I Hate al-Kitaab

I’m talking about a textbook (here), the textbook for teaching Arabic that is used not just here in the U.S., but also in other parts of the world. Instructors of Arabic love this book, but we students hate it. I’ll admit that the first book in this series, Alif Baa’ (here), is actually pretty good, but the first volume of al-Kitaab is awful, and the second is worse. I haven’t dared to look at the third.

So, why do I hate al-Kitaab? Let me count the ways.

1. Eye torture. Why inject Arabic words into an English-language explanation? You are reading along from left to right when suddenly you must jump ahead, reverse direction to read the Arabic, reverse direction again and jump ahead to get back to the English. No one in the history of the world has ever produced writing like this. The closest is the boustrophedon used in ancient Greece in which the direction changed, but only at the end of the line. And that actually is a little easier on the eyes than our system, but doing it in the middle of the line is just plain torture.

I know what their thinking is. They want to include as much Arabic in this book as possible in order to get students used to seeing it. Believe me, there is plenty in it already.

2. Forcing us to learn grammatical terms in Arabic. How many students who take Arabic are planning to one day teach Arabic grammar, in Arabic? I know of no one. Most take it for distribution requirements or maybe because it looks great on a resume or because they are actually planning to travel to the Arab world. With respect to none of these reasons is there any point to learning grammatical terms in Arabic. Use the English-language equivalents, please. And, yes, I know that there are grammatical constructions in Arabic that don’t occur in English, but guess what? English has invented words for these constructions. The iDaafa construction, for example, is called the construct in other books. And maSdar can be called a gerund or a verbal noun.

Look at it this way. A student spends a year studying Arabic in an American college, and five years later is suddenly called upon to use it in their job. What would you like them to remember? IDaafa? MaSdar? MuDaari’? Please.

3. Pathetic vocabulary. In the first lesson, one of the vocabulary items is “United Nations.” What is the point of learning this? How often is anyone actually going to use it? Almost never. It is eight syllables long in Arabic (al-umam al-mutaaHida), and I had forgotten it by the end of the year. Having this in the vocabulary is just worthless.

4. Grammar scattered throughout the book. If you are trying to remember some nit-picky little point, you must try to remember which lesson it was introduced in, and that’s not so easy. Nor is the table of contents much help because it’s in Arabic script. If you’re in a hurry, you might just as well forget it.

Let me compare all this with my textbook (here) in ancient Greek, which I used in a class back in the 1970s. The comparison is good because in Greek we were learning a new script just like we were in Arabic, albeit one that goes in the same direction as Roman script.

1. It never put any grammatical terms into Greek script when giving a grammatical explanation.

2. The number of grammatical terms from Greek was kept to the minimum. We didn’t learn the Greek words for noun and verb or much of anything else; instead, the ordinary English words were used. A few terms were new, but they were self-explanatory (like “middle voice” and “dual”). The only terms that were completely new to me were “aorist” and “optative” (and they were not written in Greek script).

3. I won’t say that the order in which we learned Greek vocabulary was particularly good, but I don’t remember being frustrated by it, either.

4. The grammar was all at the back, organized in a fairly logical fashion. Each lesson referred to some section or sections of grammar at the back instead of including the grammar within the lesson itself. If you forgot something, you didn’t need to remember which lesson it came from. You just looked it up in the back.

I won’t say my Greek book was particularly good, but I didn’t hate it. It also had the virtue of being small and easy to carry around, unlike al-Kitaab.

Arabic is already hard enough to learn. Why make it harder?