صباح الخىريا اصدقائي
“Good morning, my friends!”

Wow, it was difficult typing that. (I had to cut and paste some of it.) The Arabic keyboard layout is a challenging one. If possible, could you give us a tutorial on it? It’s hard to know how to form some of the letters (especially with hamza as used in the word “asdiqa’i”).

Shukran jazilan!

It’s pretty exciting to see the course starting . Wow !

I want to second what Bouks said about tutorials. Typing would be nice, but for us absolute beginners out there will you produce a tutorial on the arabic script itself ? Maybe also with videos or flash animations on how to write it ? The “about arabic alphabet” section in the learning center is great, especially because you have the transliteration, but some practice sheets or script diagrams would be nice.

Alternatively, are there some web-sites where I could learn ?

Hello Timothy, Danya and May! Great lesson! You really are a great team, and I can’t wait to see this series develop!
Thank you again for helping us learn Arabic.

Alec, thank you for the keyboard overlay…it’s nicer than the ones I found. Shukran!

Shukran for the links on how to write and read the arabic script.

Dear ArabicPod101 team,

Thank you for this wonderful website. I have been waiting to brush up my basic knowledge of Arabic (from many years ago) via podcast ever since I found out what a language podcast is.

I really want to second Auntie’s request. For me, it’s also very challenging to decipher the Arabic script and the vowel signs in the learning centre, even with my reading glasses on. Please, please increase the font size to make ArabicPod101 a really perfect source for learning Arabic.

Thank you all and keep up the good work.

Hello again. I’d like to make an additional request: Will APOD101 please consider providing a practical “Arabic Typing For Idiots” guide for people like me who already have a very basic knowledge of Arabic script?

I only started learning to type Arabic this weekend. But already I have so many practical questions. Eg. when you type a shadda, do you type it after or before you key in the letter that is supposed to be doubled? And how come the م (mim’s) I type join up in a different way from how it looks in my textbook? Why am I such an idiot?

Eg. If I type mmnn (for mamnun)، I get this: ممنن

P/s: In my textbook, the first م starts above the line, the stroke goes down and then there is a little kink that is the second م …

Auntie, the fact that you are typing in the Arabic script at all means you’ve managed to get past the hard part. مبروك - mabruuk - Congratulations!

Now is the fun part of discovering the many issues of a cursive script with Right-To-Left directionality, combining ligatures, diacritics. Oh yeah, and common western fonts often have incomplete support for the Arabic script.

First of all, الحركات - al-Harakaat - the diacritic vocalization markings are typed after the letter they are associated with. So عَمَّان - ^cammaan - Amman (the capital of Jordan) has the shadda typed after the miim, and the optional fatHa typed after the shadda before moving on to the next letter (’alif).

Traditional Arabic script has some shorthand ways of writing certain letter combinations. I’m currently working on getting some writing lessons for the Learning Center, and I’ll definitely make sure we cover these ligatures.

The reason your miims aren’t combining the same way as your textbook is because of the font you are using on your computer. Some fonts treat ligatures differently from others, particularly the ligatures dealing with miim. Fonts also respond differently to ligatures depending on whether there are vowel markings present between the two letters. It seems to me the only ligature that is well supported is laam-’alif. So I wouldn’t worry if what you are typing doesn’t look exactly like the writing in the textbook. The only thing you should worry about is whether you can read it or not.

The missing dots under the yaa’ could either be the font or it could be another character: ‘alif maqSuura. This is the letter at the end of على - ^cala - on/upon. Many Arabic writers often use the final dotless yaa’, particularly in Egypt. This practice is not correct, but is so common that it even makes its way into popular publications (like the Harry Potter series). It’s quite ambiguous at first, but after you’ve built up a large base vocabulary you should be able to guess the intended letter.

Now, when you start noticing missing Harakaat that you know you’ve typed, it is most likely the font is overlapping the Harakaat on each other or on the letters.

Finally, I suggest always opening and saving your work in the UTF-8 (unicode) encoding. If you work in ISO-whatever (a western encoding), you may open a file with the beautiful poem you composed over several hours turned into @s, angle symbols, and other strange things. (If that happens to you, drop the text file into a web-browser and you might be able to recover your lost text.)

Hope this helps.

P/s: To be honest, two “miim”s in a straight line are easier for me to read that two “miim”s connected by the ligature printed in my textbook. Thanks for the encouragement! I mean it.

As-salam `alaykoum everyone !
Hi from a Moroccan-french guy, I`ve just discovered this website through the koreanclass101. Seems like it`s just started recently.
Good luck
Just one question: how do Near East dialects look like ? I only know Maghreb dialect and I never had the opportunity to speak with someone from Near East.
Thanks !

Dear Nabil:

Lucky you! Some of the finest food I’ve ever eaten in my life is Moroccan-French (Moroccan?) food. I love the cuisine of Mme Fatema Hal, whose restaurant “Mansouria” was always one of my favourite restaurants in Paris. She gave me a copy of her cookbook, “Saveurs et Gestes”, which paints a beautiful picture for people like me of the kind of cooking which only Dadas, mothers, aunts, and grandmothers can do.

Dear Musouka:

I, as a learner with no Arabic background whatsoever, do worry about the diglossia constantly, But I’ll just try my best to be aware of that. Most Arabic-speaking people assume that I’m a Filipina, anyway, not an “overseas Chinese” ! So that reminds me to be open-minded, to try and think critically and basically learn as much as I can, in a discerning spirit.

Hey there, Max!

May says the beginning, “Welcome! My name is May.” The romanization is “Marhaba! Ismi May.” Marhaba = welcome
ismi = my name

Arabic doesn’t use a verb for basic sentences like this. They are called equational sentences; whenever in English you would say “is” “are” “am”, etc., in Arabic you just have a subject and a predicate, no verb. This feels weird at first, but it will become natural to you later.

So May literally says, “Welcome! My name, May.”

Hope this helps!

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