Arabic Stories for Language Learners: Traditional Middle Eastern Tales In Arabic and English (Online Included)

This book is the most helpful I have ever encountered to gain fluency in Arabic reading and listening comprehension. The CD is the absolute best because the producers were smart enough to have the readers speak clearly and slowly enough for an intermediate learner to understand. The CD is professional quality with excellent readers and no background noise to interfere. Play it every day and you will soon be thinking in Arabic. Plus the stories are interesting, often with a profound message from the ancient Arab world. In addition, the written text is clear and large. The Islamic art dispersed throughout the book is a bonus. The vocabulary involves words that are commonly used in everyday language, which is a great advantage. If you started learning Arabic using the famous Modern Standard orange books from the University of Michigan, you will appreciate Arabic Stories for its lack of technical language and complications of sophisticated texts which are too specialized for use in normal conversation. This delightful book uses vocabulary that is practical and much of it is repeated in various ways to allow you to really learn it. With Arabic's vast vocabulary, it is so nice to have an entertaining book that selects verbs and nouns that can be used in conversation with native speakers. The selection of stories goes far in helping Western students appreciate traditional cultural values of Arabs. If you have invested time in learning Arabic to the intermediate level (to the point where you can fill in most short vowels by your knowledge of Arabic Grammar), you must get this book. It will take you closer to the easy facility with Arabic that you always wanted. And the price is modest. Buy it! You won't regret it.

Although I am not finished with the book, I must say that I am impressed with the book thus far and the stories to come. I have found several stories to be quite hysterical! As an Arabic language learner, it helps immensely to have the audio available along with stories. The stories are easy to read and follow along. Apart from the audio, the large print, spacing, and English translation all make this book a masterpiece to add to a collection of Arabic literature for language learners. The vocabulary is not too challenging. If you've been studying Arabic for at least two years or more (intermediate level at least) then this is your go-to book for Arabic literature. It is a great starting place. I am curious to know if similar material with audio is available from the authors.

Great condition. Arrival on time. The book is useful for Arabic learners - it would have been better if the diacritics were also provided. Translations are decent. The fun of reading so many different stories itself justifies the purchase. I have not used the CD so far, but I assume they will read the stories on there and the matter of pronounciation will be addressed by way of that. I didn't feel this is for beginning Arabic students, more like intermediate. I will be using it to teach some students while trying to make the learning fun. I imagine they would be lost without a teacher - to help them unpack the morphology and grammar. In other words, it's a very useful teaching aid but not self sufficient.

Absolutely amazing learning tool, the online audio and worksheets further reinforce learning through listening, comprehension, and writing. I love how this book has helped me further my arabic skills through a mix of lighthearted, fun, and valuable lessons for life through the various stories.

This book is probably an advanced-beginner to intermediate level sort of book. The stories are fairly simple and easy to understand. I do not have to much trouble since I have extensive exposure to the language. What is interesting are the vocabulary words and many expressions found in the book. It really helped me so far to build up my vocabulary list. The addition to the book is the CD. It is read by a man and a woman. The downfall is the lack of energy both narrators have. They simply read the stories with no emotion at all. Other than that, it is a very good vocabulary builder.

Hezi Brosh and Lutfi Mansur did a great job of collecting 66 short Arabic stories with various moral, historic and cultural lessons. As a student of Arabic, the audio track is my favorite feature of the book. The recordings are in Modern Standard Arabic and the dialogues were recorded with voice actors, which helps to animate the stories. The parables range in size, from one paragraph, to multiple pages, and on the opposing page is the English translation to provide assistance if the reader gets lost in translation.

Excellent piece of work and one that's been needed for quite a while. A beginner with a lot of experience and enthusiasm could probably get through this book, but I think it's more ideally suited for people who are at a mid-intermediate level and higher. Although I have a Kindle, I bought the physical copy because there is an audio CD that accompanies the book which goes a long way in helping one's pronunciation. There aren't any vowel markings for the Arabic words in this book, so again, the CD is invaluable. Aside from helping to learn the language, the stories in this book are interesting even if you only read them in English. I hope to see more books of this type and quality in the near future.

The selection of stories is excellent but the book has some issues. The authors do not give salutations to the Prophet (saw). The construction of the book is poor. The glue started pulling apart the first time it was opened. The CD package is glued with excessively strong tape, causing the book to tear if it is removed. The English font is terribly formatted. It looks like a double-spaced undergraduate paper with improperly set margins.

Veru useful for extending your Arabic vocabulary.

Excellent book for learners. It also helps that the stories are available in YouTube to read along.

I bought this book for myself as I am taking Arabic lessons but wanted some extra help for reading outside class. The book is set out like a classic bilingual book, with the Arabic text on the left-hand page and the English translation on the right. The translation is fairly literal which is a great help when comparing vocabulary and structures. The stories range from half a page to several pages, and are very varied in terms of language level and vocabulary. The only downsides to this book are that there are very few written short vowels, but the audio CD included makes up for this; and the fact that the stories are not numbered - I had to write numbers in to match the stories with the audio track. These are very minor issues, however, and I would highly recommend this book for language learners! This book would also be suitable for children.

I found this really useful as a guide to my language learning, particularly using both the audio and the text versions. It uses a variety of tales, mostly quite old-fashioned and set in the past to teach quite a wide vocabulary. It may be quite useful to those learners who learned their first Arabic through the medium of current affairs and who now wish to expand their vocabulary into more social settings and learn the words that can occur often in daily life but are rare in media Arabic. This is particularly true for those whose Arabic is modern standard, rather than dialectical. None of the texts is long, running to a few pages at most. The audio is quite slow, but not so slow it feels awkward, so is very good for the learner. It is usually quite easy to work out the meaning of unknown words from context, so might be handy for those who want a change from learning lists of vocabulary. Recommended for learners of Arabic who have already got to grips with the basics and wish to broaden their skills. It is probably not a suitable vehicle for learning for absolute novices - they should probably wait to acquire this until they have a good grounding in the basic grammar and vocabulary of Arabic.

I like that stories are short and easy to read. Used vocabulary is not so hard and is mostly useful.