Middle East: Lonely Planet Phrasebook | 
 enlarge | Creator: Lonely Planet Phrasebooks
Publisher: Lonely Planet
Category: Book
List Price: $10.99
Buy New: $5.52
You Save: $5.47 (50%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 249598
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 5.5 x 3.7 x 0.6
ISBN: 1864502614
Dewey Decimal Number: 915
EAN: 9781864502619
ASIN: 1864502614
Publication Date: September 1, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: New and unread. Brand-new book. America's most famous book store. Established 1934.
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Product Description
The Middle East beckons you. With 8 key languages in this first ever phrasebook to the region, let no barriers - language or culture - get in your way. Find your way to the qahwa (cofee house) for a sheesha (water pipe), and have a chat with some of the world's most hospitable people. Immerse yourself in the culture section packed with fascinating and useful info on this unique region.
Our phrasebooks give you a comprehensive mix of practical and social words and phrases in more than 120 languages. Chat with the locals and discover their culture - a guaranteed way to enrich your travel experience.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Interesting! July 6, 2008
This book offers the phrases any visitor is most likely to need in Turkish, Farsi (Persian), Hebrew, and as many as five different "dialects" of Arabic: Modern Standard, Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf, Tunisian. The variety of Arabic presented is very interesting - I am not aware of any other phrasebook to more than one Arabic dialect.
I did find the phrases were well-selected (and the most important terms in all 8 languages like "please", "thank you", "excuse me" etc. are handily grouped together on the inside of the covers) and the fact that they are accompanied by the original script is very useful, considering how hard to pronounce Arabic can be in particular.
The only reason I give this book only 4 stars is that I'd much rather see Kurdish (spoken by millions in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria) than Tunisian Arabic in it. Any way I look at it, Tunisia is nowhere near the Middle East, and even without that, 4 Arabic dialects should be enough to get you around the Middle East!
 A colossal waste of paper - and money! May 15, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
When I tried to use this phrasebook, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. The very first entry for each of the five Arabic dialects is, "Do you speak English?" What?!? If a person who speaks no Arabic, like me, wants to converse with a native Arabic speaker, s/he should ask, "Do you speak English?" IN ENGLISH! Believe me, you will know the answer from the person's facial response. I certainly don't need to pose the question in a language that I am wholly unable to converse in, that's for sure. The very notion is absurd.
Want more laughs? This book is full of them. How about the most useful words to learn in any foreign language: thank you. You can look high and low and you won't find it in this purported phrasebook. Likewise, you will not easily find "Excuse me", "Please", "Hello", or "Goodbye", some of the other most important words you can learn. You will, however, find such useful expressions as "Can you write down the price?" (I'm sure that for one or two persons, the need for that phrase must come up all the time.)
Save your money. You don't want this book.
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