( 5 reviews )
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( 3 of 3 found this review helpful ) Posted: Dec 12 2004
I might hesitate to recommend this book to someone completely new to MSA, but if you've had previous exposure to the language and want to review the essentials of Arabic grammar, you simply won't find a better book. It can also serve as a basic reference work, although there's no index. The autodidact who knows no Arabic might be better served with a book that presents the material at a more leisurely pace; a basic knowledge of grammatical terminology would also be useful. A very motivated self-teacher could emerge from these pages with an admirably solid grounding in the fundamentals of Arabic grammar, though. This is an excellent book, and I recommend it.
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( 3 of 9 found this review helpful ) Posted: Jan 6 2002
I recently obtained my copy of this book....I can't say I've read the whole book. Also, I'm noexpert in Arabic; I'm just a guy with a general curiosityabout langages in general and a curiosity about Arabicin particular at the moment. I'll also reveal mylimitations by mentioning I'm a native speaker ofAmerican English, and not truly fluent in any otherlanguage.It's clear to anyone trying to learn this language thata key aspect to learning the language is to learn thescript. The arabic writing system is much more complicatedthan the roman alphabet used in most European languages,so it seems obvious that it is absolutely essentialto make an understanding of this completely clearat the outset.However I find this book to be printed with the writingwhich is not quite distinct, so one can't clearly make outwhat it is one is seeing. The writing system has lots oflittle dots and lines and other marks above or below the"main" part of the letters, but the printing of theseletters is sufficiently small and blurry that thereader simply can't tell in many cases if that littleblotch is a pair of dots, or a short line, or if ithas more complicated structure to it. It's simply impossibleto tell.One might think that the book as a whole is simply poorlyprinted. This is not entirely the case; the english textis printed in a very crisp, clear font which is easy tomake out, showing fine detail very well. The problemis that the arabic writing is simply not printed asclearly.I think the arabic letters are distinct enough thatone can tell them apart, and I'm pretty sure thata person who already knows the writing systemwould have no problem using this book to learn thelanguage.However for a person like me who does not know thearabic script, this book is maddening and is nota useful place to start. There seem to be books... that purport to teachthe arabic script itself. I haven't seen them andI don't know how good they are, but something likethose books seems to be an essential prerequisiteto making much use of this book.After basing my purchose of this book on theother 5-star reviews, I am extremely disappointedwith what I find.Even overlooking the problem with the script, I findthe exposition of the grammar to be merely fairand not great. I've read grammars for classicalLatin, classical and Homeric Greek, modern German,French, Spanish, Italian, Portugese, Hebrew, Russian,Ukranian, and Japanese, and by comparison this bookis simply not as clear in its exposition. If this is, asclaimed, the best available, then this is moreof a statement about the sad state of the teachingof Arabic to English speakers than it is a statementabout the excellence of this text.That said, I won't say this is a completely awfulbook. It is readable, once you get past the problemwith the script. But I recommend that beginnersfind some other book to learn the script from; andtry to make a careful comparison with other booksfor the learning of the grammar.
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( 14 of 15 found this review helpful ) Posted: Oct 20 2001
This introduction to the literary language is indeed excellent. Cowan provides detailed, clear explanations of grammatical points and moves in a logical progression through the material. The book is most decidedly not of the "Teach Yourself" type, in that it is presumed that the reader is educated and familiar with grammatical terminology, and it does not interface with the spoken language.I can only compare it with Haywood and Nahmad's "New Arabic Grammar of the Written Language", which it resembles considerably. (Cowan was published by Cambridge, whereas Haywood and Nahmad was published by Oxford - interesting!). I learned Arabic with the Haywood and Nahmad book, which I preferred and which I felt provided more background material than Cowan. Cowan is much more concise, which in my opinion is not necessarily an asset in this subject. You may want to check out both of these books; they are both still in print, both available through Amazon and were both published about the same time (1950's) and therefore somewhat dated, although not as much as you might think.If you're shopping around for a self-teacher of literary Arabic a third title you may investigate is Wheeler Thackston's "Introduction to Koranic and Classical Arabic", which is also available through Amazon and which some students might find more amenable. Professor Thackston expects the would-be learner to be intelligent, but possibly less linguistically sophisticated than the Oxbridge books do. The only other choice I would recommend is a set of four books by an Austrian Arabist named Kaplivatsky (The books are in English). They were first published in the 1940's and were in print up until at least 20 years ago. Kaplivatsky really teaches you the classical idiom, and when you're done with him you can read Abu Nuwas without difficulty. I gave them away to a budding Arabic student some time ago and I have regretted it ever since. Does anybody know if they're still around?
