Levantine Arabic: Shwayy 'An Haali: Listening, Reading, and Expressing Yourself in Lebanese and Syrian Arabic: Volume 1 (Shwayy 'An Haali Series) Paperback – 6 Jan. 2018

I also have Matthew's other books, Levantine Colloquial Arabic Vocabulary and Levantine Arabic Verbs. Along with this one I find them an excellent tool for learning Levantine Arabic. They are clearly laid out with the English phrase, arabic script and transliteration for help with pronunciation and learning to read the Arabic. The icing on the cake is the audio files which can be downloaded to hear pronunciation by Arabic speakers. This is invaluable.One piece of feedback for the author would be this. As a beginner in learning Arabic, I find the rate of speech in the audio files is too fast for me to take in. When I play the files I have to slow them down by at least a factor of 2. This lowers the pitch of the files also. So a set of audio files spoken slower, and perhaps with a repeat done very slowly would make them fantastic. Thanks for the effort that you put into these publications. I really appreciate it.

This really is a great resource, so well organised. Not only do you learn many incredibly useful conversational phrases but there is plenty of Arabic to read and practice with too. The whole thing is just very well thought out and put together. The audio (which can be downloaded from the Lingualism website) is FAST but I like this - it makes it more authentic and it is understandable if you know the vocabulary and play it back a few times to practice. For reference I am at beginner level, I've been learning for about nine months.

I like that there are several speakers with different accents

Great book full of exercises

Explains Arabic well

I did not find the methodology easy to handle as a beginner. If you can't read in arabic, I would not recommend this version