An innovative and highly structured course for teaching Arabic to beginners
Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the literary language of today’s books, media, and formal communication throughout the Arab world, the region’s principal shared language of written and official discourse. The first book in this new series for the classroom is designed for adult learners of the language at the beginner stage.
Drawing on her years of experience as an Arabic instructor, author Samia Louis has developed a course rich in everyday contexts and real-life, practical language, along with a wide range of grammar-learning strategies to allow students to deploy the language with confidence. Written in accordance with the ACTFL guidelines for teaching Arabic as a foreign language, the course is conceived in such a way to make the study of Arabic language and grammar easier for the student.
Book 1 is divided into ten chapters, focusing on specific everyday situations, including greetings and introductions; people and names; numbers, dates, and telephone numbers; and directions and addresses. The chapters allow for the gradual acquisition of vocabulary and grammar, the exercises at the end of each chapter covering all the crucial skills of listening, reading, writing, and pronunciation, with emphasis on reading and writing. For the accompanying video films of real-life situations covered in the chapters click here. The book is further supported by interactive reading, writing, and grammar drills accessible through the Internet. Click here to listen to the tracks on Soundcloud.

Mastering the conjugation of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA) verbs is an essential part of the student’s learning process, and it is equally challenging for instructors to ensure that the student has internalized them correctly. Yalla! Let’s Learn Egyptian Colloquial Arabic Verbs is a practical tool to help both students and teachers of Arabic in the classroom. The book presents the three hundred most frequently used verbs in ECA, each one categorized according to ECA verb patterns, which are based on those used in Modern Standard Arabic.
The verbs are fully conjugated in the present/imperfect and past/perfect tenses in the affirmative and the negative, each entry also listing imperatives and active participles. This resource focuses on pronunciation, rather than reading or writing, in order to help students gain fluency in spoken Egyptian Arabic. To this end, each verb in the book is spelled phonetically.

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For the Table of Contents, click here.

Songs are a great way to learn a language, and popular songs can reveal much about the culture and traditions of a country where the language is spoken. 20 Egyptian Songs to Learn and Sing brings together twenty songs performed by popular Egyptian singers, from iconic twentieth-century diva Umm Kulthum to present-day singing sensation Amr Diab. Following on the success of Kilma Hilwa: Egyptian Arabic through Popular Songs: Intermediate Level and Musiqa al-Kalimat: Modern Standard Arabic through Popular Songs: Intermediate to Advanced (AUC Press, 2015 and 2017), Bahaa Ed-Din Ossama and Tessa Grafen build a lively variety of language lessons around each song, accompanying them with notes on vocabulary, grammar and usage, and exercises. Aimed at beginner learners of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and fans of Arab popular music, 20 Egyptian Songs to Learn and Sing is a motivational and highly enjoyable approach to learning Egyptian Arabic.
Suitable for use in the classroom or for self-study. Includes songs by: Dina El Wedidi, Amr Diab, Sayed Darwish, Shadia, Mohamed Monir, Umm Kulthum, Suad Hosni, Nancy Agram, Dalida, and Rema Kheshesh

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For the Table of Contents, click here.

We are all married to our bodies, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. As a result, the body is a hard-wired, powerful presence in thought and speech. Rooted in the Body: Arabic Metaphor and Morphology considers this basic premise of linguistic embodiment and shows how it is especially true of Arabic. Consciously and unconsciously, speakers of Arabic use reams of vocabulary derived from the body, making it an ideal springboard for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of Arabic morphology. Structurally speaking, Arabic is a language built on abstract roots, short sequences of single consonants that are systematically modified to produce actual vocabulary. Learning to recognize and manipulate those roots is an invaluable skill, especially for non-native adult learners, because it lightens their memorization load significantly.
Rooted in the Body uses delightful side-by-side essays and comic illustrations to invite readers to explore Arabic’s signature morphology as they reflect on some 120 metaphorically charged body parts. On the long road to proficiency, lexical precision is important, but so, too, is cultural fluency. As it demystifies the links between morphology and semantics, Rooted in the Body also uses citations from Arabic’s rich cultural history to highlight the body’s vital role in language. This book will be a fascinating and invaluable resource, not only for advanced learners of Arabic but for linguists, rhetoricians, and philosophers of language.

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This easy-to-use beginner’s level guide to Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA) grammar is the ideal supplement for students of ECA as a foreign language. Keda Mazbuut is divided into twenty-five lessons, each devoted to a key grammatical rule, with examples to illustrate usage followed by a variety of exercises. Drawing on twenty-five years of experience as a full-time teacher of Arabic, Mona Hassan has organized the lesson topics to gradually progress in difficulty, from basic nominal sentences to more complex grammatical structures such as the imperative and conditional sentences. All rules are explained in straightforward English, while words and phrases are provided in both Arabic script and transcribed Arabic, accompanied by audio files to facilitate students’ ECA pronunciation. With its clear, user-friendly structure, Keda Mazbuut is designed to encourage students to work through grammatical rules at home, allowing them to devote more class time to the speaking activities that reinforce those rules.

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For the Table of Contents, click here.

A delightfully illustrated selection of 100 commonly used Egyptian food expressions

Can you guess what Egyptians mean when they say that something is “a peeled banana” or that someone is “sleeping in honey” or has “turned the sea to tahini”? You may find the answers quite unexpected when you open the pages of this delightful giftbook featuring some one hundred popular food-inflected phrases and sayings used by native speakers of Egyptian Arabic.

Idiomatic expressions lend color, dynamism, and humor to everyday speech, and convey complex ideas and beliefs with an economy of words that also tell us something about the culture from which they spring. Each expression in Fish, Milk, Tamarind is given in Arabic script and English transliteration followed by its literal and intended meanings, while humorous color illustrations throughout help readers visualize and remember the expressions. Learners and native speakers of Arabic, as well as Egypt enthusiasts and language lovers will find much in this book to teach, entertain, and enthrall them.

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An introductory media Arabic book for the elementary and low intermediate levels

With the proliferation of satellite television news and social media channels, students of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) have access to an increasingly vast range of print and broadcast news from the Arab world. Media Arabic for Beginners is a unique textbook designed to lead elementary and low intermediate level students of MSA to a solid level of proficiency in the language of Arabic media.

Through active engagement with authentic texts selected from a wide variety of news sources and websites, learners are familiarized with vocabulary, idioms, lexical items, and collocations, while grammatical concepts are introduced and explained in context. With sixteen texts accompanied by sixteen audio files and supportive PowerPoint presentations, this content-based approach allows students to develop and enhance their reading, listening, speaking, and writing skills. Vocabulary and grammatical points are presented as PowerPoint slides, making for discrete and manageable learning targets.

Media Arabic for Beginners is structured around four themes, each devoted to a dominant news topic: Official Visits and Talks; Elections and Referendums; Attacks and Explosions; and Demonstrations and Protests. Each unit is in turn made up of four lessons, each lesson featuring a text from a particular perspective together with pre-reading activities, reading activities, post-reading activities, and a section with particular focus on grammar. The texts progress from very simple to more complex, as students steadily increase their reading fluency. Each unit ends with a thorough review section with various activities, such as comprehension questions, vocabulary translation, and role play.

Click here to access the video files. Click here to access the audio files.

To read an excerpt, click here.

For the Table of Contents, click here.