Michel Thomas Method: Arabic Advanced Course (Michel Thomas Series) |
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Author:
Jane Wightwick,
Mahmoud Gaafar
By Hodder Arnold
Average Customer Rating:  
List Price: £48.93
Our Price: £27.00
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Binding: Audio CD
EAN: 9780340957295
Format: Audiobook
ISBN: 0340957298
Label: Hodder Arnold
Manufacturer: Hodder Arnold
Publication Date: 2008-03-28
Publisher: Hodder Arnold
Studio: Hodder Arnold |
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Great for spoken Arabic, 2008-09-10
I'm half way through the advanced course now, having completed the foundation. I'm very happy with the way my Arabic is improving and the proof is that I'm talking to my wife's family and they understand me! We're all so happy as I think everyone was despairing of me ever learning to speak Arabic. My wife tells me that the media Arabic such as on the BBC or Al-Jazeera is really quite hard even for native speakers. You can't compare it to English or other European languages because the news and current affairs is in Standard Arabic and it's not what people talk everyday. I think you'd need a specialized course for that. But I am starting to understand (Eastender-type) soap operas which are in spoken Arabic! Highly recommended.
Very smart and efficient as an introduction., 15 Oct 2008, 2008-10-15
I already posted my review of the Foundation course.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/product/0340957271/ref=dp_db_cm_cr_acr_txt?_encoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
I see this "advanced course" more as a complement to the Foundation course than as an "advanced" course.
When you finish this course you are unlikely to understand conversations, but you can build you own sentences with a limited vocabulary, and you have (painlessly) acquired the essentials of grammar.
More importantly you feel confident that you actually can envision speaking Arabic. Well, the Egyptian dialect, which is widely understood.
Grammar is made simple and absorbed. The mechanisms of the language are simply explained and internalised.
I wish I had used this program before I used Pimsleur Eastern Arabic, I would have better benefited from Pimsleur's two levels. Although Pimsleur very efficiently gives you more (yet limited) vocabulary and what you need to be an efficient traveller, its quite hard at the beginning. The dialect differences between Eastern (Syrian) Arabic are obvious and not important. Some words differ , pronunciation differs, but it's easy to deal with the differences, similarities are stronger than the differences.
After these Foundation ad introductory courses, I went a second time through Pimsleur Eastern Arabic very fastly. And my feeling is that I was ready to learn more: more vocabulary and more verb tenses. Which I did as you'll see.
In brief, Pimsleur taught me lots of useful sentences and basic vocabulary, but it was not that simple for the first level (and it's awfully expensive). Michel Thomas / Wightwick / Gaafar give the structural understanding of the language and this dramatically improved my abilities to build new, never heard before sentences.
It is quite likely that the next final "vocabulary" level will be very useful.
The course , it should be stressed, should be used as they tell, in a laid back manner: relax and let it flow in and out (I mean you are going to produce sentences that will easily flow out even though you never heard them beforehand). Don't strain and don't try to remember. You're not at school , you are learning to speak a new weird mysterious language for real ! With very few CDs (8 + 4) that I essentially used while running , or driving (which is not the best usage of the CDs but the best usage of my available time) I deem the results remarkable.
Then one has to use other materials to reach a conversational level.
After I tried some other Eastern Arabic and Egyptian Arabic material which did not really suit me well, I eventually bought the Linguaphone complete Arabic course. This (Linguaphone) is a very thorough course with 10 dense CDs exclusively in Arabic. There are lost of new words, as in the Assimil methods (by the way I tried the Assimil Arabic for French speakers, it's audiotrack sounds nothing like Arabic and is ridiculously slow. An Arabic friend judged the Arabic used ridiculously pronounced. That's a pity since the Assimil book is intelligently built. And I'm a huge fan of Assimil that I used for 4 other languages I can now speak quite well).
Linguaphone is not as rewarding as Pimsleur and Michel thomas /Wightwick/ Gaafar. I would not have been able to use it, had I not had an earlier introduction that allows me to progress. Of course , as this is classic Arabic , modernised, it's different, and more complicated. Still my previous introduction to Syrian / Eastern arabic (Pimsleur) and to Egyptian (with nicely taught grammar) now proves invaluable to make the best use of this very rich Linguaphone course whih I think must be very frustrating for a complete beginner.
Take home message: if you want to learn Arabic, this course (Michel Thomas foundation and advanced) is the perfect introductory course to a widely understood Arabic dialect. I don't know were the "vocabulary " course will take us, but even without it , it's easy to improve one's abilities after Jane Wightwick and Mahmoud Gaafar have lead us to build new sentences , understanding the basics of this strange language's grammar, painlessly and almost unknowingly.
I'd recommend this course as the first one if you want to learn Arabic. Otherwise, the other courses may disgust and deter you. With this one as a starter, you'll magnify your further learnings.
J.
This is a basic course not advanced, 2008-06-25
I consider the level of this course as basic not advanced. At the end of an advanced language course, one is expected to understand news on TV. With this Arabic course you would struggle to book a hotel room in Arabic let alone understand Arabic TV. This course is not for serious learners of Arabic.
Remarkable progress in Arabic!, 2008-08-03
This 'Advanced' course course follows on from the 'Foundation' course by the same authors. The pedagogy is remarkable. After a very short time you can compose your own sentences in Arabic because you really do understand how the language works. The whole process is really satisfying - I was worried about the script but of course in an audio course this is not an issue at all. And proof that it works is that last week I was driven by an Iraqi taxi driver and I was able to converse in Arabic about where I'd been, what I'd seen, where I was going, whether I understood, etc. Intensely satisfying.
The format of the course is different from Michel Thomas's original courses in French and Spanish, which he taught himself. Here the teacher has a native-speaker assistant, which is (I believe) a huge improvement on the Thomas originals. The students' mistakes are quite comforting and encouraging and there are some nice exchanges between them and the teachers, if they've not quite understood something.
I was delighted that after this course I was able to express myself in Arabic, frequently regarded as almost impenetrable to English speakers.
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