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I've been using this book for about a month, in a second-semester class (Alif-Baa was used in the first). It's true that it asks you to make leaps of faith, in that you're sometimes given only parts of a verb ('she lives', 'I study'), or apparently inappropriately advanced vocabulary ('My father is a translator for the United Nations' in lesson 1?). On the other hand, it does seem to mimic how we learn our native languages: we learn piecemeal, rather than by memorizing conjugation tables, and we often learn by guessing the meaning, using the word, and re-evaluating based on the listeners' reactions. Also, we learn in several ways, all at once: reading, speaking, listening, watching.
I have studied and achieved various levels of fluency in several languages over the last 30 years, ranging over Indo-European from Irish to Spanish to Russian, with a few others in between. I think you have to accept that, as exotic as any of these languages may seem to an English speaker, you'll have to open your mind to other ways of expressing yourself once you leave that (Indo-European) family.
For a beginner like me, learning Arabic seems like a very long journey. Everyone decides for themselves whether it's worth the time and effort. I think this book goes some way towards making the journey interesting and stimulating.
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