstanding for its comprehensiveness and professionality though. You can read its Google Books preview here, though I haven't checked how much of the book is available.
As we've discussed before, mutual intelligibility isn't a yes/no matter but rather a gradient. Generally speaking the more in contact two dialects are the more mutually intelligible they are, and as far as Damascus and Beirut Arabic go, they're quite intelligible.Meera wrote:Is Syrian multi-intelligle with Lebanese?
I couldn't agree any more on both points. If you need a good reference for verbal conjugations in particular, don't look any further (though the books deals with a lot more than verbal morphology).layla_n wrote:I recommend Karin Ryding's A Reference Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic; it's clear and concise, but still quite thorough (and relatively cheap too)
An interesting thing about Haywood and Nahmad's grammar is that it works more like a textbook than a reference grammar. I had never seen a reference grammar with vocabulary lists and exercises before, and this goes on all the way to the end, finishing with several texts for you to read. It even includes a glossary.Haywood's A New Arabic Grammar of the Written Language is supposedly very stilted and dry, but an excellent reference with clear, thorough explanations of grammar.
This is, out of the many books I've consulted, by far the best for the modern written language. Very comprehensive.Modern Written Arabic: A Comprehensive Grammar by Adrian Gully, unlike Haywood, focuses on modern standard Arabic without including the classical variety, and is also very thorough (albeit littered with typos).
The Hans Wehr is good but beware 1. the latest Arabic-English edition, the 4th one, was published in 1979 so many concepts from the past 30 years are missing, especially technology; and 2. it's Arabic -> English only.Hannahanneke wrote:Dictionary of Modern written Arabic: Arabic-English
by Hans Wehr and J.M. CowanThe best dictionary available! The book you absolutely need to have if you only buy one! Although i find the Arabic-Dutch and Dutch-Arabic dictionaries from Nijmegen better when it comes to Modern Arabic.
Wow, Cambridge produced a book of its Student Grammar series for MSA? Why wasn't I informed? I'll check it out later...A Student Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic
by Eckehard Schulz
The best basic grammar for Modern Standard Arabic in my eyes
I found his literal translations of Arabic grammatical terminology into Latin really interesting though.A Grammar of the Arabic language
by William Wright
A good grammar when it comes to classical grammar, although the remarks of and comparisons with all other semitic languages sometimes drove me crazy.
Serafín wrote:An interesting thing about Haywood and Nahmad's grammar is that it works more like a textbook than a reference grammar. I had never seen a reference grammar with vocabulary lists and exercises before, and this goes on all the way to the end, finishing with several texts for you to read. It even includes a glossary.Haywood's A New Arabic Grammar of the Written Language is supposedly very stilted and dry, but an excellent reference with clear, thorough explanations of grammar.This is, out of the many books I've consulted, by far the best for the modern written language. Very comprehensive.Modern Written Arabic: A Comprehensive Grammar by Adrian Gully, unlike Haywood, focuses on modern standard Arabic without including the classical variety, and is also very thorough (albeit littered with typos).Wow, Cambridge produced a book of its Student Grammar series for MSA? Why wasn't I informed? I'll check it out later...A Student Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic
by Eckehard Schulz
The best basic grammar for Modern Standard Arabic in my eyes
Only one of the two books has exercises: Haywood and Nahmad's.Hannahanneke wrote:Serafin: Would you recommend one of these 2 grammars for the exercices? Or do you believe it's not worth it?
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