Formal Spoken Arabic FAST Course with MP3 Files (Georgetown Classics in Arabic Languages and Linguistics)

If you plan on learning arabic this is a effective way of starting.FSI is a kind of dialect in itself by taking the features that are common to spoken arabic and putting them together.The thing to know is that you will be understood in a greater area of the mid -east. but you will still have to adapt to the spoken dialect of the area you are going too.Example: classical arabic for (very much)= kathiirun; FSI- kathiir; somone in syria = kaTiir.no real big deal just remember you will have to tune your ear for the changes in pronunciation in different places.Note. This book was made as a 6 week intro to arabic before getting a post in The M.E, don't expect miracles in your language skills.

I have been using this book and cd for the past two weeks and have learned so much Arabic just from the first two lessons! I'm headed to Syria in a month and wanted to learn basics of the language so I can communicate with my in-laws. My husband is amazed at how much I've learned; he says the pronunciation is for Saudi Arabia, but I'll be understood fine when I go to Syria. The mp3 files are terrific, though I miss some of the nuances when I'm in my car (I hear them fine in a quiet environment or when I use headphones; initially I thought the phrase for "Keep the change" sounded a lot like "Hally Berry" - boy was I wrong!).The way the mp3 files are arranged for each chapter is that first you hear a dialogue spoken in a regular fashion, then slowly so that you can repeat it after each speaker. You then have vocabulary from the dialogue (the list is basically every new word from the dialogue), then supplemental vocab to expand your knowledge. Then there are a few drills (listening comprehension) and grammar for the chapter. The dialogues are fairly easy to grasp if you listen to them repeatedly, and I don't feel overwhelmed by the amount of new words that I'm learning with each lesson.The only problem is that the book is set up to use in a classroom setting, and unlike other language books I've used, there's no answer key to the lessons. Most of the answers are directly from the dialogue and you can figure others out, but I've had to ask my husband for help with a couple of the questions.In the end, I would highly recommend this if you're trying to learn Arabic. It's not an easy language to learn, but if you listen to the mp3s over and over, it really sinks in! It helps for me that the book uses English letters to spell out the words - I don't think I can learn the writing also at this time (the dialogue is also written in Arabic on the opposite page, though, if you do want to learn it that way). Being able to hear the dialogue and look at it in the book really helps things sink in well. I've even been able to throw in Arabic words during regular conversation with my husband without straining hard to think of a relevant word.By the way, I tried using the In-Flight Arabic cd initially, but it was pretty worthless to me. It went really fast and the speakers would say things once, hardly giving you enough time to comprehend what they were saying before they moved on to the next word/phrase. They taught the numbers by "1, 2, 3" "4, 5, 6" and so on, and if you've never heard Arabic before, all the words just run together - aargh! I don't even know if you can buy that cd from Amazon.com (I got it through Audible.com), but please, don't waste your money on In-Flight Arabic if you don't have a clue about Arabic before you begin (like me!).