A good effort
This phrasebook is a good effort, but it includes very few items that are specifically Qatari Arabic (as opposed to just Gulf Arabic). There is one obvious problem in the way this was produced: Qatari Arabic allows two consonants at the beginning of a word, but Classical Arabic does not. To “correct” this in words like “shlonik”, an alif (without a hamza) is usually placed at the beginning of the word. This is (presumably?) to assist people coming from a Classical Arabic background, but it actually introduces a vowel where there wasn’t one. Then the Qatari readers read this out loud in the recordings, resulting in “ashlonik” instead if “shlonik.” Having the students read the words out loud obviously resulted in some stilted pronunciations in this app. Having said all that, the app is very beautifully programmed, includes very practical categories, and is easy to use.
