Shou fi ma fi?: Intermediate Levantine Arabic

This book is okay particularly given that the resources for studying Levantine Arabic are few. The major problem with this book is the audio. There are two issues. First, there is only one clip per chapter. The clips are also extremely short. Together, there is not enough listening practice time. Second, half of the audio is completely in-audible, it is either too quiet or the poor quality "fuzzes" the sound (it seems they tried to compress the audio for download and it reduced sound quality). Trust me, this is not simply my difficulty understanding the dialect as words roll together. The quality is bad. As those of you trying to study Levantine know, listening and speaking are key to learning the dialect and if you can't hear the audio that accompanies the book this is a major problem.There are three good things about this book though which is why I am giving it three stars instead of two. First, there is good cultural knowledge to include foods and manners. This is obviously very important as students of dialect intends to spend time talking to people. These will also help you understand some of the distinctly Levantine sayings you'll find in a social setting. Second, the exercises are good and make you practice what you learned with realistic sentences. It would be much better if there were also answers for self study, but they are decent as is. Third, the book is very thin and light which makes it easy to carry around to study in your spare time.All in all, the book is OK. However, it is not worth the price overall unless you have no other resources. Before buying this book, I would definitely look at GLOSS on DLI first and see if this free resource meets your needs. There are many more audio clips with grammar explanations, exercises, and translations.In case the publisher sees this review, please fix the quality of the audio. It would make the book SO much better.....

I would not recommend buying this book unless it's required for a class. The book is poorly organized and does not contain many useful vocabulary words. The book contains very few opportunities to practice the vocabulary, phrases, and grammar that you do learn. The author attempts to teach commonly used phrases, but provides barely any context for how to use those phrases in conversation. The audio portion is not great quality, but I appreciate having an audio portion included at all. Nevertheless, with this book and a GOOD tutor, you will probably learn the very basics of spoken Levantine Arabic.One of the most frustrating aspects of learning Arabic is the lack of quality learning materials. If I wanted to learn French or Spanish, almost any textbook would be decent enough quality for me to learn useful language skills. Every French and Spanish textbook I've seen has been organized into topics, contained a list of relevant vocabulary words for each chapter, and provided plenty of opportunities to practice new concepts. This textbook is not organized the way a quality language textbook should be. The only textbooks I've found of the same quality as the average French or Spanish textbook are the Saifi Institute's Urban Arabic textbooks. Unfortunately the Saifi books can only be ordered directly from the school and shipping can take months. If you have some Arabic under your belt and you're interested in a quality Lebanese/Levantine Arabic textbook, I would highly recommend contacting Saifi and ordering Urban Arabic book 3 (which is about at the same level as Shou Fi Ma Fi). You'll learn MUCH more useful vocabulary and have more opportunities to practice grammatical concepts than you will with Shou Fi Ma Fi.

There is a definite lack of great Levantine books out there and, although this has some good points, it is not well organized and has terrible audio on the website. There should be far more example sentences for words that are introduced and some explanations are very poor. Some audio clips are barely able to be heard and you can hear them turning the microphone on and off...very badly done. There should be a lot of audio examples for the example sentences given and not just one example of it given in each chapter's dialogue. There should be a clear glossary in the back of the book with all the words used. Some Levantine-specific words are translated but others are not and it is impossible to use a dictionary to find out the meaning. This is frustrating! I also think that all the dialogues should be translated into English to prevent any confusion. There are multiple choice questions in each chapter and I find this to be a complete waste of time. At this level, it is too simple....it would be far more effective to get more content into the book by introducing a Levantine word or expression and then giving various examples of it in contexts with accompanying audio.

I have studied the Levantine dialect for over a decade, in and out of immersion environments and this is the best aid that I have found. Chouairi does an outstanding job of illustrating the difference between MSA and Levantine - particularly through his utilization of the Arabic alphabet for dialect. Every other resource that I have encountered utilizes some sort of transliteration scheme that hinders learning. He effectively blends cultural lessons into each chapter in order to enhance the student's capability to actually interact in the environment. The fact that the dialogues in each lesson are humorous helps students to overcome the arduous task of progressing to an intermediate level in dialect. This book is particularly useful for students preparing for oral proficiency interviews as many of the dialogues are directly relevant to the test.

Good book. Ijust wish that it came with an actual cd. There is an accompanying audio to the book on line but it can't be downloaded. I wish it was able to be either downloaded ot the the book came with a audio cd. Will I ever buy from this author again, yes because my tutor loves it and I did learn much of the lebanese dialect from it.

It's a decent book and there is audio available on the website given in the book. It's nicely presented too and I think you can manage it on your own if you have some knowledge of Arabic.

I really like your approach, it fills a big gap linking the written and the colloquial variants of the language. However, the book includes some exercises but does not the solutions to the exercises. If you are a self-taught student, doing the exercises without being able to see the key won't be very useful. This is a big gap in this book, otherwise the content is good.