Focus on Contemporary Arabic (Conversations with Native Speakers) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Focus on Contemporary Arabic (Conversations with Native Speakers)? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Focus on Contemporary Arabic (Conversations with Native Speakers). Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Focus on Contemporary Arabic (Conversations with Native Speakers) ReviewShukri'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.
Focus on Contemporary Arabic (Conversations with Native Speakers) OverviewFocus 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 programs consist of a slim, user-friendly student textbook and an accompanying DVD that contains 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 target language. 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.

Want to learn more information about Focus on Contemporary Arabic (Conversations with Native Speakers)?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now