23 topics
Arabic help, starting from the three-letter root
Arabic words are built rather than listed. Nearly every one grows from a three-consonant root threaded through a pattern, so k-t-b yields kataba (he wrote), kitab (book), maktab (office), maktaba (library), katib (writer) and maktub (written). Once you can see the root sitting underneath an unfamiliar word, the dictionary stops being a wall and vocabulary starts arriving in families rather than one item at a time.
Where students get stuck
I cannot find the word I am looking at in the dictionary
Arabic dictionaries are ordered by root, not by the first letter printed on the page, so you have to strip a word back before you look. Peel off the definite article al-, then any prefix from the pattern such as mu-, ma-, ta- or ya-, then endings like -at, -un, -in and the plural -at or -un. What is left is usually three consonants, and that is your entry. Try it on mustashfa: drop mu- and the long vowels and you get sh-f-y, to heal, which is exactly what a hospital is named for.
Sometimes al- is pronounced and sometimes it vanishes
Fourteen of the twenty-eight letters are sun letters, and before them the l of al- assimilates into the following consonant, which then doubles. So al-shams is said ash-shams and al-nur is said an-nur, while al-qamar and al-bayt keep the l because q and b are moon letters. There is no list to memorise if you notice the pattern: sun letters are the ones made with the tongue tip at or near the ridge behind the teeth, the same place the l is made, and the tongue simply does not bother moving twice. The spelling never changes; only the pronunciation does.
Real Arabic text has no vowels on it
Short vowels are written only in the Quran, in children's books and in dictionaries. Everywhere else you get consonants and long vowels, and you supply the rest. That sounds impossible until you realise the pattern is what carries the vowels. Once you know that the shape maCCuC means something acted upon, the bare letters m-k-t-w-b can only be maktub. Reading unvowelled text is therefore not guesswork, it is pattern recognition plus context, and it is a skill that improves fast if you read aloud rather than silently.
How do I say the door of the house?
With idafa, and it is not the construction English trains you to expect. You put the two nouns side by side, possessed first: bab al-bayt. The first noun in that chain never takes al- and never takes nunation, even though it is definite in meaning, because it borrows its definiteness from the second noun. Adding al- to the first term is one of the most common written errors, and it turns the phrase into something ungrammatical rather than merely awkward. Chains can run longer too, and only the last noun ever carries the article.
Which Arabic am I actually learning?
Modern Standard Arabic is what school courses, newspapers and news broadcasts use, and it is nobody's mother tongue. At home people speak Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf, Iraqi or Maghrebi Arabic, which differ in everyday vocabulary, in negation and in how verbs are conjugated. This is why a student with a high mark can be lost at a relative's dinner table. The answer is not to abandon one for the other. Build MSA for reading, writing and assessment, then add the dialect your family or your community actually speaks on top of it.
What's covered
Arabic topics you can work through with a tutor, generate practice on, or turn into flashcards and a study plan.
Script and sound
- The 28 letters and their four joined shapes
- Short vowels, sukun, shadda and tanwin
- Sun and moon letters after al-
- Emphatic consonants and the ayn, ha and qaf set
- Handwriting and letter joining
Roots, patterns and word building
- Three-consonant roots and their patterns
- Verb Forms I to X and what each one adds
- Sound plurals and broken plurals
- Active and passive participles
- Verbal nouns (masdar)
Sentence structure
- Nominal and verbal sentences
- Idafa possessive chains
- Case endings and irab
- Non-human plurals taking feminine singular agreement
- Negation with la, ma, lam and lan
Registers of Arabic
- Modern Standard Arabic for school and news
- Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf and Maghrebi dialects
- Classical and Quranic vocabulary
- Choosing a register for an oral assessment
Skills and assessment
- Reading unvowelled passages aloud
- Listening to news audio and dialect speech
- Paragraph and essay writing
- Building vocabulary by root family
Arabic questions
Is it teaching Modern Standard Arabic or a dialect?
Whichever you ask for, and it will tell you which one it is using. Course work almost always means Modern Standard Arabic, so that is the default for writing, grammar and assessment practice. If you want to talk the way your relatives in Cairo or Beirut talk, say so and it will switch, and it can show you the same sentence in both so you can see exactly where the two part company.
Can I practise speaking Arabic out loud with it?
You can hold a live spoken conversation with it in Arabic and it will reply by voice, at whatever speed you ask for. It can stay in Arabic for the whole session or switch to English the moment you get stranded. It does not measure your accent or produce a score for it, because that is not something the product does. Any comment on how you sounded comes back as talk, not as a reading on a meter.
Can it read the Arabic on my worksheet?
Hold the sheet up to the camera and it will read the Arabic back to you, vowelled or not, and it can work through a passage line by line while you follow along. Sharing your screen works the same way for a PDF. Handwriting is harder than print, especially where letters run together, so confirm what it read before you build an answer on top of it.
Will it just translate my homework passage for me?
It will not hand back a finished translation to copy out. Ask about a line you cannot crack and you get the root under the difficult word, the pattern it is sitting in, and the grammar the sentence is testing, which is what the exercise is actually for. Once you have written your own version it will check it and tell you where the case endings or the idafa went wrong.
Stuck on arabic right now?
Talk it through out loud, share your screen, and watch it worked out step by step on a whiteboard.
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