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Title: This is Essentially Useless, and There's Nothing Better
Review: This "course" is simply a reprint of an old Georgetown book from the 60s. It is garbage. The text is not in Arabic script (which is ridiculous) and the "exercises" are useless, but the vocab could be a good start if some of the words were not outdated and the author had explained which were Moroccan, Standard Arabic, French, or Spanish. The recordings, although insightfully encoded into MP3 format, are of the worst quality. They are clearly copies from tapes from back in the 60s when this book was useful. It sounds like they were recorded in a bathroom by someone who had smoked three packs of Winstons a day for 25 years. It was a decent language book for its time, but this is 2005. LET'S GET SOME NEW BOOKS GEORGETOWN!!! If that institution is such a bastion of Arabic studies in America, then I challenge it to get off its ass and put something out there (besides al-Kitab). This stuff is IMPORTANT these days. We Arabic students NEED it.
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