Arabic language course CD? - Horizons Unlimited

**tmborden** · #1 8 Jul 2004

can anyone recommend a good Arabic language course CD? my wife and i are travelling thru Tunisia, Libya and Niger this winter and would like to have some basic Arabic skills under our belts.

thanks.

**Sam Rutherford** · #2 8 Jul 2004

I have just got a Linguaphone Arabic 'PDQ' course, but not started it yet. Looks okay, but have my doubts about the pdq description!!

GBP15 on ebay...

Sam.

**pbekkerh** · #3 25 Jul 2004

Look here:
http://www.eurotalk.com/Library/fmpr...geID=092&-find

**KevinMc** · #4 25 Jul 2004

Arabic will be of very little use in Niger. Practice your French

**Geoff van de Merwe** · #5 25 Jul 2004

I can recommend the 'Teach Yourself' series.
The Arabic CD's ISBN is 0 340 80282 0, it comes with a book which is ordered separately, but worth getting.
The course deals with not only speaking day-to-day arabic, but also reading and writing the language.

Be warned though, I found it a very difficult language to learn and once I was on the road, the differing dialects from region to region meant that what I had learnt was not as helpful as I had hoped.

For this reason I would also suggest learning some French.

Geoff

**POB/London** · #6 25 Jul 2004

I have just travelled through Tunisia for almost 50 days, and I'm now in Cairo.

I blitzed through the PDQ course mentioned above before I left the UK, and I also had some lessons through my Uni (UCL in London - the lessons are available to non-students, office is at the top of Gower Street). The PDQ course is OK, but not fantastic. I bought it becauise I have had good experience with Linguaphone, but you're probably better with the full course.

Except....

Aside from a few phrases and words, it has been mostly useless, for the same reasons as Geoff found. You're probably better off just learning a few phrases (water, name, greetings and salutations, "no arabi" etc etc)

For where you're going a good conversational French knowledge will be FAR more useful. Be warned that the others are right - Arabic is fiendishly difficult and variable: phrases from my Lebanese teacher were useless in Tunisia, and phrases from Tunisia sound like nonsense to Egyptians.

In some places in Libya, Italian and English will be OK.

Happy learning!

**tmborden** · #7 25 Jul 2004

thanks everyone for the input. sounds like we might be better off with two good phrase books, one specific to Tunisia and one specific to Libya. i found this one for Libya:
http://www.libyaninvestment.com/shop..._in_libya.html

does anyone have a recommendation for one for Tunisia? or a better one for Libya?

tb