Thanks for the very complete answer, and sorry for the terrible typing/ writing! I really have to find a way to see what’s on the keyboard overlay. Again, thanks Tim.

kathiir or katiir? hmmm…the truth is I almost always hear kathiir pronounced katiir.

Although ‘afDal does follow the pattern for comparisons (that’s why we included it), the adjective faDiil has a more specific usage than “good”. As I understand it, faDiil is how you would describe a religious leader, and my Hans Wehr dictionary has the entry “outstanding, eminent, very good, first-rate, excellent; distinguished, deserving; learned, erudite” with a related word faDiila meaning moral excellence, virtue, merit.

I believe ‘afDal as we used it in the dialogue comes from the verb faDDala meaning “to prefer”.

Plurals are my personal weak point because I learned a couple hundred singular nouns before finding out that many plurals don’t follow the common rules. So here’s a head’s up:

There are three types of plurals: masculine sound plurals, feminine sound plurals, and broken plurals.

We covered feminine sound plurals: lugha, lughaat
Masculine sound plurals are 2 or 3 lessons after this one.
Broken plurals will be discussed individually as they come up in the vocab.

Dagag -
We’ve been de-emphasizing the verb “to be” because it is not used as often in Arabic as in other languages. But after 20 or so lessons I guess it is time to formally introduce كان and the types of expressions it is used in.

Thanks everybody for the feedback and suggestions.
[rtl]شكرا جزيلا![/rtl]

أكثر كثير

I really am incredibly short-sighted. To see the accents on the keyboard viewer, I have to maximize the display until it covers half the screen! To view the pdfs (even though the font is now bigger, thanks APOD101) I have to zoom in two or even three times. But that’s just me… Again, thanks.

I really like this lesson

If we’re requesting lesson topics, how about the past tense “to be”
كون
?

aunti68- I always thought that more was كثير
with three dots instead of two…?
I type arabic on the mac too..I use the keyboard viewer to make sure I hit the correct key.
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keep up the great lessons!

Let me see if I understood the grammar point of this lesson. Typing in Arabic is absolutely hellish! The “right to left” directionality seems to be unstable on my Mac. And I’m not even entirely sure what I’m typing, because the accents on my keyboard map are too small for me to read.

Here goes:

[rtl]أغصر غصير[/rtl]

[rtl]أطول طويل[/rtl]

[rtl]أفظل فظيل [/rtl]

[rtl]أكتر كتير[/rtl]

‘aqsar (”shorter”) is formed from qasiir,
‘aTwal (”longer”/ “taller”) is formed from Tawiil,
‘afDal (”better”) is formed from faDiil, and (hopefully!)
‘aktar (”more”) is formed from katiir?

If I may update my “wish list”: I so hope you will revisit and reinforce the topic of duals/ plurals covered in the previous two lessons (ie, 12 and 13).

For example, the examples given in the “What Time Is It?” lesson — eg. “lugha - lughataan - lughaat” — were extremely useful for helping me to understand the point first made in the earlier lesson (”How Much Does It Cost?).

But they also made me aware of some gaps in my understanding. For example, I can see how diinaaraan is formed from diinaar, but I’m not so sure about the plural, danaaniir, which seems to have an extra “nun” ن

Thank you APOD101 for everything you do for us. I really appreciate the vocab flashcards feature, now that the selection menu is so rich (unvowelled, vowelled, romanised, English, even audio!).