Sunday

Books in Different Languages on Amazon

I'm not talking about books for learning foreign languages, although there are plenty of those. I'm talking about books written for native speakers. I didn't realize there were so many books in different languages on Amazon. It's not immediately obvious how to find these books on the site and it seems like they hide the foreign section or at least they don't really care if you find it or not. It took me a bit of searching and I eventually stumbled on it by accident. If you go to "Advanced Search" it only lets you choose English, French, German, and Spanish.

Typing "Arabic" into the search is just going to give you books for learning Arabic. If you want authentic books written for native speakers of whatever language you're looking for then you need to go here. That link takes you to where you can view all the foreign language books on Amazon.com sorted by language. As you would expect, there are a ton of books in Spanish, French, and German, but they have less common languages as well. There are nearly 20,000 books in Arabic and 500 books in Farsi. They even have languages like Armenian, Bengali, and Malay.

I bought The Crime in Arabic by Naguib Mahfouz and a book of Arabic short stories that has both Arabic and English. I'm trying to do more reading in MSA. Reading is something that I haven't focused a lot on and so I feel it's a skill I am weak in.

I hope this was helpful. I've been trying to find a place that sold Arabic books that shipped to the US. I didn't think Amazon did it because I could never find anything but books for learning languages. Maybe they don't advertise this because there isn't a big demand for it? But eventually languages learners need to move past books that teach language and on to real authentic materials written in the foreign language.

9 comments:

Anton said...

Very helpful as always with your posts, although here in sweden we have great public libraries that have a lot of arabic books, childrens books as well as novels and other. Many thanks for your great work!
Anton, Stockholm

Aaron said...

Thank you for pointing this site out! Do you know of any specific books (or authors, even) that are written in colloquial dialects? Does such a thing exist?

Thanks
-Aaron

Ana said...

Thank you!! But you didn't tell us (or it wasn't clear enough for me), how did you arrive to this page? I am asking because recently in my country they introduced more taxes on shipments coming from the USA, so it's better for me if I order from .fr or .uk.
Aaron, there are many books that have entire paragraphs in dialect, usually the dialogues, it's a modern tecnique, started with Tawfiq al Hakim (see 'awdatu-r-ruh). Many contemporary authors now are using it, for example it appears also in the book i'm reading now ra'ihatu-s-sabun by iliays khuri. You will find this at lebanese authors, and egyptians, especially. (baha' tahir, another good name)

José said...

Here in Brazil is also hard to find, I myself use english material to study arabic. Here we speak Portuguese, and I speak english as a second lenguage, so I use my second lenguage to study my third lenguage.

Anonymous said...

I once saw a bilingual book published in Fusha on my page and Yemeni colloquial on the other. It was the greatest colloquial resource I think I've ever seen, but I've never been able to find anything like it until this day.

Anonymous said...

could you comment bout this movie? the vocabulary!!

thank you!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdCsGw-TvU4&feature=related

Anonymous said...

I am personally looking for Arabic e-books! If you find anything, please let me know (danielwmackey@gmail.com)

أبو مرقس said...

nice find mate, i got as far as trying to search by language once before and got disappointed Arabic wasn't an option.

Anonymous said...

Hi,

I think you'll find many of Mahfouz's book are in Eytptian Arabic- I got a few on my own shelf.

Like you, I'm always 'about' to finish a book.

I tend to find reading articles more helpful (they're shorter)- since I'm into politics and history, the Arab press is something I find interesting.

James



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