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Learning to type in Arabic - gasp!

AndrewPenney
New in Town
Posts: 10
Joined: May 7th, 2008 9:11 pm

Learning to type in Arabic - gasp!

Postby AndrewPenney » May 13th, 2008 1:06 am

Hello. I have an extremely basic (and shaky) "knowledge" of the Arabic characters, including the ligatures but NOT including the vowel marks. My only reference up to now has been John Mace's "Beginner's Arabic Script" (2003), published under the "Teach Yourself" imprint.

A few days ago this Auntie decided to have a go at typing in Arabic. I'm really enjoying that, on the whole, but the process of going through my textbook again and trying to type (rather than hand-write) the examples has revealed some difficulties which I'd like to share with Timothy et al (in the hopes that APOD101 can help to resolve them in their lessons on script):

1. I was startled to discover that the "miim" ligatures are handled differently by my Mac's Arabic character input whatsit, cf the way they appear in my textbook. NB: Timothy has assured me that this is not a problem, as long as I can read it.

Thanks!

2. Some difficulties typing "shaddas"; they don't always appear in what I have typed. Here Timothy has assured me that it is probably a fonts issue. Okay, no problem.

3. When I type a final "yaa", the two little dots don't appear. Again Timothy gave a full answer, which is a bit too advanced for me to understand, but once again it sounded reassuring.

4. Now that I'm looking at different kinds of fonts for the first time -- the APOD101 standard font, the font used in my textbook, and the font that my Mac produces -- I am noticing a greater degree of variation between them than I had anticipated. Eg. I have difficulty deciding which character a "hamza" belongs to. Usually this is when there is an alif in the vicinity of a "yaa" .

5. When I toggle between US input and Arabic input, the alignment sometimes seems to get stuck, making it impossible for me to complete my sentence as a single line.

6. This last one is actually a language issue, rather than a typing/fonts issue, but I think Tim won't mind if I put it in anyway: When a single-character word like و or ل or ب is joined to the definite article "Al" and then to a word, I don't have a confident grip on when to drop an "alif". I definitely need some practice and guidance there.

On the whole, trying to type Arabic is quite smooth, even exhilarating. I definitely recommend it, even if your knowledge of Arabic script is still shaky (like mine). Oh yes, I was happily surprised that in my Mac's default font, the characters "miim" and "haa" are actually much clearer, much easier to tell apart. And the dot for the "nun" is slightly higher above the character when it is being written in the "tooth" format, which makes it that much easier to recognize the character. Yay!

I'm still working my way through my textbook, and will post any further observations here. Thanks!
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