Arabic-English/English-Arabic Compact Dictionary (Hippocrene's Compact Dictionaries) Paperback – June 1, 2004

Just fine.

This is a compact dictionary, good enough for beginners. There is an appendix at the end that tells you how to conjugate Arabic verbs, which I thought was pretty useful.

I need a lot more than the little carry along.

Arabic is a very hard language for most Westerners. I work in the Middle East and have a fair facility with European languages, so I obtained this book to help me get along in the Arab world. Unfortunately, although it is a good pocket dictionary of words, there are no "useful phrases" put together to really help one converse in Arabic.The only way to really learn Arabic is to take a classroom course, starting from the basics. However, this little book does explain the Arabic alphabet and pronunciations, which is helpful. The dictionary does a good job of listing words in English and Arabic, with good definitions and pronunciation guides. But, unless one already knows Arabic it is hard to find an Arabic word in order to find the English translation. The English collection is adequate, but without some sample phrases it still leaves one with no way to connect the nouns and verbs into intelligible sentences.Overall, it would be useful to someone already learning Arabic, but it is not really going to help a novice "learn" the language.

I bought this book in the bookstore after making a general flip through it for content. I wish now I had looked a little closer. It's missing some words that you would think would be fundamental and perfect for a pocket reference. Months, days of the week, basic verbs like to know and to think, the list really is quite long of things that are missing. But then inexplicably it has words like kleptomania, lunar and a some other quite bizarre ones for a pocket reference. All in all, I'd say going looking for another reference. Although I will agree with another reviewer that the verb conjugation table is handy, this one isn't worth the money.