( 6 reviews )
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Posted: Jan 27 2009
This book is not even witten in Arabic. To use it I will have to learn a whole new transliteration system. It is useless for someone transitioning from classical Arabic to spoken arabic.
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( 1 of 2 found this review helpful ) Posted: Mar 3 2007
It's a shame that the Arabic-English part was never completed!! I love this dictionary, it has almost everything it. I actually went through most of it with a Syrian friend, and he agreed that everything in there appears as it is spoken in Syria today. It lacks slang terms, but then again one can learn the slang of Syrian Arabic by visiting Syria, and it's a great country to visit, very beautiful!
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( 3 of 3 found this review helpful ) Posted: Jan 5 2006
I refer to this book once in a while.Its really neat that I can just think of a word, look it up and voila!....there it is in perfect syrian colloquial arabic.The entries also have example sentences to give you an idea of the context and grammatical syntax with which this word is used.I have noticed however that some very common arabic expressions/words that I hear spoken by Syrians and Lebanese are not included as synonyms for the meanings.Im not sure if this is because this book was compiled in the 1960s and the colloquial slang could be slightly different now in 2005....this sort of thing is very rare, though.I wonder how on earth they compiled such a detailed exhaustive list.This is a lifetime keepsake, if you are as crazy about learning levantine arabic as I am!
