An Introduction to Spoken Standard Arabic: A Conversational Course on DVD, Part 1 (Book & DVD) Review

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An Introduction to Spoken Standard Arabic: A Conversational Course on DVD, Part 1 (Book & DVD) ReviewI've been using this DVD/book package regularly for six months and it has been a great help in improving my speaking ability in Standard Arabic. As an older learner in an intensive Arabic program, I started benefiting a lot from this book once my class got about a third of the way through Al-Kitaab fii Ta'allum al-'Arabiyya with DVDs: A Textbook for Beginning Arabic, Part One Second Edition. Al-Kitaab was short on examples of things a learner of Arabic wants to talk about, and this supplement was exactly what I needed. Plus, this DVD is far more fun to watch.
This DVD/book has ten lessons of varying length, for a total of about an hour and a half of dialogue. The first seven lessons each show roughly half a dozen different speakers talking about themselves, their friends and families, their hobbies, and their daily and weekend activities. The speakers are a mix of advanced non-native Arabic speakers (seemingly American teachers of Arabic) and native speakers, all speaking rather naturally but quite understandably in Standard Arabic for students at the second-semester college level or above.
The last three lessons feature the narrator taking the viewer along while running a variety of errands in an Arab country (taking a taxi, checking into a hotel, exchanging money, etc.), plus a visit to a university, and finally a tour of a house, discussing the names of the rooms and the common objects in them.
I found it terrifically useful to see many examples of people talking about things in Arabic that I wanted to be able to talk about also. At first, I needed to use the book quite a bit to figure out unfamiliar words, but with repeated viewings I found I could internalize many phrases and use them with some changes in my own conversations in Standard Arabic.
The DVD is lively and of outstanding production quality. The native Arabic-speaking teacher and narrator who conducts the interviews has an ultra-clear voice, and as I improve in Arabic I notice how much of the grammar I encounter in Arabic class is cleverly woven into her introduction and conclusion of each lesson. The book also includes some exercises and drills.
The book contains all the transcripts from the DVD in a large font in fully-voweled Arabic, but not in English. Arabic-English vocabulary lists are provided at the end of each lesson, and Arabic-English and English-Arabic glossaries are at the end of the book, but on several occasions I couldn't find the translation of a word I was seeking and had to look it up elsewhere or ask my teacher. At first I struggled a bit with the Arabic-only DVD menus, but soon figured them out with a little trial and error.
I also have the same author's Focus on Contemporary Arabic (Conversations with Native Speakers) DVD/book package, but that one is aimed at a considerably more advanced student and doesn't have the presence of a narrator/interviewer who adds a lot to this one.
An Introduction to Spoken Standard Arabic: A Conversational Course on DVD, Part 1 (Book & DVD) OverviewThis text-and-DVD package can be used to improve the conversational skills of second- to third-semester beginning Arabic students. It helps students as they begin to express themselves in the Arabic, guiding them through language functions such as introductions, describing people and places, and discussing typical daily activities.

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