Speaking Arabic by J. Elihay - if Assimil had done a colloquial Arabic course....

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jimmy
Green Belt
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Re: Speaking Arabic by J. Elihay - if Assimil had done a colloquial Arabic course....

Postby jimmy » Sun Nov 20, 2022 12:58 pm

Hi ;

I am concentrating on MSA. I think these days I am about to be at the earl of B2 (intro B2), so I wrote B2 on my profile.
If I reach to Excellent level (C1-C2) I think I should use two sentences for the accomplishment:

---my mother tongue's pronunciation is very similar to MSA (Kurdish).
---spending long hours & efforts has brought me capability to see myself able to cope with deep grammar of MSA.
I am hopeful and hope to reach excellent level (inshaallah,amin amin amin).

I would kindly like to invite you communicate in Arabic threads.

as to mention something little bit related to colloquial Arabic, I think Al jazeera and some Saudi sources are understandable (Approximately and roughly 50%)

but levantine and egyptian seems like to me a bit annoying (Just %20 is understandable).
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Self Taught - Autodidactic

willcouchman
White Belt
Posts: 35
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2018 1:48 pm
Languages: Korean (Beginner), French (B1), Hindi (Beginner), Arabic (A1).
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Re: Speaking Arabic by J. Elihay - if Assimil had done a colloquial Arabic course....

Postby willcouchman » Tue Nov 22, 2022 12:25 pm

ArabicAmateur wrote:At the risk of reviving an old post, wondered how you’d got on with Conversational Eastern Arabic since your last update?

I’m only a few lessons into the first book but now I’ve got my head around the transliteration (and found an Arabic script Anki deck accompanying the series), I’m enjoying the way it presents a dialect.

Interested in knowing, if you’ve got to this point, how you’d rate your abilities and comprehension after book 1, 2 etc?


Thanks for getting in touch! Firstly a disclaimer - I'm a language dabbler and this course is intense, so after these two years I'm only just getting to the final book 4!

That being said, I have learned/acquired Arabic almost exclusively through Elihay's course and I can speak a decent conversational Arabic - I was in Morocco last week and had to use Arabic a couple of times where English and French were unsuitable, and I was very pleased with how smoothly it flowed, despite the inevitable stumbles. I was able to converse back and forth in some basic social/transactional situations without searching for words or second-guessing myself.

I have also had some more complex conversations in Arabic, including some emergency translation to give assistance, and my Arabic has been complimented highly - and this is by my own admission without having gone anywhere near as in-depth with the exercises and grammar explanations/tasks in the books as I could have.

If I look at how proficient my Arabic is, having just really listened to and sometimes shadowed the dialogues - and much less so having even translated the English into Arabic which I think I abandoned doing around book two haha - and I can listen to some 'B1' level short stories or GLOSS recordings without too much difficulty, had I really pounded these books as designed, one lesson per week, I would expect I'd have been a comfortable B2 over a year ago.

We can debate such things endlessly, of course, but the point is to show just how effective and comprehensive these books are. In the realms of language learning materials, nothing for me will ever beat Assimil's 'New French with Ease', but Elihay's course comes a close second.
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ArabicAmateur
White Belt
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Languages: English (N)
Arabic - MSA (A1), Levantine (A0)
Dabbled in Dari, some schooling in German and Latin
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Re: Speaking Arabic by J. Elihay - if Assimil had done a colloquial Arabic course....

Postby ArabicAmateur » Tue Nov 22, 2022 3:34 pm

willcouchman wrote:
ArabicAmateur wrote:At the risk of reviving an old post, wondered how you’d got on with Conversational Eastern Arabic since your last update?

I’m only a few lessons into the first book but now I’ve got my head around the transliteration (and found an Arabic script Anki deck accompanying the series), I’m enjoying the way it presents a dialect.

Interested in knowing, if you’ve got to this point, how you’d rate your abilities and comprehension after book 1, 2 etc?


Thanks for getting in touch! Firstly a disclaimer - I'm a language dabbler and this course is intense, so after these two years I'm only just getting to the final book 4!

That being said, I have learned/acquired Arabic almost exclusively through Elihay's course and I can speak a decent conversational Arabic - I was in Morocco last week and had to use Arabic a couple of times where English and French were unsuitable, and I was very pleased with how smoothly it flowed, despite the inevitable stumbles. I was able to converse back and forth in some basic social/transactional situations without searching for words or second-guessing myself.

I have also had some more complex conversations in Arabic, including some emergency translation to give assistance, and my Arabic has been complimented highly - and this is by my own admission without having gone anywhere near as in-depth with the exercises and grammar explanations/tasks in the books as I could have.

If I look at how proficient my Arabic is, having just really listened to and sometimes shadowed the dialogues - and much less so having even translated the English into Arabic which I think I abandoned doing around book two haha - and I can listen to some 'B1' level short stories or GLOSS recordings without too much difficulty, had I really pounded these books as designed, one lesson per week, I would expect I'd have been a comfortable B2 over a year ago.

We can debate such things endlessly, of course, but the point is to show just how effective and comprehensive these books are. In the realms of language learning materials, nothing for me will ever beat Assimil's 'New French with Ease', but Elihay's course comes a close second.


This is a really helpful response - thanks!

Appreciate this wasn’t the technique you used by your own admission, but is the “one lesson a week” intended as going through the dialogue multiple times, reviewing regularly and internalising before moving on?
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willcouchman
White Belt
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Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2018 1:48 pm
Languages: Korean (Beginner), French (B1), Hindi (Beginner), Arabic (A1).
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Re: Speaking Arabic by J. Elihay - if Assimil had done a colloquial Arabic course....

Postby willcouchman » Sun Nov 27, 2022 3:32 pm

Yes I think the one lesson a week as they set out - which includes going over the dialogue multiple times, translating the English into Arabic (i.e. the Assimil active wave) and doing the exercises - is the ideal way of doing it.

If I could go back in time, I'd redo it that way and pound each lesson for a whole week, grammar explanations and examples and all, until I'd bled it dry. I'd have finished the course in way under half the time I've been doing it, and be a lot further along.

It would be challenging, but doable I think!
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mike245
Posts: 1
Joined: Sat Apr 23, 2022 1:10 pm
Languages: English (N), Spanish (intermediate), French (intermediate), German (intermediate), Cantonese (intermediate), Khmer (beginner), Japanese (beginner)
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Re: Speaking Arabic by J. Elihay - if Assimil had done a colloquial Arabic course....

Postby mike245 » Sat Jul 01, 2023 9:49 pm

I started using "Speaking Arabic" about a month ago, and since this thread was one of the big motivators for ordering the book to begin with, I wanted to toss in my initial impressions. By way of context, I started studying Eastern Arabic about two months ago with Pimsleur (I'm still doing it concurrently with the Elihay book) and I am a huge fan of Assimil (New French with Ease is easily my favorite language method ever). So far, I've gotten up to Lesson 8. I've been averaging about a lesson every 3-4 days, since I have a fair bit of free time these days and I already have some rudimentary knowledge from Pimsleur. I am only interested in spoken Arabic at this time, and don't have any plans to learn to read or write it.

How I use it

I usually start each lesson by listening to the audio track a few times, following along with the text (both English and romanized Arabic to piece together meaning, then usually just listening and repeating while reading the Arabic romanization). I will listen to the dialogue intermittently over the course of a day or two, before reading and re-reading the grammar notes that follow and trying to understand and internalize the grammar points. After 2-3 days of this, I will try to listen to the dialogues without the text and complete the exercises. I don't bother to learn everything perfectly, but I do regularly go back to previous lessons to review material. A few days after moving onto the next lesson, I will go back to the previous 2-3 lessons and try to translate the English back into Arabic active-wave style, saying each line in Arabic out loud before listening to the actors say that line of dialogue. I also re-read aloud the exercise sentences to get additional practice. I would say I spend about 30-45 mins per day studying, although it's probably longer if I count listening to the dialogue without the book handy.

What I really like about it

As others have mentioned, this book seems really comprehensive. Each volume is slim but covers a lot of content, and supposedly it teaches around 2,500 words by the end. I would not be surprised if it covers almost as much content as a two-volume Assimil course in terms of grammar, etc. The author has a lovely, easygoing sense of humor: some of my favorite instances so far include one dialogue about a sick girl where the author reassures the reader that the girl gets better but we haven't learned enough vocabulary yet to discuss that development, and a grammar chart where he says, if you find this overwhelming, then just ignore it! The illustrations are very reminiscent of Assimil, with whimsical and humorous interpretations of key sentences from the text. Unlike Assimil, each dialogue seems to build on the previous one soap-opera style, which I like since there's some emotional investment in the characters. (The little boy, so far, seems like a bit of a brat!)

What I wish could be improved on

Each lesson is dense! Usually each lesson includes 3-4 dialogues, which are right off the bat are long and complicated (at least for this beginner), and there's only one audio track per lesson, which means that I have to either do a lot of re-listening to the whole track or careful rewinding to get to the dialogue I want to listen to. I should probably edit the tracks in Audacity to break them up into smaller files, but I've been too lazy to do that.

Beyond that problem, the real challenge of long lessons is pacing. With Assimil, I could be relatively assured that I could cover a lesson every day, since each one was bite-sized in content. With this method, I have to cover a lesson over several days, and it's harder to know when I'm done with each lesson and should move on. Also, I think that I would be a lot more lost if I didn't have some background in Pimsleur, since "Speaking Arabic" ramps up really quickly in terms of difficulty.

In general, the recordings are fine, but I wish: (1) the publisher updated the vocabulary and recordings to make them clearer and more modern, (2) that more of the vocabulary and example sentences were recorded. A lot of times, new vocabulary is introduced only in the grammar explanations or exercises, and it's hard to get a good sense of how those words should sound and the rhythm and flow of each sentence.

I also prefer Assimil's dialogue heavy approach, with most of the grammar explanations saved for the review lessons once a week. Here, it's clear that each dialogue is deliberately meant to be an illustration of the grammar points, and I've never been someone who's enjoyed explicitly studying grammar. I would prefer to spend more time with conversational examples to really internalize rules before seeing the explanations.

Overall impressions

I do enjoy this course, especially since it's one of the few comprehensive methods out there for Eastern/Levantine Arabic. I wish that Assimil would buy the rights to the book and adapt it into an "Eastern Arabic with Ease" -- updating the vocabulary, re-recording the dialogues, breaking up each lesson into multiple lessons so that these 50 lessons stretched out over 150 lessons or more. But alas, that's not the case.

It's not a perfect method, but it's enjoyable enough for me to plod through nevertheless. In the past month, at least, I haven't gotten bored of it, and I've given up on a lot of language methods over the years. I'm learning Arabic for a short trip to Jordan next year, so hopefully I do make it through the course and find myself able to use Arabic while I'm there.
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