kullu tamam!: An Introduction to Egyptian Colloquial Arabic

It's a very useful book with an impressive and clear vocabulary. There are other books like this written by prestigious universities which ignore the need to provide a fully comprehensive glossary. This book really teaches you to communicate in a proper way and in a variety of situations.

Contrarily to what the other review says, you definitely need arabic dialects to communicate. I graduated in Arabic and spent 2 months in Yemen to practice it, and believe me, outside the arabian peninsula very few people speak standard arabic.The egyptian dialect is widely understood, though not as widely spoken, because Egypt produces loads of tv shows and films. And this book really helps.I bought it after my graduation because I also wanted to speak Egyptian, and I would recomment it to anyone.

no arabic writing, that does not help very much if you go to that country. It is too difficult only with the phonicwords with this you do not learn real arabic.

Kullu Tamam would be great - if it came packaged with an egyptian arabic teacher to guide you through the book.. - In other words not a book for self learners noting that : there are no translations of the dialogues, many idiomatic forms are introduced before any grammatical explanation is provided, the romanisation method used is inconsistent making it often difficult to identify words.....So if you have a teacher/ native speaker to help you through this might be a great book - if you're working on your own this is a going to be a headache.

When I bought Kullu Tamam I was really excited because it was advertised as a modern approach to teaching Egyptian Arabic using English transliteration, and as I was starting out from scratch with no basis in MSA or Arabic script it sounded perfect. It wasn't. For me Kullu Tamam is the embodiment of old-fashioned language teaching methods, which seem to work on the basis that if you describe a grammar rule in as much detail as possible all in one go, people will magically be able to put it to use in communicative situations (as if simply understanding the rule was the problem...try this with children learning their first language) and that if you give people random lists of 40 words to learn without context, somehow they'll stick. Anyone who has taught a language knows that this is an approach that is bound to fail for 95% of students and slow down the learning of the 5% who have the bloody-mindedness to stick it out. I'm convinced this is why so many people in the UK are under the impression that language learning is an extraordinary and mysterious 'gift'. If you're looking for an introduction to Egyptian Colloquial Arabic that uses English transliteration you would be infinitely better off with 'Colloquial Arabic of Egypt' by Jane Wightwick and Mahmoud Gaafar, which is designed for self-study and brilliantly sets out the fundamentals of vocab and grammar in an intuitive and incremental way, supplemented by Pimsleur Egyptian Arabic (which will teach you how to read and get speaking) before starting off on the Kallimni 'Arabi series. If you want to learn to write, 'Mastering Arabic Script' is a really useful, practical little book. And for the record, I think learning Egyptian Arabic before starting out on MSA is a really great way round of doing it if you can get your hands on the right books.