Levantine Arabic: Shwayy 'An Haali: Listening, Reading, and Expressing Yourself in Lebanese and Syrian Arabic

Lovely book. Interesting from a cultural point of view, and meticulously translated and laid out including as an ebook; having modern standard Arabic where necessary is good. I’ve been able to use the wide variety of personalities and stories to adapt to my own family and work situation so I have worked out a template for a basic introductory conversation. And the questions posed are also a good way of entering into real-life conversation. Having the audio is excellent too, although you need to find a way of slowing it down to start with ideally. I highly recommend this book.

The book is excellent! Well written and well elaborated. The best of all is that the book is written with arabic alphabet, of course taking into consideration the particularities of the colloquial levantine arabic (CLA) phonetics relating to vowels and pronunciation or non-pronunciation of some letters. The latinized CLA in the vocabulary is of great help. But, personally, I assume it is very important already know at least the Standard Modern Arabic alphabet correctly in order to take better advantage of the book. I am going to buy all of the books of the serie!! Fantastic.

A great Arabic collection. I particularly like the showing of both Syrian and Lebanese variants, along with the (in small type) MSA. Audio download too. I also downloaded a second book on Syrian colloquial phrases; there is supposed to be audio for this too but I haven’t found it yet. Recommended.

The sample gives you an overlook of almost the entire book

The book is meticulously authored, transitioning from one short dialogue to another. The dialogues are simple and there is an ample vocabulary list for each dialogue. Those who enjoy learning & practicing Arabic in a format with a more natural language approach will appreciate the contents & style. Generally, this book is for students at a beginner's level to lower intermediate. Though the author's introduction suggests that the book will interest advanced students, I didn't find much for learners at that level. Matthew's Arabic Voices 1 & 2 have a lot more meat for more "adult" & hungrier learners. Additionally, some will find it enjoyable starting off easily with short, friendly, biographically conversations by natives but it may get a bit wearisome by the time you reach the 100th page in the book. Overall, I think many will enjoy this book...depending on your level in the language.

For anyone studying colloquial Levantine or Egyptian Arabic, Mathew ‘s books are invaluable.. They are by far the best source out there for learning spoken rather than formal Arabic. This book and it’s Egyptian Arabic counterparts are well organized, enjoyable and easy to use.. I can’t recommend them highly enough..

Useless

I also have Matthew's other books, Levantine Colloquial Arabic Vocabulary and Levantine Arabic Verbs. Along with this one I find them an excellent tool for learning Levantine Arabic. They are clearly laid out with the English phrase, arabic script and transliteration for help with pronunciation and learning to read the Arabic. The icing on the cake is the audio files which can be downloaded to hear pronunciation by Arabic speakers. This is invaluable. One piece of feedback for the author would be this. As a beginner in learning Arabic, I find the rate of speech in the audio files is too fast for me to take in. When I play the files I have to slow them down by at least a factor of 2. This lowers the pitch of the files also. So a set of audio files spoken slower, and perhaps with a repeat done very slowly would make them fantastic. Thanks for the effort that you put into these publications. I really appreciate it.

The idea is good, the execution is bad. So basically this book offers you real native speakers reading out the sentences. Problem is: The Audio Quality is really bad and the dialect is spoken soooo colloquially that you won't be able to use the Words you've learned. Also there's almost no harakat/tashkeel. So you can't even guess how a word is pronounced. Sadly a waste of money.

The mps is missing or inaccessible

Très utile pour les gens voulant apprendre l’arabe de Levante

Il est difficile de rédiger des méthodes pédagogiques et progressives d'arabe, littéral ou dialectal : ce livre ne fait que confirmer la règle. Constitué exclusivement de dialogues trop élaborés pour un vrai débutant, dépourvu de tout exposé grammatical, accompagné d'une version sonore dont le débit est beaucoup trop rapide, il ne peut absolument pas servir à l'apprentissage de l'arabe du Proche-Orient. Tout juste peut-on l'utiliser comme appoint, sa présentation du vocabulaire (avec distinction entre formes syriennes, libanaises et littérales) étant utile. Et c'est bien dommage, car nous manquons, en français, d'une bonne méthode pour s'initier à l'arabe syrien.