More words of wisdom from author James L Price …
When you finish this book and master all of the material, will you be able to sit down with a Naguib Mahfouz novel and read it for pleasure, almost as if it were in English? Will you be able to speak Arabic with the eloquence of Gamal Abd Al-Nasir? Will you write with the gracefulness and precision of Taha Hussein? Absolutely not!
However, you will have all of the grammatical knowledge you need in order to develop your abilities to read advanced Arabic works, speak Modern Standard Arabic correctly, write properly, and even to learn more grammar. However, in order to be able do these things well, you will need to read extensively in whatever field you choose, acquiring the vocabulary and intellectual background that field or genre requires. In order to speak well, you will need to practice speaking. You are not going to learn to speak from a book. In order to write well, you are going to have to develop writing skills.
So you will still need to pursue your study of the language. The big difference will be that when you do so, you will be grammatically equipped. This fact will be of great benefit to you no matter what
direction your study of the language may take. However, if you try to pursue your study of the language without a good grammatical foundation, the odds are very heavy that you really will not get anywhere. The fact that you have read this far is proof that you know that this is true.