Friday, June 12, 2009

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:

  • Pronunciation of Levantine and Saudi Arabian Arabic.

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!

Thursday, June 11, 2009

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.

Monday, June 8, 2009

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.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

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.