Great Product: Focus on Contemporary Arabic by Shukri Abed

Ya... Arabic speaking dudes and dudettes, for those of you who have a good commmand of Arabic but feel like you just never get enough practice listening to how Arabs actually speak their dialect, this book is for you. All too often books you buy to learn Arabic revolve around Modern Standard Arabic i.e. how to speak like a newscaster. Instructional books on dialects always start from the bare bone basics and are boring. This is the one book that I keep turning back to. It features real conversations on numerous topics on a DVD that are literally transcribed in the book, and I mean literally; every ahhhh and uummmm is accounted for. The only thing that would make this better is a comprehensive lexicon at the back of the book and, most importantly, the option to convert the audio to an MP3 file to listen to on your ipod. No matter how long you have been studying Arabic, this book is worth picking up!