I vaguely remembered my Hebrew verbs, and when we first started looking at the Arabic conjugations I felt a sense of deja-vu. Turns out the Arabic present tense seems to be very much like the Hebrew future tense. Check out the words for “to write”:

Sorry if there are any mis-spellings or the transliterations aren’t quite right, but you get the idea.

There are other words that are the same:
yad (hand)
arba/arba*a (four; they are pronounced slightly differently)
ach/akh (brother)

For this reason I’m staying away from Hebrew until I finish the class; there aren’t a lot of identical or near-identical words, but just enough to be confusing!

The book series we are using in my Arabic class is not awful, but not great either. (I’ll discuss in a different post some of the more serious issues I have with it.) The grammar is scattered around the book and doled out to us in bits and pieces. Since I don’t learn that way, it’s clear that I’ll need some supplementary material. Arabic Verbs & Essentials of Grammar is a thin but useful text. All the verb forms are described, and in concise language the author explains the pitfalls likely to trip up an English-language speaker. The part of the book that deals with grammar is not as extensive as I’d hoped, but for less than $10 this book was a great deal.

Fortunately this was in stock in a real bookstore. I’m finding with Arabic material that it’s better to see what you’re purchasing in person and make sure it is legible and that the teaching style is a good fit. I’m lucky that the Barnes and Noble in my area has a very extensive language section.

There’s all kinds of great electronic help out there for learning a language. Even Google Translate is useful. If nothing else their text-to-speech feature is amusing to use.

But sometimes you want a regular, printed dictionary. Our professor recommended the Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic. However this only translates from Arabic to English (not the reverse), and you need to know the root of the word to find it. At this point I decided a smaller and more user-friendly book would serve me better, and bought Nicholas Awde’s Arabic Practical Dictionary. At the time I bought it, it was only $17 on Amazon. The text is clear and legible, the Arabic words are transliterated, and although it is not very extensive it is also not too large to carry around with my other books.

After struggling with writing Arabic for a little while, it occurs to me that it would be (physically) easier if it were a left-to-right language, like most of the world’s alphabets. As left-handed people are forced to do when writing left-to-right, I have to keep my hand lifted off the page so as not to smear the ink. So, since only 8-15% of the world’s populations are left-handed, I am curious how two commonly used languages (Arabic and Hebrew) evolved in a direction that is inconvenient to the majority of those who write it.

It’s a puzzle to me. All I can think of is that these alphabets, or perhaps their parent, Phoenician, were originally carved into clay tablets. Perhaps this is something you need the strength of your right hand for. And somehow when ink and paper was adopted, it was too difficult to reverse direction.

What makes any language difficult to learn are the exceptions, not the rules.
In Arabic, there are three ‘short’ vowels. They are not always printed, but beginners like me get to see them when we are shown a new word. They are the marks over and under the letter ‎ا (alif) shown below:

‎اَ اِ اُ

All good.
But then I was given this word (a greeting):

‎أهلاً

It is spelled, roughly, A-H-L-A, but pronounced A-H-L-A-N. It was hard to understand where the ‘N’ sound comes from, because there is no nun, the character that sounds like ‘N’, in the word.
More investigation ensued. It turns out that if any of the vowel marks are doubled, like this

‎اً

it is called tanwin, or nunation, and indicates that the vowel is followed by the N sound. There seem to be a lot of grammatical implications to nunation, but that discussion is over my head right now. I’ll just try to remember to pronounce the N.

On my Mac an OPTION-SHIFT is needed to see these doubled characters on the Keyboard Viewer, after switching to Arabic – QWERTY input.

This Arabic phrase caused a lot of frustration for me:

‎صَباح النور

It’s a response to “Good Morning!”, translating literally as “Morning Light”. But I was puzzled by the pronunciation. Although the second word is spelled with the Arabic equivalent of A-L-N-OO-R, our textbook indicated that we should pronounce it “A-N-N-OO-R”. This seemed really strange to me, since I’d been previously told that Arabic was a phonetic language. So what happened to the “L” sound? I spent some time searching online, tried to figure out if I wasn’t reading the letters correctly, but could not make any sense of it. Finally I gave up, unable to figure it out.

It wasn’t until I cornered one of my Arabic-speaking coworkers the next day for an explanation that I learned about solar and lunar letters. Apparently, before letters designated ‘solar’, such as ‘N’, the ‘L’ in the article ‘al’ is swallowed, or not pronounced, and the first letter of the word is doubled. Now this would have been a nice thing to know!

The textbook, as it turns out, covers this, but not until the very end of the book. Long after we are supposed to have learned to read, write and say النور and similar words.

This article starts off in a little bit of a cringe-worthy style, but it makes some good points (or at least Rachel Levine does):
Why’s a Nice Jewish Girl Spending a Year in Syria

Now that I’ve learned a few letters I realized I know enough to write my name, phonetically, in the Arabic script. It’s a lot more concise than in English, because the vowel is left out, and the ‘th’ is represented by a single character.

‎بث

Love that alternative alphabets are so easy to implement on the Mac; it’s just a matter of a few clicks to switch back and forth, and the computer usually figures out by itself when it should expect right-to-left vs. left-to-right entry. And the letter is formatted correctly, depending on whether I type it alone, or in the beginning, middle or end of the word. Smart!

It occurred to me that there must be some nicer fonts out there than what comes pre-installed. Indeed there are.

And here is some fantastic calligraphy. Totally amazing how this guy combines words & art. This is his site.

I’ve decided, sort of on a whim, to learn Arabic. The reasons are complex, but boil down to the fact that I’ve always wanted to be able to read their weird script of dashes and dots, and while I am still in my current job, I have access to free courses which might otherwise be out of financial reach. So I signed up for Elementary Arabic for this fall semester, and then sort of freaked out when I started looking more closely at the language and realized what I’d gotten myself into.

1. They have about 30 letters in their alphabet, which is manageable. But each letter has a number of different shapes, depending on where it appears in the word.
2. There are numerous sounds which English speakers are not trained to say, including the vocalization of their version of Hebrew ‘ayin’, a sound that Jews, perhaps wisely, gave up on trying to pronounce. As I learned it, anyway, the Hebrew version of that letter is silent. In Arabic it’s a gargling sound.
3. Some letters or letter combinations which have multiple pronunciations in English are represented by different shapes in Arabic. I guess this is a plus for them; their alphabet is phonetic while ours isn’t. But it is a brain-teaser for someone like me, to remember, for example, that the ‘th’ sound in ‘thunder’ and ‘this’ is different.
4. As might be expected for a language spoken by hundreds of millions, over a wide swathe of countries, there are many different forms of Arabic. In the class we’ll be learning what is the ‘standard’ version, which apparently seems to be spoken on newscasts, but not in day-to-day speech. I fear this might be akin to learning Shakespearean English to prepare for a trip to the UK. I’d prefer to be learning the language as actually spoken (somewhere). (guide to languages of the world with numbers of native speakers, kind of an interesting chart)
5. Most of the guides for Westerners I have seen for the alphabet (as well as the textbook for the class I’m taking), include some version of “Don’t panic, you can learn this!” In fact, our textbook spends quite a few pages reassuring us that mastering Arabic is possible. None of the Spanish, French or Portuguese classes I took ever felt the need to do this.

Well, anyway, here I go. I spent the week prior to starting the class trying to master the alphabet so I could have a little bit of a head start. Here are some useful resources I found:

YouTube videos (there are a huge amount, this is a very, very small list)

• slightly boring but useful video of the alphabet
• strangely engaging alphabet song
• lullaby of the alphabet

Some web sites

• Awesome interactive site showing the different forms of each letter, with examples of writing and tips on pronunciation.
• An expat’s concise explanation of the alphabet along with some amusing travelogue of his trips around the world, if you click through.
• Printable alphabet chart, from Stanford, although some letters seem to be written slightly differently than I see elsewhere.

Helpful iPhone and online apps

• Pretty great flashcards site, Quizlets. The words in the books our class is using are ALREADY THERE! This was an exciting find for me. I don’t know if I would have typed them out myself, but the fact that someone else went to the trouble was incentive for me to start using this app.
• iPhone app called Flashcards++” with the ability to import Quizlet sets. Created by Jason Lustig; his developer site is here. I am more likely to use this iPhone version of the flashcards, since it is an activity I can easily do while commuting.
• There are also two iPhone apps which directly show the alphabet. These two are both useful in different ways. This one, for an extra 99 cents, will let you practice writing the letters on-screen. And this one shows you all forms of each letter.

This list may seem like ridiculous overkill. But I need to see something presented a few different ways to get my head around it, particularly if it’s a totally new subject for me. Also, I’m a very visual person so I find the different formats help. Anyway when the links list got long enough I figured I’d post it for the googling public.