Arabic Practical Dictionary: Arabic-English English-Arabic (Hippocrene Practical Dictionaries),   ISBN:9780781810456

Customer Rating: 

i tossed this thing after a year. might be good for people studying arabic just for university. a tiny little dictionary like this could never cover E-A and A-E both very well, so whats the use? a bigger dictionary, like the mawrid, is necessary to make real progress.

Customer Rating: 

I find this dictionary very practical. The pronunciation is helpful (ie: romanized for Arabic). I teach English to Arabic speakers and they enjoy using the dictionary also as it gives the words which are common in speaking several dialects. It is small enough to carry in a purse or book bag. Any English speaker with a basic understanding of the Arabic alphabet and sounds, can use it to interpret either the spoken or the written Arabic.

Customer Rating: 

This dictionary has some things going for it that make it worth having. The vocabulary it offers is very contemporary, the Arabic is printed in a nice-looking font, and quality English-Arabic dictionaries of any size are hard to find. So I made a lot of use it for classes where written compositions were assigned. And it isn't too heavy to carry around and won't take up a lot of room in a briefcase or book bag. My one criticism would be that the Arabic-English half is organized by alphabetical order, not by roots as most Arabic dictionaries are. Best suggestion: get this along with Hans Wehr (Arabic-English only) and get going right away learning to look up words by roots. It's a slow and painstaking learning process, but it's a very necessary skill in learning Arabic, so it's really better not to put it off. Use the Arabic-English half of Awde only if you're in a hurry to finish an assignment.

Customer Rating: 

Item is exactly as described and correspond to what I was looking for. A little note about the arabic words for a future edition, it would be better if printed a bit bigger. As some times difficult to read.

Customer Rating: 

Awde and Smith's ARABIC PRACTICAL DICTIONARY, Arabic-English, English-Arabic, is the perfect dictionary for university students in beginning and intermediate Arabic courses. First of all, it has an up-to-date vocabulary (2004 publication), and it fits their budgets, as it's very inexpensive, compared to most university textbooks today; and it also contains almost everything they'll need in the way of grammatical points. The Arabic-English section is great training for students just beginnning to look up words using the Arabic script. The Arabic words are also transliterated, and I am a great believer in transliteration (if it's used correctly). Transliteration will solve any reading problems a student might have and allow that student to refocus quickly on the Arabic script with the right pronunciation in his or her head. Noun plurals are given and this is especially helpful with the broken plurals in Arabic. Any vowel changes that occur in the various forms of the verbs are also listed. Other, larger, dictionaries are available for advanced study, but this one works extremely well in the beginning.