The one thing that I believe is saving me from a total flaming crash and burn in Arabic class is that I had a reasonably good grasp of the alphabet before I went in. Interestingly enough, there are a number of books and websites that will teach you Arabic, but virtually every one assumes you know the alphabet first. There's a reason for that as a lot of kids in Islamic countries learn the Arabic alphabet so they can learn Quranic suras for recitation during the daily prayers. So they can read the Qur'an, but they don't know the Arabic. (That's just weird to me.)
So, prior to taking this class, I did a LOT of searching around the Internet to find (free) resources that I could use to learn the alphabet. And by that, I mean more than just alphabet songs on YouTube. That's because Arabic is a totally foreign alphabet for those of us whose languages are based on Greco-Roman alphabets. I am a native English speaker, I know enough Spanish to get myself in trouble, I can read French. I learned a smattering of Latin and Russian and koine Greek. Even though Russian and koine Greek both have slightly strange looking alphabets, most of the letters are similar enough to the Latin alphabet and you can pick up the other ones.
Arabic is not like that at all.
The Latin alphabet, familiar to English readers:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Arabic
ا ب ت ث ج ح خ د ذ ر ز س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ك ل م ن ه و ي
Oh, and those are just the letters by themselves. Most of these letters change form in one way or another when they get smushed together with another letter OR, worse yet, they're one of the several letters that don't connect on the left side to the next letter. Like this:
(I did mention that Arabic is read right-to-left, didn't I?) And then I also didn't mention that while in Classical Arabic (i.e., the language used in the Qur'an and some religious books) the writing uses certain diacritical marks that indicate the "short" vowels, this does not generally exist in modern Arabic for the most part. This has been one reason why I've gotten my kiester pounded in some of the exams, because the program we're using to learn Arabic uses the "harakat" aka diacritics, while the tests do not. ARGH.
Ok, so if I haven't totally scared you off from learning Arabic, which, by the way is a fantastic language with a 1400+ year history, a language in which people were writing high-level grammars at the same time some of my ancestors were sitting in the mead hall and chanting Beowulf, a language that literate Arabic readers can read the ancient documents in from 1400 years ago and DO on a regular basis, a language with some of the most fabulous and fantastic calligraphy out there (and you do want to know what those squiggles say, right?), then let me give you some suggestions and tools on how you can learn the alphabet.
- Noorani Qaidah
The first of these tools is a computerized version of an old standby in the Indo-Pak world, the Noorani Qaidah. In its paper form, it's been used by millions of moms and teachers all over the Indian subcontinent for decades or longer, it's basically a chart of the letters, then the letters with the harakats, then the letters and harakat combined together into words and finally, pronouncing the Arabic in accordance with Quranic recitation.
This link will get you to the first page, which is the alphabet:
Subsequent pages will take you though various aspects of how to pronounce Arabic. It will introduce the various harakat (fathah, kasrah, dammah, etc.) and how they sound. This tool is (unfortunately) best accessed with Internet Explorer (Exploder). By the time you get to page 15, if you've hit all these pages and worked with them, you should have a really good idea of what the Arabic language sounds like, plus you should be able to identify the letters and the harakat. Pages 15 and 16 talk about alif madd, which is a type of alif (letter A) with a squiggle like a Spanish tilde on top. You can probably skip those pages if you're in a hurry, because at that point, this is more a finer point of how to recite the Qur'an rather than learning Arabic. But I still think listening to the words is useful.
- Basic alphabetic explanation
In conjunction with the Noorani Qaidah, above, you also need to read over some VERY basic alphabetic explanation. The Noorani Qaidah introduces these harakat (the little symbols over the letters) and doesn't tell you that one sounds like short A, another like short I, or another like short O/U. You need to read this to get an idea of what's going on here, so I'd strongly suggest at least SKIMMING through this set of lessons. (I'm still looking for a less complex set that used to be out on the web, but this will do.)
More to come.
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