Top of the line
From Amazon
With the assistance of an Arabic teacher, this is definitely the best book around. It's very helpful; the pace of learning increases gradually so it remains easy to keep up throughout the series. It's never overloaded with information and grammatically it's spot on. Recognized as one of the top (usually THE top) Arabic language series.
Arabic language textbook Al-Kitaab Part 2
From Amazon
I bought this book for an Arabic course at NYU where it was a required text. [...]. This book is part of a comprehensive series. As it comes with DVDs it could be used at home, but is more conducive for classroom instruction. The DVDs include a'amiya (colloquial) arabic as well as fusha (MSA) which is a plus. Part 2 does not include a dictionary unlike Part 1 which is a pain.
To be used with the aid of an instructor
From Amazon
This book was developed by several expert arabists with the patronage of the federally funded NMELRC at Brigham Young University. It is well structured for the traditional arabic course in US universities and is rapidly gaining acceptance as the primary instructional text for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The advantages of the text include the accompanying audio visual material which provides some immersion into MSA as well as the egyptian dialect of Arabic. One notable disadvantage would be the difficulty for use in self study without the assistance of an instructor. This text is therefore best used with the aid of an instructor. Other than that, the contemporary treatment of MSA as a living language is notable strength of this text. The three levels of this entire course as well as the Alif baa introductory course would be well suited for adoption by instructors or students serious about mastering MSA.
Quite useful but seriously flawed
From Amazon
One thing is for sure - this book should not be used by autodidacts! I have been using a different set of textbooks that are heavy on grammar and vocabulary acquisition and very light on oral comprehension, so I am using this book to review my vocabulary and improve my listening skills. For that purpose the book is great! The texts are mildly challenging and the DVD content is most useful. In just one month that it took me to get through part 2 I made excellent progress.
Nevertheless, I have to note that
1. Grammar presentation is bordering on pathetic, if I did not know all of that stuff already I would have never learnt it from this volume.
2. Vocabulary retention exercises are few and not terribly effective (although the choice of vocabulary items it quite good, just the stuff you need to read a newspaper).
3. The "colloquial Arabic" part is useless at best. I ended up skipping it altogether, if I ever need to learn a particular dialect I will make it a separate project and will find an appropriate source.
4. Was there any meaningful reason to put the answers in a separate book? Did it have to be that bulky?
Unfortunately, I have never found an all-around good textbook of Arabic in any language, although the French and the Russian ones that I initially used were almost decent, they just do not take you very far.
Considering that language instruction is such a huge industry I am constantly amazed by how many products of inferior quality are on the market.
a stinking corpse
From Amazon
One thing must be said about Ms. Brustad and Messrs. Al-Batal and At-Tonsi: They do not embarrass easily. Those learners who made it to the end of Book One in this numbingly shoddy trilogy of unedited mediocrity find themselves with another nearly insurmountable obstacle to overcome and very little and inadequate help to do it with.
The flaws in this volume are the same as those in the first, only more so: little explanatory material is offered, and the student is expected to read original materials from Arabic newspapers and magazines without new vocabulary being glossed, so the choices come down to struggling for hours with a dictionary to finish a reading section, skimming the material to get the sense without using a dictionary (which the authors actually recommend) or waiting for a teacher patient enough to spoon feed it in a class. If we knew Arabic well enough to read it on our own, why would we need a textbook?
It is widely considered that Arabic is a difficult language, and in some respects that may be so, but the lagging state of Arabic education in this country has less to do with the complexity of its grammar than it does with the sheer inferiority of the pedagogical materials that are available. There are equally difficult or more difficult languages which have much higher proportions of successful students (Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew- to name just a few)because the textbooks available for their learners present their material systematically and comprehensively. There is no reason why this could not be done for Arabic as well -it is simply an effort that these authors did not choose to make.