I am learning to speak Arabic from stratch. From zero knowledge I will become fluent in reading, writing, listening and speaking Modern Standard Arabic. Using all methods available I will expore how to learn best. Come join me on my Arabic Adventure!
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!)
Summary: An Arabic Pangram that contains an instance of every letter in the Arabic language.
The PangramTest
A pangramis 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.
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!
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 Ankiwith 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!
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:
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 linguafranca 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:
By writing down what I learn as I learn it I will improve my study skills and help my review process
Readers and friends can help improve my Arabic, correct my mistakes and make recommendations on how to improve.
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.
4 CDs with 18 lessons.
