Teach Yourself Arabic Complete Course (Paperback)

I also thought the Hippocrene book was good, and it would be my second choice for a [beginner.] About half-way through the book it started including many full paragraphs of material for translation. I have my doubts that the beginning reader would be that advanced by that time but I don't really know. I have the Hippocrene Spanish Grammar and it is the clearest, most concise, and overall best basic grammar I have, out of the four five that I own. One other main strength to this book is that it can accompany the tapes so you can get some idea of the spoken language too.

One thing I was pleased to see was that, although I had heard that Arabic was a difficult language, it is actually much simpler than Latin or Greek or even a contemporary Slavic language like Russian, as far as the grammar is concerned. It only has three cases, the nominative, accusative, and jussive, compared to Greek's eight, Latin and Russian's six (and the vocative case in Latin is hardly ever used), and German's four. The nouns are marked for the single, dual, and plural, which is different from English, which lost the dual inflection like many Indo-European languages many centuries ago. But the books make it clear that in modern spoken Arabic the three noun declensions are pretty much universally ignored, and you don't really learn them. The only time you need to know them is if you're reading classical literature or the Koran, or in academic discourse, where it might be used.

However, one difficult thing is that Arabic has many different ways of marking the plural, and here it resembles the complex rules in English for the use of the apostrophe, which causes almost as many problems for native speakers as for foreigners.

That having been said, verb conjugations in Arabic are not difficult and are quite regular, unlike Latin and many other languages. Here Arabic resembles Japanese, which also has a very regular verbal system, and you can count the number of irregular verbs in Japanese literally on the fingers of one hand, and also Chinese, which has no conjugation for gender, number, or anything else. In fact Arabic's is so regular that Arabic dictionaries can refer to the verbs by a number system (I-X). So it appears that the main difficulty in Arabic is learning the alphabet, which is more complex than in English since the individual letters alter their form depending on whether they're at the beginning or end of a word, or in the middle. Another similarity between Arabic and Japanese, oddly enough, is that they both lack a true future tense.

Overall, a good first grammar on a language that may not be as difficult to learn as I was first thinking. However, I'm about to find out!