Submitted by Jay Schulz
If you are like me, you like to know what people are saying around you. The 'smart book' that was issued to me by my unit that told me how to say things like "Put down your weapon or I'll shoot." Don't usually come up in my everyday conversations with the Iraqi Police that we are currently working with. So, I went to the PX and bought a book on Arabic. This was a disappointment as our interpreter told me that it was "Egyptian Arabic". Although they could understand what I was saying, I wouldn't be able to understand what they were saying. So, I sent my wife an e-mail requesting that she find me a book that had "Iraqi Arabic".
This is the book she came up with: Beginner's Iraqi Arabic with 2 audio CD's.
It has 12 lessons that start out with pronunciations and work through verb conjugation and many other forms of words while building up one's vocabulary. In the back of the book is a decent English-Arabic and Arabic-English dictionary. It also comes with two audio CD's that keep one's pronunciation on track. I think the lessons are easy, and if you are going to interact with the local populace daily, as most soldiers do, this book can help tremendously.
