Foreign Services Institute - Arabic

Summary: Review of Arabic material from the Foreign Services Institute.

The Foreign Services Institute (F.S.I.) is where the US State Department teaches it's diplomatic team foreign languages.

http://www.fsi-language-courses.com/Arabic.aspx

It has some good materials on the following:

• The Arabic Writing System (PDF) - http://www.fsi-language-courses.com/Courses/Arabic/FSI%20-%20Classical%20Arabic%20-%20The%20Writing%20System.pdf

• A Comparison of Eastern and Western Arabic (PDF) - http://www.fsi-language-courses.com/Courses/Arabic/FSI%20-%20From%20Eastern%20to%20Western%20Arabic.pdf

• Pronunciation of Levantine and Saudi Arabian Arabic.
  

• A Comparison of Levantine and Saudi Arabian Arabic (PDF) - http://www.fsi-language-courses.com/Courses/Arabic/FSI%20-%20Levantine%20and%20Egyptian%20Arabic%20-%20Comparative%20Study.pdf

This is really good material and I really recommend printing the first PDF about the Arabic Writing System and studying it.

Happy Studying~!

Visual Image of Letter Sounds

Summary: Positions of the mouth when pronouncing Arabic letters.

I have just Stumbled upon the following website that shows you what position the mouth is in when pronouncing the letters of the Arabic language:

http://www.hqw7.com/elibrary/xFlash.aspx?xID=234


Interesting, but I doesn't seem that useful to me.
Happy Studying~!

Learn Arabic Online - Website Review

Summary: LearnArabicOnline.com Website Review: too dry grammar guide for me.

These days I am looking on the web for good websites for helping me to learn Arabic and I will review them here for you. The first one is LearnArabicOnline.com which has a lot of information but seems to be mostly a dry guide to Arabic Grammar. I am not very good at learning a language through grammar directly (I prefer examples and learning from reading and repeating) but for those who like to learn the grammar rules I think this would be a good website to start. It's well set out and has a good design:



If anybody uses it, please tell me what you think of it.
Happy studying!

A Tale of Two Books

Summary: The two top books for studying Arabic.

There seems to be two main books for studying Arabic and they are Al-Kitaab (which means "the book") and Alif Baa (which means "A B" as in ABCs):

1. Al-Kitaab Fii Ta Allum Al- Arabiyya: Pt. 1: A Textbook for Beginning Arabic (affiliate link)


2. Alif Baa with DVDs: Introduction to Arabic Letters and Sounds (affiliate link)



If you are interested in learning Arabic then buy both of these books (as I will be doing). I will be reviewing the books soon.

The Arabic Dictonary

Summary: The Hans Wehr is the best and only Arabic dictionary to get.

I have been reading a lot of websites and blogs about learning Arabic and if there is one clear message from all of them it is that there is one clear winner when it comes to the best Arabic dictionary, namely: The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic. So I suggest that if you are going to get a dictionary, get it:

It's currently $36.45 on Amazon here (affiliate link) :

Arabic-English Dictionary: The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic


I will be reviewing online Arabic dictionaries soon.

Drill the Arabic Alphabet

Summary: learn the Arabic letters using this website I found.

I found a great website to drill the Arabic letters:

http://www.theiling.de/schrift/#arabic

It is split into Consonants, some Ligatures (special combinations of joined up letters), and the Digits 0-9.

It looks like this:


It displays a random character and you click which transliterated character from the English alphabet or click "No Idea".

I have found this really good for drilling in the characters, particularly in different forms and learning to differential between similar looking characters.

Also there is the option to change the Font Face which I have found really useful. I have actually gone through all the characters in each different Font Face option so that I really know them. The same characters can look very different depending on the font, so to avoid being caught out by that - practice all the font faces.

You can also flip to English -> Arabic too. I did this afterwards and found it much easier - or perhaps I'm actually learning :p.

Audio Review: Berlitz Arabic Gauranteed

Summary: Audio Review of Berlitz Arabic Guaranteed.

4 CDs with 18 lessons.

Very fast paced but quite short. Each CD is 1 hour so there is 4 hours of material in total. Needs listening to several times. I have listen through them once over 4 days. I will listen to them again perhaps next week and then again in a month or so. Even if the lessons aren't that great - it's worth it just for the listening practice. Will try and get my hands on the accompanying book too (if there is one!)

Map of Countries using Arabic

Summary: A map of where Arabic is spoken in the world.

Dark green is Arabic speaking countries and light green is where the Arabic script is used in part:



That's quite a large area! There are Approx. 280 million native speakers of Arabic.

Happy studying!

Picture of the Arabic Alphabet

Summary: Arabic Alphabet Picture

Here is a picture of the letters of the Arabic Alphabet that you can save or print:



I've put them into the memory program Anki to study, here's a screenshot:


I have added the sounds from the website Arabic2000 (I will do a website review soon).

Happy studying!

Arabic Pangram

Summary: An Arabic Pangram that contains an instance of every letter in the Arabic language.


The Pangram Test

A pangram is a sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet - I'm sure you've heard the English one "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". (I remember it not so fondly from touch-typing classes!). Well, anyways guess what! - I've found one for Arabic, dadah!:

نص حكيم له سر قاطع وذو شأن عظيم مكتوب على ثوب أخضر ومغلف بجلد أزرق

"A wise text which has an absolute secret and great importance, written on a green tissue and covered with blue leather"


Reading that will certainly test if you've mastered the Arabic Alphabet or not! :-D

Don't worry - it's just for fun; maybe we'll come back and review this sentence once our Arabic is better.

Arabic Alphabet Video

Summary: The Alphabet Song in Arabic from Youtube.


There are a few version of the Alphabet Song in Arabic on Youtube which I have found!, here is one for you:



The letters look so funny like that! Learning Arabic is cool :p Make sure you sing along!

A reminder of the Alphabet:

ا ʾAlif, ب Bāʾ, ت Tāʾ, ث Ṯāʾ, ج Ǧīm, ح Ḥā, خ Ḫāʾ, د Dāl, ذ Ḏāl, ر Rāʼ, ز Zayn, س Sīn, ش Šīn, ص Ṣād, ض Ḍād, ط Ṭāʾ, ظ Ẓāʾ, ع ʿAyn, غ Ġain, ف Fāʾ, ق Qāf, ك Kāf, ل Lām, م Mīm, ن Nūn, ه Hāʾ, و Wāw, ي Yāʾ.


How are you doing with learning it? I'm making progress on remembering and them and being able to recongise and write them! It's certainly fun when these "silly little squiggles" start becoming memory prompts for certain funny sounds!

Don't worry too much if you haven't hammered them yet - we will move on to words and phrases and this will make it so easy to know the letters that you'll look back and wondered what was so hard about remember just 28 items!

Arabic Alphabet

Summary: Learnt the Arabic alphabet which contains 28 letters and Arabic is written from right to left.

Here they are (courtesy of Wikipedia) along with their names:

ا ʾAlif, ب Bāʾ, ت Tāʾ, ث Ṯāʾ, ج Ǧīm, ح Ḥā, خ Ḫāʾ, د Dāl, ذ Ḏāl, ر Rāʼ, ز Zayn, س Sīn, ش Šīn, ص Ṣād, ض Ḍād, ط Ṭāʾ, ظ Ẓāʾ, ع ʿAyn, غ Ġain, ف Fāʾ, ق Qāf, ك Kāf, ل Lām, م Mīm, ن Nūn, ه Hāʾ, و Wāw, ي Yāʾ.


First impressions are that they are so beautiful! A bonus is that they are designed for joined up writing!

A few bonus notes:

• Each letter in Arabic has a name (how cute is that!) so those are NOT their pronunciations.
• The letters can look different in a word than they do stand alone. (sometimes they like to dress up :p).
• A few of the sounds don't exist at all in English - so we'll be learning something truly "new"
• In Arabic writing you mostly write just the Consonants - Vowels are only there when you read it or speak it!
• Some of the letters look different depending on the font.
  

Plan for study

• Put the letters into Anki with all their variant forms, with sound files (anybody know where I can get these from? found.) and learn.
  
• When I learn them write them out by hand to get used to their feel and shape and to improve memory. (I have a geeky plain white writing book that I write everything I learn down by hand too for this purpose)
• Move onwards and upwords onto words, phrases and sentences!
  

Project: Learn Arabic

Summary: Learn Arabic as efficiently and effectively as possible using all means of new technology. Modern Standard Arabic only.


Learning Arabic!

I have decide to learn Arabic. This is the language of much of the Middle East and North Africa and I believe that being able to read it and understand it will help me understand the people of this part of the world.


Colloquial Arabic

The Arabic spoken in different countries is very different. For example Arabic in Egypt is very different from that spoken in Morocco or Saudi Arabic - in fact they are almost like learn different languages.

The main branches of Arabic and where they are spoken:

• Egyptian Arabic - Egypt
  
• Gulf Arabic - Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia
• Iraqi Arabic - Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey
• Levantine Arabic - Israel, West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Cyprus, Turkey
• Maghrebi Arabic - Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libiya, Western Sahara, Niger

Modern Standard Arabic

Fortunately there is a standard across the whole language called Modern Standard Arabic (also just to confuse you it's also called Literary Arabic). This can be called the lingua franca of the Arabic world. Although it is not often spoken in conversation, everybody can understand it and it is the form used in Television News, Newspapers and Books. This is what I will be learning.


Learning and Blogging

I will be blogging for the following key reasons:

1. By writing down what I learn as I learn it I will improve my study skills and help my review process
2. Readers and friends can help improve my Arabic, correct my mistakes and make recommendations on how to improve.
3. People interested in learning Arabic can read along to help their studies and learn from my mistakes.

This will be a complete history of how I will go from knowing absolute NOTHING about the Arabic language to my ultimate goal: being able to speak Arabic fluently.