Colloquial Arabic of Egypt: The Complete Course for Beginners (Colloquial Series (Book Only))

The item is an excellent resource to start to get acquainted with Colloquial Arabic of Egypt. I have the original book, and I also bought in digital format. Why is the book so special? Because Egyptian Arabic is taught in a communicative way. The book consists of different units, each one of them with an introductory dialogue. Then, you have the translation and the transliteration of each one of the lines for those dialogues. Each unit presents their new vocabulary words, and most importantly the corresponding grammar for each lesson. I have been studying Egyptian Arabic for more than a year, and I had never found the pertinent explanations that I was expecting in other books. There is so scarce material for the Colloquial Arabic of Egypt, and believe me, this book really met my expectations in relation to learning the most spoken Arabic dialect of the Arab World, Egyptian dialect. This book has broaden my knowledge of the Egyptian Arabic, and I think there might be a couple of books being compared to this one for the subject that it presents. I have learned a lot and I have made great progress using the instructional tools that this book offers the customer. The only missing thing is the Arabic Script, but it is supplemented by the transliterations. I recommend this book to anyone that is interested in the study of the Egyptian Arabic. You’ll need this book. It is a must.

I bought the book with the 2 CDs. Although pricey at the time - $67.45 in September of 2014, the book was definitely well worth it. I don't usually care for a lot of transliteration, which this book has, because when you go to Egypt, you won't see any transliteration there, or anywhere else in the Middle East. But, this book was more useful than I thought it would be. My book is falling apart, but that is a good thing in this case, because I have been using it so much. Yes, there are Arabic script dialogues and exercises in the back, along with a brief English-Arabic glossary and vice versa. I had studied a year of MSA a long time ago and used some Egyptian Arabic materials. Now it seems that getting the book with the CDs is very difficult. I don't understand the outrageous prices being offered by sellers for the books that contain the CDs.Hopefully they become available again.

I honestly did not want to pay 30$ for a digital book but this book is worth every penny. It is very difficult to find a decent Arabic book in general, but to find one that lays out the Egypt dialect as well as this book, I can only name one other that is this good. You will not be disappointed. I was not able to download the audio, however, but still found the transliterations to be quite helpful.

There are two CDs, one of them was empty, so I returned it to the seller and got it replaced. The new item had exactly the same problem so I returned it again. It seems nobody at Routledge checks the CDs after they produce them.

In the US, it seems like there is mindset of "standard Arabic first, then dialects", and the existing learning materials seem to strongly suggest that dialects are somehow some kind of "advanced" study. This book breaks away from that model and starts with "So you speak English, huh?" and goes from there.Short version: Is it good? Yes. Is it great? Maybe. Could it be better? A bit. Should you buy it? Probably. Will you be able to talk about desires, activities, food, shopping, places, dates, and travel in the past, present, and future? Yes. Will you reach "B1" level after completing this book? Eh, if you practice a lot of what you learn you may fall somewhat below it.The course begins with greetings and slowly increases your vocabulary while throwing in grammar and culture points. The book is broken into a sequence of "units". The lessons in the units are "dialogue based", meaning that you typically see a particular piece of dialog with some concept (say "adjectives" or "the past tense") repeated many times, then a translation and mini-glossary for that particular conversation. The Arabic conversation is presented as a transliteration using the Latin script, but with a few digits (e.g. 9 = ع) and digraphs (e.g. 'sh' for the IPA sound /ʃ/). Stress is marked with an accent mark over vowels. If you are more comfortable with the Arabic script (and honestly, I'm not sure who reads an entire "Learn Arabic" book written in English but is more comfortable with the Arabic script), then you can use the Arabic script version in the back of the book -- but it has no vowels. Typically, you listen to the conversation a few times, then move on the to the lesson and activities. So let me say that again just to be clear: Every conversation has: a) Conversation in transliterated Arabic, b) English translation, c) Glossary for that conversation, d) Conversation in Arabic script (no vowel markings).After the dialogues, you typically see a breakdown of the grammar concepts you just witnessed, and they often refer back to specific textual examples in the conversation. This is good for reinforcing what you've just read, or comprehending it -- and often times, you'll not be able to understand what you are reading/listening to until after you've read either the translation or the glossary. There are other writing / listening exercises that come after to make sure you get it. Per "unit" you will see usually two or three dialogues, grammar explanations with examples, a couple of listening exercises, and some reading / writing exercises. This book will not really help you learn to speak well, but there is more than enough material to get yourself on a site like italki.com or conversationexchange.com and find a conversation partner to practice some phrases and words with.At the end of each unit is some bit about learn the Arabic script, usually 2-3 letters at a time. I am already quite comfortable with the Arabic script, so I did not make use of those exercises. Honestly, there are probably better ways to learn the script, but this is probably sufficient.Purists may hate the fact that it takes until nearly the end of the book to fully learn the Arabic script, but the target audience is different: the audience is people who have never studied Arabic before. The script is an eventual necessity, but for speaking / listening, it's less so.So what's good? The grammar explanations and examples are very useful. Transliterated is great for learners and to capture some of the oddities of going from written (standard) Arabic to spoken dialects, especially the vowel elisions and shortenings.What isn't so good? Majority of the dialogues are great and on point, but sometimes they can throw in some weird stuff. Take this example: "Is she still afraid of aeroplanes? Yes, but she got a sedative from the doctor." Sedatives? Some other fun words I found while reading: "savages", "water pipe", "to breed".What is bad: Honestly, the narrator (and I hope that it is not the author, Jane Wightwick) has the most dull, slow, and monotone voice I have heard in a while. It just sucks the enthusiasm right out of the lesson -- they really need to have someone who sounds excited to be alive; it's just painful to listen to the introductions to the audio tracks. I'm always waiting for the Arabic to start and the terrible, grandmotherly English drawl to end. The Arabic itself is fine, although sometimes it can sound a bit artificial. I suppose that's OK for learning a language though.

This book has so much potential but there are other far better resources available for Egyptian Arabic that I would not recommend purchasing this product at all. The Arabic script is not even given in this book and, as a result of the very poor alliteration guide the authors have provided here, especially that of the vowels, the student can do nothing else but mispronounce almost every single word. Very disappointed with this course as Routledge's other language courses are usually of excellent quality. Although there is quite a lot of material by Jane Wightwick on Egyptian Arabic, I can't say that I have found anything by her that I have been very happy with. For someone with apparently so much experience in Masri, her accent is dreadful too.

Good Introductory book for someone who has been learning standard arabic before.Besides that I would give it 5 stars but no Arabic script is actually provided within the book like many books pertaining to dialect.

I bought this to brush up on my Egyptian Arabic, and overall it is very useful and helpful, but I really struggle with reading the transliterated words into English. Obviously, many students using this book possibly don't read Arabic, and this book is primarily aimed at speaking, what is really a spoken language - so perhaps I am being selfish in wishing for the Arabic script from the start. I can see the difficulties, in that part of the book would have to dedicated to that, it probably also bumps up the printing costs.I also have the CDs which accompany the book - in their CD version , extremely useful to me, as I can listen on my in car CD player, as I drive around and mumble the exercises to myself. Overall, it is a useful book for both beginners and those like myself who need to brush up, after a long period of neglect.

Good book. Especially the idea of teaching colloquial Arabic in a romanized way is very brilliant. The only real limit is that such books should cover a much higher number of topics.

This book is quite OK for someone who is not too picky about consistent transcription and grammar explanations. Its size the print quality, the typography, contents accompanying audio on the Routledge website all give an excellent learning tool, which is a joy to take in the hands. I used to learn Classical Arabic, and I wanted to refresh my knowledge, and for the sake of fun I decided to learn this time Egyptian Arabic.Here are the main features I loved.(+) Transcription had accent marks, which is terribly important in ECA.(+) The book starts teaching Arabic script, and the dialogs are included in Arabic scripts, too in a separate section (p 278 - 299).(+) Solution/answer keys are given to the exercises (p 300 - 326)(+) English - Arabic and Arabic - English (not the Hans Wehr - a fantastic dictionary - style root order, though) is really useful containing the lesson number where the word is first used.(+) Cultural points in English are refreshingly joy to read.(+) The audio is of very high quality, easy to listen too, not too slow, not too fast.(+) Pages 253 - 275 have a summary of Egyptian grammar, quite useful, but far from the completeness of T.F. Mitchell or M. Woidich.(+) Additional exercises and vocabulary are available on the Routledge website, interestingly in docx format instead of PDF.What could have been done a bit better:(-) A number of words used in the book is simply missing from the glossary. For example, the title of Unit 2 is 9ilti - My Family, but 9ila - family is not in the glossary.(-) It was weird to see that 9 was used for 3ain and "oh" and "ay", were used instead of "oo" and "ee", but I got used to it quite quickly.What could have been made a lot better:(-) Grammar sections are useful, but definitely far from the comprehensiveness of the brilliant T.F. Mitchell (Teach Yourself Colloquial Arabic). The grammar sections in M. Woidich (Kullu Tamam) are more complete and more consistent, too. For example, this book doesn't even mention the concept of "Fronting of a topic" (see M. Woidich p30) aka "Thematic sentences" (see J.R.Smart p136), which is a terribly popular feature in Arabic.(-) The transcription, unfortunately, is not consistent with the actual pronunciation. Some of the phonetic rules are simply ignored. The pronunciation of the native speakers, of course, is accurate, but the transcript is not exactly and precisely what they say. For example, the sg.3rd pers. f. pronoun suffix is [(a)ha] a short a in every book I have on ECA, but this book writes [haa], which absolutely not the way it is pronounced. This leads to examples like [wilaadhaa], which is completely against an important phonetic rule in ECA pronunciation: only one long vowel is allowed in ECA, and it always have the accent/stress. The authors should have given more attention to the Mitchell and other books with excellent ECA grammar. So, this book has really useful grammar sections and phonetic rules, no question, but if you want, precise, consistent grammar and phonetic rules you should go for the Mitchell, Woidich or Abdel-Massih books.(-) The quality of the recording is of very high quality, but the English narrator talks too much. I know that it is part of the methodology, still 60% of the audio is to listen to this lady talking English. What To mitigate the pain, I downloaded the MP3 files, and with my sound editor application I cut out the English narration completely keeping only the Arabic talk, then I merged all the tracks of a unit into one single continuous stream to listen day and night.(-) No Index for grammar terms.So, this book is a fine text book for learning ECA. The other books that are worth considering: M.Woidich: Kullu Tamam, Ernest T Abdel-Massih: An Introduction to Egyptian Arabic (actually it is free, rich content including grammar and ECA texts, but no audio), and, of course, all books from M. Aldrich especially ECA Verbs and ECA Vocabulary and the Big Book of Egyptian Arabic Verbs.When I started my project of learning ECA, first I thought just to watch the dozens of Youtube "Learn Egyptian Arabic with XYZ" channels. They are lovely and fun, eventually, however, I gave up since they are not consistent in content, no grammar, no methodology, they are just random entertaining videos. They cannot replace a real textbook with consistent audio material like this book. Likewise, online monthly subscription learning sites are not my cup of tea either. I love the tangible feel of a high-quality book: It's eternal.

The Egyptian dialect is almost unrecognizable as being an Arabic dialect. It is more like cajun in that it mixes so many ethnic dialects and then also intentionally revises pronunciation of words in order to be different. Egyptians think they're outstanding and they have the pompous presumptuousness to act as though they built those architectural marvels. It is not even know if the pyramids were built by Egyptians or a previous civilization whose name would not have been "Egyptian". Clearly, the language at the time of the remarkable architecture was neither Arabic nor anything remotely similar to it that could be called a dialect.As for this book, the voice of the woman is incredibly annoying. I cannot listen to more than a few minutes before I have to click off the entire audio.Never, in recent memory, have I wasted $100 on such a meaningless, irrelevant and useless item.

Purchased the book after listening to the michel thomas course made by the same authors. Definitely worth the price !