Language Learning

Diacritics in Arabic (2) In the previous lesson, you learned that Arabic certainly has vowels, but they are not written, especially in Modern Standard Arabic, because they are diacritical, i.e. not actual letters. These vowels are called short vowels or الْحَرَكَاتُ الْقَصِيرَة al-Harakaat al-qaSiirah. Besides them, there are other diacritical marks. What are they? This lesson…

Diacritics in Arabic (1) Is there a word in English without a vowel? No. Linguistically, there cannot be a word/syllable without a vowel/syllabic consonant (i.e., a consonant that has some features of a vowel sound). Vowels help us divide words into syllables. Besides, it is articulatorily difficult to move from one consonant to another. Therefore, vowels aid the movement/tran…

Transliteration of Arabic Letters Translation of Arabic letters is not recommended. However, in the initial stages of learning, using transliteration is inevitable and sometime useful. It facilitates transition from the pure beginner stage to the upper-beginner stage; plus, it speeds up learning. This lesson presents the actual pronunciation of Arabic sounds in English sounds,…

Connecting Arabic Letters (2)  Connecting Arabic letters is the focus of this lesson, namely the last fifteen letters of the alphabet. In the previous lesson, you came to know how the first fifteen Arabic letters are joined to other letters. You also learned that there are six letters that never join to letters that follow them. They are ا, د, ذ, ر, ز, and و. In this lesson yo…

Connecting Arabic Letters (1) Connecting Arabic letters is the focus of this lesson. Arabic is a cursive language; its letters must be joined to form words. This entails that they change their shapes. The change in shape is not straightforward, as a letter can have three different shapes: one at the beginning of the word, one in the middle of the word, and one at the end of th…

The Arabic Alphabet (2)  Arabic letters and long vowels are the focus of this lesson. In previous lesson, you learned the Arabic letters and their pronunciation which varies according to the short vowels (al-ħarakaat al-qaSiirah, الْحَرَكَاتُ الْقَصِيرَة) that accompany them. For example, we pronounce the letter ل as لَ la, لِ, li, or لُ lu. What if long vowels follow the lett…