Kamaan Shuwayya 'An Nafsi

Book excerpt: Kamaan Shuwayya 'An Nafsi ("A Little More About Myself") will be of tremendous help to independent language learners who want to develop their conversational skills and increase their Arabic vocabulary. Bonus: Free audio tracks available to download and stream from www.lingualism.com. Kamaan Shuwayya ‘An Nafsi presents the results of a survey given to 10 Egyptians. Each of the 36 sections in the book begins with a question from the survey followed by the 10 responses and a breakdown of the vocabulary and concludes with a page where you are encouraged to give your own answer to the question using newly learned words and phrases. This book is the second of a two-part series. If you are not yet at an intermediate level of Egyptian Arabic, it is advised that you complete the first book, Shuwayya ‘An Nafsi (which includes features to assist elementary-level learners: phonemic transcriptions for the texts and even the most basic words are introduced in the chapter glossaries) before moving on to Kamaan Shuwayya ‘An Nafsi. In Kamaan Shuwayya ‘An Nafsi, only glossed words include phonemic transcriptions. Common words which appear numerous times throughout the book do not appear in the chapter glossaries. However, they can still be found in the glossary in the back of the book. The responses are typically somewhat longer than those in the first book. For more advanced learners, the texts appear again in the back of the book without voweling (tashkeel) or translations (Appendix B), to provide a more challenging reading experience without distractions. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) translations of the texts (Appendix C) are also given for learners who are more proficient in MSA and can benefit from comparing the similarities and differences between it and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA).