Arabic 101

In a fashion similar to spanish and not at all to english, arabic does plurals differently. Instead of making the subject possessive, they restructure the phrase. My mother’s necklace, becomes the necklace of my mother. 

There are two kinds of sentences in arabic; nominal and verbal. The nominal sentences start with nouns, and the verbal sentences start with verbs. Aziza has another good post elaborating on the distinction between the two. 

In arabic, conjugating verbs is a large part of grammar. Arabic almost always attaches a personal pronoun to their verbs, so in translation sentences would sound like “My mother she works in the city” instead of “My mother works in the city”. This can present difficulties to english speakers because we don’t have a quite as complicated conjugation system.

In terms of number for nouns, the arabic do not express a plural noun above ten. While “she has nine cousins” add a few more and it becomes “she has twelve cousin”.

These are only a few of the little quirks i’m learning, but there are more to be sure!

2 Comments | In: Grammar | tags: arabic, Grammar, sentence structure. | #

I’m having a really hard time with the whole male/female part of the language. LangaugeGuide describes how we put a ta marbuta at the end of some nouns to make them feminine, but it gets more complicated than that. Obviously. 

Similar to other languages arabic places masculine and feminine titles on to arbitrary objects. You have to remember these objects as their gender so that you can conjugate sentences correctly.

I linked to the arabic blog earlier, and they have another great post about this!

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Monday’s schedule includes my arabic midterm, so i’m ponying up and studying hardcore for it. I always felt that quizzes were a good strategy for me, so i looked around for some quizzes online that people created. I found some great ones, and hopefully my midterm grade will reflect it!

The first one I found was at proprofs.com, it was pretty fun. It was more about the general knowledge of the alphabet.

This one was on funtrivia, and it was a pretty good measure of understanding where I stood with greetings and common phrases.

1 Comment | In: Alphabet Tips, Vocabulary | tags: arabic, quizzes. | #

When I left class today, I wanted to cry. We had our first grammar lesson, and I freaked out. Everything he said went over my head and I was ready to give up. So I went online to find something to supplement my teacher. 

Although I left class wanting to cry, a few hours later, I’m smiling as I write this. I found charts and descriptions online, and I actually understand what’s going on. The task at hand is learning how to conjugate verbs in arabic. Thankfully we’re only focusing on the present tense at this point, so I’m just learning one set of rules right now. I copied this chart down into my notebook, and I swear by it. It really simplified the whole process for me.

No Comments | In: Grammar | tags: arabic conjugation, Grammar. | #

I have a confession. I can’t remember a single word of arabic vocabulary my teacher has taught us. The four words I know are from the Rosetta-Stone lesson we did on the first day of class. Which now that I think about it screams the fact I should buy the software. 

I’m not sure why all the words he says goes in one ear and out the other. Maybe I’m too stressed out about deciphering the letters in front of me. Maybe my mind is drifting too far towards the experiences I hope to have speaking arabic, instead of learning to speak arabic. Whatever the excuse, I’ve got to start learning some vocabulary. 

I keep hearing that the way to learn a language is through pictures instead of words. The more I think about this, the more it makes sense. When we are young, we have a basic vocabulary before we start to read, and when we start to read, we use pictures. Right now I’m learning an alphabet of sounds and letters. But once I string those sounds and letters together, the word is meaningless to me. I think this is where my problem lies, I can’t possibly fully comprehend my alphabet if I don’t even know the word I’m reading. 

Seeing as Rosetta-Stone is upwards the price of $250, I found some beautiful online resources. Videos on youtube are a great resource, here’s a taste of one. I also ran into a native speaker, and he said watching arabic movies helps out a lot with vocabulary.

No Comments | In: Uncategorized, Vocabulary | tags: arabic, videos, Vocabulary. | #

Like some english letters, arabic letters look different when handwritten versus typed form. I think this is because the typed letters are the original formal letters used in religious texts, but they adjusted them to be easier for handwriting. I’m familiar with this concept because it’s the same way in hebrew, we write in script form but read the siddur with formal characters. I have to admit though, it gets difficult to remember two forms of a letter no matter what language. Fortunately arabic does not have upper case and lower case letters, just one form.

I’ve been working on a project for class where I have to write three words for each stage of each letter of the alphabet. I’m constantly referring to my handwriting guide because I forget the handwritten forms of the letters. While not all of them are different, the amount is significant enough to confuse the hell out of me. To help me out I found a really cool interactive video that shows you have to individually draw each letter.

2 Comments | In: Alphabet Tips, Uncategorized | tags: arabic, arabic alphabet, handwriting, script. | #

In arabic, they have symbols that are not letters nor vowels. Much like an accent, they tell the reader to place further emphasis on a certain syllable of the word. Being an english speaker I rarely encounter these sorts of grammatical problems in my everyday speaking, so naturally I’m having difficulties.

One such of these symbols is a shadda. Written on top of the letter, like short vowels, the shadda is an indication to double the length of the consonant in pronunciation. My textbook told me it does not sound like the sound two Ts make in little, but they never gave me an example of what it does sound like! 

arabic7 gave a really good description on where to place shadda grammatically, but the best advice I was given was from arabiccomplete.com with their audio clips.

No Comments | In: Symbols | tags: arabic, arabic alphabet, pronounciation, symbol. | #

Arabic has letters with sounds i’ve never really noticed. For instance, that sound at the end of Bach, the ch, that one sound is a whole letter in arabic! Khaa.

They also have a letter called dhaal, that specifically makes the sound of th in the word “other”. It’s different from the word thaa, which makes the th sound in the word “three”. Confusing right? 

Last week I gave a link that had a diagram of where each letter’s sound should originate in the throat, and I would encourage anybody to visit that site often, it really helps!

In this week’s hunt for some helpful resources, I found a charming site, Itty Bitty Language Courses. The site gives mini-courses on communication-wise words for many different languages.  

I also found an awesome resource I never knew existed, called Livemocha. Livemocha is a social networking site for people learning languages. It also has language courses of it’s own. I would highly recommend anyone to register.

No Comments | In: Alphabet Tips | tags: arabic, arabic alphabet, pronounciation. | #

Today in class we learned about emphatic consonants. Emphatic consonants deepen the sound of the surrounding vowels in the word. The best way I can physically describe it is kind of the difference between moh and mohh. That isn’t a very good example though. There are Naturally I went to the web to try and find some good advice on learning these complicated arabic letters. 

I found a really helpful site that actually shows what part of the throat each letter’s sound should be spoken from.

This article at e-how really helps with a description of how to pronounce the letters.

I was searching pretty deep in google, and I found probably the best collective resource of arabic alphabet rules and letter illustrations, thank you Daniel Scherek!

1 Comment | In: Alphabet Tips | tags: arabic alphabet, emphatic vowels, pronounciation. | #

We were introduced to arabic vowels in class along with the rest of the alphabet. They seem a little trickier than English vowels because there are different forms of the vowels, just as the rest of the alphabet.

There are long vowels and short vowels. They also have a concept called “vowel quality”, the different ranges of sounds each vowel can make. Similar to the way “a” can sound very differently depending on the word it’s in, like “father” or “base”.

The three long vowels; alif, uu, and ii, also have corresponding short vowels; fatHa, Damma, and kasra. They all have different script rules also, like not connecting letters before or after each vowel.

This site, speak7, has a great description of the way the vowels are supposed to sound when speaking. I especially liked their description on how words can be distinct without short vowels, using the Canada example.

I also found a really neat quiz site that had flash cards, quizzes, and activities to help with arabic vowels.

the dots above and below the letters are vowels are still part of the letters, but the individual lines are the long vowel, alif.

5 Comments | In: Alphabet Tips | tags: arabic, arabic alphabet, arabic vowels, flashcards, long vowel, short vowel. | #