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Focus on Contemporary Arabic (Conversations with Native Speakers) | 
 enlarge | Author: Shukri Abed
Publisher: Yale University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $39.95
Buy New: $31.94
You Save: $8.01 (20%)
Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 288299
Media: Paperback
Edition: Pap/DVD
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 5.9 x 0.7
ISBN: 0300109482
Dewey Decimal Number: 492.783421
EAN: 9780300109481
ASIN: 0300109482
Publication Date: September 10, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.
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Product Description
"Focus on Contemporary Arabic" is the fifth volume in the "Conversations with Native Speakers" series, which strives to offer pioneering multimedia language materials to students at the intermediate and advanced levels. These programmes consist of a slim, user-friendly student textbook and an accompanying DVD showing interviews with a variety of native speakers filmed in the target language. These speakers represent all areas of the cultural spectrum, offering a realistic view of the diversity of the native-speaking populations of the language in question. The interviews on the DVD broach an assortment of socially and culturally relevant topics and present students of the language with a glimpse into the complexity of both the language and the culture.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 Excellent November 20, 2008
Eastern Approaches
I agree with much of what was written by Mr.Cummings in this thread.
I would add that if you have the technical ability, it is very useful to extract the audio for CD and to play it in the car as you travel. (Note: I am not advocating piracy - just playing the audio from the DVD as you drive if you are able).
I've found that this was an excellent way to develop my ear training. Read the texts, watch the DVD (numerous times) and listen to the audio over and over whenever driving. It never gets tiresome but instead is revelatory the way you start to develop a better ear and make morphological connections in your own thinking. ("Ah, so that's why you use x word for x" etc)
By the way, I contacted Yale and asked whether they would consider releasing the segments for iPod download as videos or just audio. They said that they are considering it but it would be a way off. I hope they do so (I'll purchase it again to replace my rough job) and also that they release follow up editions on more complicated subject areas. This is a really excellent resource for self-study and I recommend it highly.
Great material, well-organized October 19, 2008
Walker Murray (Washington, DC, USA)
There are tons of dialogues from different speakers, some of whom are very easy to understand and some of whom are a little more difficult. The book provides fully vowelled transcripts of all the dialogues. This is great practice for a lower-intermediate to intermediate student. Much better done that some of the other Arabic learning tools out there.
Effective Learning Material February 9, 2008
Bushra Alshakhly (Nebraska, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Hi...I used this book for my intermediate/advanced class of the Arabic Lang. for the whole semester. My students really liked it as it was developing from subject to subject and from level to a higher level. They enjoyed the mixture of MSA and dialects within the authentic dialogues. I recommend this book for the teachers of the intermediate Arabic and for the learners of Arabic after they pass the basic level. The dvd has high quality pictures and the transition between chapters is well done. What my students and I have missed is the need for more covarage of dialects and dialogues that taken from the Arabic streets where people talk about real life issues.
 !!!WORTHLESS!!! September 18, 2007
Kyle C. Foley (Washington, DC)
7 out of 18 found this review helpful
!!!THIS BOOK IS UTTERLY WORTHLESS!!! WITHOUT AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF THESE TEXTS ONE HAS TO GUESS AT WHAT MUCH OF THE ARABIC MEANS, OR WORSE YET, LEAVE IT INCOMPREHENSIBLE!!! BY THE TIME YOU REACH THIS STAGE OF ARABIC YOU CAN ALREADY GET TRANSCRIPTS OF ARABIC SPEECHES ON YOUTUBE AND THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION FOR FREE!!! WHAT WERE THE AUTHORS THINKING??? ALL THEY DID WAS TRANSCRIBE SOME ARABIC CONVERSATIONS - BARELY A SERVICE!!! DON'T BUY THIS BOOK!!!
Contemporary Arabic Conversations June 27, 2007
Richard T. Cummings
15 out of 15 found this review helpful
Shukri's Focus on Contemporary Arabic is excellent. It is a compilation of dialogues of native speakers discussing a variety of increasngly more complicated subjects. Happily, it is not another vapid audio of survival Arabic for Western tourists in the Middle East. Rather, the DVD provides ample opportunity to improve aural skills for serious students of Arabic and the book contains a complete transcript of the monologues on the DVD -- and more. The author's annotated footnotes provide insightful explanations related to grammar and colloquial speech. Virtually all of the topics are highly interesting, of great contemporary relevance and address important social issues. The book retains the reader's interest throughout. If your Modern Standard Arabic level is upper intermediate, then your frustration level will be low with the book (although listening to the DVD, depending on the speaker, is slightly more demanding in terms of aural skills than is reading the narrations in terms of reading skills). Even the Arabic print is clear and easy to read. Moreover, the book, though paperback, is well-bound, the pages are of high quality paper and the cover is aesthetically pleasing. The book and DVD are well-worth the cost. They are value-for-money.
In certain minor aspects, however, there is room for criticism. All the questions appended to the transcripts in each of the thematic chapters are in English with answers solicited in English. Why? In all likelihood, the reader already has mastery of English and has a passive knowledge of Arabic. The utility of the book and dvd is to promote an active command of contemporary Arabic; accordingly, the questions should have been in Arabic with perhaps model answers of harder questions at the back of the book. In the Exercises, the author asks for a translation of all the questions; translation is another skill set. The exercises at the end of each chapter are all very monotonous in form. For the self-learner in particular, more structured and varied exercises, with answers at the back of the book, would have proven more expedient.
The focus of the conversations is on Levantine speakers generally expressing themselves in a standard spoken Arabic (although a few speakers resort to a more colloquial way of speaking). It is good for the listener to have exposure to different speech patterns in Arabic including contrasting colloquial with standard and the author is to be commended. However, more utile would have been greater geographic diversity; Gulf speakers, for instance, are short-shrifted. Egyptians take a back-seat to Jordanians and Palestinians.
Depending on the elocution of the speaker, there are deviations in the crispness of the sound of the audio; interviews take place in a variety of settings where acoustic quality varies.
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