Showing posts with label Arabic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Arabic. Show all posts

Saturday, August 13, 2011

Mastering the Arabic Forms/Measures

If you're learning Arabic (and unless you were raised speaking it, you're never done!), then you've grappled with the enormously difficult system of the Forms (Measures) of the Arabic Verb.

Setting aside the question of the irregular verbs, even the most regular of letters can have up to ten different forms in which to appear.

As a handy reference, here is a presentation the 10 main Arabic Verb Forms. (There are a few extremely rare and now archaic and unused Forms beyond the 10. Don't worry about those.)

While you're just getting started in Arabic, it's important to have a clear chart of the Arabic Verb Forms readily on hand to consult while you're needing to look things up in your dictionary.

The best one I've seen for casual learning purposes are available for sale on the internet by one Snarla Husayn.

She has her chart of Arabic Verb Forms available in the form of a mousepad:



A wall poster:



And even a t-shirt with the Arabic Verb Forms!:



As long as you're buying nifty Arabic learning materials, check out Snarla Husayn's Store at Zazzle, where she has, among other things--

Shaykh Zubayr (get it, Shakespeare in a kafiyah!):



Anyway, what I found while learning Arabic is that the more I surrounded myself with the language constantly, the greater progress I made. And products like these really can help make the language come alive.


Thursday, December 30, 2010

It's All About Vocab

I ask my students, what would they think if they heard someone who didn't know English come up to them as ask "Me Water Drink Want!"

Well? What is this person trying to say? They always assume, correctly, that the answer is "I want to drink water."

And that's why I stress vocabulary over grammar as the primary place to direct your efforts when trying to learn a new language.

The free word lists I give away on my websites are a tool I've used, but there are some other really nice collections I've found that you may find useful.

Arabic
http://arabic.desert-sky.net/vocab.html
http://iteslj.org/v/a/
http://www.madinaharabic.com/Vocabulary/General/html/

Spanish
http://iteslj.org/v/s/
http://www.lingolex.com/spanish.htm

Romanian
I'll be honest, since not many people study Romanian, I think my word list is one of the best free products available. But these people have put together a very nice product:
http://www.happychild.org.uk/freeway/romanian/index.htm

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Getting Back to Basics

No matter how long I have been studying a language, I have found value is sometimes starting all over and going back to basic vocabulary and confirming that I have the most essential words utterly mastered.

For anyone interested in them, I'm making my own personal list of basic vocabulary items available for free.

You can download PDF files of my materials for Spanish, Arabic, and Romanian and free MP3 files of the words at my website.