At Champolu, we provide a lot of free materials to help you learn Arabic. In this article, you can find a list of the free materials we have. Indeed, you don’t have to pay a lot of money (or any money) to get started to learn Arabic.
List of Free eBooks to learn Arabic
Arabic Cheat Sheet: This is a good starting point to the grammar of Modern Standard Arabic. It covers many topics with many examples and visualizations. It has an interactive version, where you can listen to the example. Also, you can download it as a PDF file from here.
Arabic Reading Guide: If you cannot read Arabic script, this guide can help you. It explains all the alphabet and diacritics, and helps you sound out Arabic words. Download from here.
Word of the day: You need to keep working consistently on building your vocabulary. These word of the day Facebook posts help you with a new word each day.
Vocabulary sheets: These are different sheets to learn vocabulary for different topics, in different varieties of Arabic. This is a sheet for basic vocabulary of Modern Standard Arabic.
Word of the day: Here you can find a list of word of the day posts, that we publish on our Facebook page.
Noun Phrases in Arabic: One of the things that shows your command of grammar is how to build a noun phrase. This interactive lesson helps you get a full understanding on noun phrases, and how to build and understand them.
Which Arabic to learn Guide: Arabic has different varieties. There is Modern Standard Arabic and many dialects in different Arab countries. This guide helps you understand the difference and know what and how to learn. (Coming Soon)
List of Free Arabic Learning Apps
You cannot learn a language without practice and consistency. Therefore, one of our goals is to build apps that can help you with this to learn more effectively. Here is a list of our apps:
ALIF (Arabic Learning Is Fun): ALIF helps you learn Arabic reading, vocabulary, verbs and grammar in a methodological and fun way. You can go to the app here. It is still in the development phase, so your feedback is greatly appreciated.
Arabic Word Search: To polish your vocabulary and reading skills, you can play this simple game. Each word search has a theme, where you need to find.
List of Free Videos to learn Arabic
You can learn a lot by watching a video. Here are some of the playlists we have. In these playlists, you can get more skills in Arabic reading, grammar, and listening to actual media. For more, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Arabic Reading Video Playlist
Arabic Grammar Playlist
Alice videos with Arabic and English subtitles
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Learning noun phrases in Arabic (or in any language) is a crucial part of building a sentence. A noun is a word that refers to an object, person, or concept. Therefore, a noun phrase is a structure that is based on a noun. In this lesson, we will learn how to build and use noun phrases in Arabic, together with 5 grammar topics that we will go through in the next 10 minutes. You can listen to all examples marked with an audio icon on the interactive lesson.
Suppose that you have the noun “book”, there are different ways of using a noun phrase with it. For example, you can say “a book”, “the book”, or “this book”. Also, you can combine it with an adjective, such as “a new book” or “the old book”. In terms of possession, you can use a possessive pronoun such as “my book/his book”. In addition, it can be part of a genitive expression, such as “The teacher’s book”, “the law book”, or “the book of grammar”.
What is common among all these structures? They can all be used in similar contexts and in similar grammatical roles. For example, you can say “I saw a book” or “I saw this new book” as an object of the sentence. Also, you can use it as the subject of a sentence “The new book fell on the floor” or “the teacher’s book fell on the floor”.
The bottom line is that: noun phrases in Arabic are essential parts of the sentence. However, understanding and using them usually spans different grammar topics. Such topics include: definite and indefinite nouns, adjectives, demonstratives, possessives and genitive expressions. Luckily, we cover all of these topics in our course “Basic Arabic Grammar” on Udemy.
Learn and practice building Noun Phrases in Arabic
For now, let’s start practicing how to build simple noun phrases in Arabic. Here are the examples for the five types of structures, corresponding to different grammar topics.
Examples for noun phrases in Arabic – for the word kitaab = book
Notice that there are five types of noun phrases we are using here. The first is single noun, whether indefinite or definite (preceded by al- ال). Then we have noun phrases combining nouns and adjectives. In this case, it is important to also notice that if the noun is definite (i.e. has al- prefix), the adjective has to have al- prefix as well. Then, we have noun phrases with demonstratives (e.g. this), and in this case the noun has to be definite, and consequently the adjective, if any.
The next type is noun phrases with possessive pronouns (e.g. my/his), where the word itself has to be indefinite (without al- prefix), but grammatically it becomes definite by adding the possessive pronoun/suffix. The last type is for genitive expressions, indicating that something belongs to something or someone. In this case, the noun for the thing that belongs is indefinite, while the other noun is definite.
Study these examples well. Do you see the patterns? Also, open the link to the interactive lesson and listen to the audio for each example. Try to repeat what you hear. This way, you will start to develop your listening and speaking skills. To further enhance your grammar skills, you will need to practice. In the following image, you will see empty templates, where we removed the noun “book” and its equivalent from the examples. Now it is your turn to try new words. Use the words indicated above, as much as you can, to build new noun phrases.
Noun Phrase templates – use them to build simple phrases in Arabic
What about feminine words?
As you may know, nouns in Arabic have gender: either male or female. In the examples above, noun phrases were based on the noun “book”, and other nouns of male gender in the exercises. Does it make a difference if we use a word of feminine gender? Yes it does. First, for a feminine word, the adjective has to be also feminine. In many cases, we do this by adding taa2 marbootah (this letter: ة ـة , a letter that sounds as “h” at the end of the word).
Noun phrases for a feminine word “fikrah = idea”
Now you get the idea. The only prominent difference involves words ending with taa2 marbooTah. If such words have a possessive suffix, this taa2 marbooTah becomes a normal taa2, in both writing and pronunciation. However, in case of genitive, where the word for the thing that belongs is followed by a word for what it belongs to; and in this case, the taa2 marbooTah is still written, but its pronunciation becomes a regular taa2.
Now also do your practice by filling the templates with other feminine words.
Practice building noun phrases with feminine words
Going further
It is important to know that Arabic grammar is highly complex. There are different complexities when learning Modern Standard Arabic and when learning dialects, so it is important to learn the differences. There are so many topics which are interrelated and can be tackled on different levels of sophistication. That’s why the focus of our lessons is to go as simple as possible. You don’t need to study dozens of other topics just to learn the topic at hand. Just understand it well, practice it as much as you can, and then it will give you a useful piece of the puzzle, and a useful tool to help you navigate the complexity of the language. Good luck and keep learning! Please leave any questions you have in the comments or on our social media.
A few days ago the last episode of Marvel’s Moon Knight series was released. The story and acting were quite good, but there was an aspect that many people liked. It is basically how Egypt, and its civilization and culture were portrayed. One significant aspect of Egyptian culture was the choice of the songs used in the intro and ending of each episode, as well as those that served as background music. As language learners, we may be curious about what these songs actually say, so in this post, we will cover a number of these songs, with their lyrics and explanation.
Marvel’s Moon Knight Series
Nagat – ba7lam ma3aak
This song appeared in the first episode while the main character was waiting for his romantic date. The song itself is quite romantic, but its words portrays some interesting picture, which apparently have some significance in a later episode (No spoilers here 🙂 ). The singer of this song is Nagat (or Nagat al-Sagheerah, the little Nagat, apparently to distinguish her from another singer called Nagat).
Song by Nagat – I dream with you – ba7lam ma3aak – بحلم معاك
ba7lam ma3aak lyrics
These are the lyrics of the song.
I Dream with you
ba7lam ma3aak
بحلم معاك
I dream with you .. of a ship
ba7lam ma3aak … be-safeenah
باحلم معاك.. بسفينة
and a harbour .. to anchor us
we be-meenaa .. terasseenaa
وبمينا….ترسينا
and sail again
we-neba77ar taanee
ونبحّر تاني
the wind resists ..and i found you
el-ree7 te3aaned … we-ala2eek
الريح تعاند … وألاقيك
in your eyes .. and your hands
fee 3enaik .. we-eedaik
في عينيك …..وإيديك
my shore and my safety
shhaTTee we amaanee
شطي وأماني
the whole world
el-3aalam kolloh
العالم كله
with its secrets
be-asraaroh
بأسراره
living with me
3aayesh wayyaayaa
عايش ويايا
living inside me
3aayesh gowwaayaa
عايش جوايا
as long as you’re .. in the journey with me
Tool ma-enta … fee el-re7lah ma3aayaa
طول ما انت ..في الرحلة معايا
my name and your name .. my darling
esmak we esmee … ya 7abeebee
اسمك واسمي…. يا حبيبي
my town .. and my story
madentee … we-7ekaaytee
مدينتي…… وحكايتي
my home and my roving
sakanee we-ter7aalee
سكني وترحالي
the whole world
el-3aalam kolloh
العالم كله
with its secrets16
be-asraaroh
بأسراره
living with me
3aayesh wayyaayaa
عايش ويايا
living inside me
3aayesh gowwaayaa
عايش جوايا
as long as you’re .. in the journey with me
Tool ma-enta … fee el-re7lah ma3aayaa
طول ما انت ..في الرحلة معايا
Lyrics are adapted from Lyrics translate website
Ahmed Saad – el-molook (the kings)
This song appeared in the outro of the second episode. It belongs to a genre of music in Egypt called mahraganaat (literally means “carnivals”). This kind of music was at first mainly the music of more certain areas of cairo (manaatiq sha’beyyah = literally means popular areas but refer to more crowded and poorer areas). However, this music spread in popularity everywhere. It is similar to rap music in terms of some focus on “dissing” (or expressing disrespect) to other unnamed rivals. Of course there are also carnivals about romantic love and others about contemplating life and human nature. However, this song “el-melook” belongs to the first category, with a message of “we are better than you”.
Song by Ahmed Saad Ft. 3enaba and double Zuksh – the kings- el-molook – الملوك
El-melook lyrics
Here are the lyrics of the song
The Kings
الملوك
[Singer: 3enaba]
[عنبة]
I can see non of you
anaa mesh shaayef feekom 7add
أنا مش شايف فيكم حد
y’all bunch of boys, wheedling for a living
entoo 3eyaal 3aayshah 3alaa el-7akk
إنتوا عيال عايشين ع الحك
Everyone knows that y’all are miniscule
koll el-naas 3arfaakoo 3al-2ad
كل الناس عارفاكوا ع القد
Everyone knows that i’m fierce
koll el-naas 3aarfah enne ghasheem
كل الناس عارفة إني غشيم
Never needed backup
3omree fee yoam maa e7tagt le-7add
عمري في يوم ما أحتجت لحد
Not bragging, swear to god it’s true.
mesh tafkheem wallaahee begadd
مش تفخيم و الله بجد
Like a lion, standing in front of everyone
waa2ef west el-koll asad
واقف وسط الكل أسد
Wasn’t meant1 to be mean
maa etrabbet-sh ennee ab2aa la2eem
ما أتربتيش إنى أبقى لئيم
When it’s serious, i got the missiles (name of a band)
fee el-tanfeez 3andee el-Sawaareekh
في التنفيذ عندى الصواريخ
I am 3enab from mars, dude
anaa 3ennaab yasta el-marreekh
أنا عناب ياسطى المريخ
In my wars i use RPGs
west 7oroobee baDrab bawaazeek
وسط حروبي بضرب بوازيك
In my county, i make history
west belaadee bakteblee tareekh
وسط بلادي بكتبلي تاريخ
[Singer: Young Zuksh]
[يانج زوكش]
Dude,
7abeebee
حبيبى
Papa,
baabaa
بابا
Here comes the gang
7aDarnaa gainaa 3eSaabah
حضرنا جينا عصابة
We live…
3eshnaa
عيشنا
Modestly
basaaTah
بساطة
You’ll make it, if determined
hatenga7 law feeh eraadah
هتنجح لو فى إراده
Never needed support, i am on my own (Alone)
ma7tagtesh 7add, anaa saaned nafsee alone
Alone ما احتاجتش حد أنا ساند نفسى
Ringing and buzzing daily, is my phone.
arqaam betrenn be-tezenn 3ala el-telephone
أرقام بترن بتزن على التليفون
Now that i made it, they love me, took my side!
7abboonee lammaa weSelt etlawwenoo 100 loan
حبونى لما وصلت اتلونوا 100 لون
Your shot hits the post, mine scores a goal
kortak teegee 3aarDah kortee teegee goan
كورتك تيجى عارضه كورتى بتيجى جوون
[Singer: Ahmed Saad]
[أحمد سعد]
hush hush hush hush.
sokoot sokoot sokoot sokoot
سكوت سكوت سكوت سكوت
The kings, kings, kings, kings are here
gatt el-molok molook molook
جت الملوك ملوك ملوك ملوك
There is no escape, escape escape
mafeesh horoob horoob horoob
مفيش هروب هروب هروب
from the lions, the lions
men el-osood men el-osood
من الأسود من الأسود
No sales talk!
e7naa mesh be-nebee3 kalaam
إحنا مش بنبيع كلام
We get to the point!
e7naa naas doghree we-tamaam
إحنا ناس دوغرى و تمام
(We) do not care who says what
mesh shaaghelnaa meen ellee 2aal
مش شاغلنا مين اللى قال
The envious have no place
el-7aqood malhoosh makaan
الحقود مالهوش مكان
[Singer: Young Zuksh]
[يانج زوكش]
Mess with me, you get a taste of lunacy
tenkosh-nee teshoof genaan
تنكشنى تشوف جنان
People would gather2
we-tetlam el-geraan
وتتلم الجيران
God blessed me with a wise tongue
rabbak eddaanee 7ekmah fee el-lesaan
ربك إدانى حكمة فى اللسان
(with which) I’d win battles
akol-kom bel-kalaam
أكلكم بالكلام
Yang Zuksh is from El-Salam
yough zoksh gaay men el-salaam
يانج زوكش جاي من السلام
Do not trust me
akhook malhoosh amaan
أخوك مالهوش أمان
I’m decent, so don’t yell “man” at me
anaa 3ala el-mazboot tamaam fa mat2olleesh yaa man
أنا على المظبوط تمام فمتقوليش يا مان
hitting the gas, wining all trophies, bottled poison, quenched their thirst!
anaa daayes we faayez kesebt kol el-gawaayez .. 7aTTait el-semm fee azaayez .. sherebt koll ellee 3aayez
انا دايس و فايز كسبت كل الجوايز حطيط السم فى ازايز شربت كل اللى عايز
I want you to understand me, distinguish! (as i’m doing), and know what’s right!
Stay away, i vigorous, from Cairo, yet stronger than any foreigner
eb3ed 3annee 3ashaan anaa ghabee, qaaheraawee we-agmad men el-agnabee
ابعد عنى علشان انا غبى قاهراوى و اجمد من الاجنبى
Dude, your planet is different from mine
kawkabkoo yasTaa ghair kawkabee
كوكبكوا ياسطى غير كوكبي
Alone, can drive an army of Tatars
beToolee wa7dee asoo2 tataar
بطولى وحدي اسوق تاتار
[Singer: Young Zuksh]
[يانج زوكش]
I’m cool, i’m cool, i’m chic
anaa gaamed anaa gaamed anaa sheek
انا جامد انا جامد انا شيك
If you have money, a car gets anywhere
law ma3aak feloos 3arabeyyah be-temashsheek
لو معاك فلوس عربيه بتمشيك
Bro, befriend no hobos, it’s a given
ma3roof ya zemeelee ma-teSaa7eb-sh halaafeet
معروف يازميلى متصحبش هلافيت
(Are you) Cultured? Welcome aboard
law betefham fee el-oSool ahlan beek
لو بتفهم فى الاصول اهلا بيك
We’d want you
neshtereek
نشتريك
You’ll be on top
teb2aa foa2
تبقى فوق
Gray-haired?, meh, it’s just a colour.
we-law yesheeb el-sha3r loan
و لو يشيب الشعر لون
Till the end we’ll keep up
mekammeleen le-aakher yoam
مكملين لآخر يوم
Success is hard, requires no sleep
aSl el-nagaa7 dah sa3b mesh me7taag el-noam
أصل النجاح ده صعب مش محتاج النوم
Sabah – Sa3aat Sa3aat (Sometimes … sometimes)
This song appeared at the end of episode 5. A very melancholic song by the amazing Lebanese singer and actress Sabah. The song portrays a complex psychological state, about a person oscillating between feelings of unexplained happiness and sadness.
Song by Sabah – sometimes sometimes – saa3aat saa3aat – ساعات ساعات
When learning Arabic, it is important to have a clear understanding of your goals. Otherwise, you may spend a lot of time, money and effort without a satisfactory outcome. The first thing to know is that there are two different types of Arabic. The first is Formal language (known as fuSHaa, meaning the most eloquent). FuSHaa includes both classical Arabic and the more popular Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)d. MSA is used mainly in written and formal materials. On the other hand, the informal/colloquial language is mainly spoken, with different dialects and varieties across different countries. In this post, you’ll see the different possible goals associated with each type. Then, you will know which type of Arabic to focus on, so that you can achieve your goals.
Two types of Arabic: Formal/fuSHaa/Modern Standard Arabic – and dialects
Suppose that you need to learn Arabic to read some official documents or read a book in Arabic. In this case, it makes sense only to learn MSA. Otherwise, if you want to:
watch Arabic speaking media
listen to songs or other cultural production
then in most cases you will need to study one dialect or another.
Which type of Arabic to learn?
An ideal learning strategy would be to combine both types. In fact, this is what most Arabic native speakers do. They just switch between the two types according to context.
What is fuSHaa: classical Arabic + Modern Standard Arabic
In order to understand Arabic better, it i important to make a few distinctions, and to see some overlaps.
The first distinction is between Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic. Although Arabic speakers call both of them al-fuSHaa (or the most eloquent), classical Arabic refers mainly to Arabic used in literary and religious texts many centuries ago, while Modern Standard Arabic is the Arabic that is used nowadays for most of formal contexts. Here are a few points from this figure: 1- There is a lot of overlap between MSA and classical Arabic. The grammar is basically identical
2- many words in ancient texts (classical Arabic) that are not used nowadays (MSA)
3- many modern words that were coined to reflect many areas of technology, economics, business and so on
4- Some words had a certain meaning in classical Arabic and a different meaning in MSA. For example the word “sayyaarah” was used in Quran to mean “a caravan”, but in modern use, it means “a car/au automobile”
FuSHaa is the combination of classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic
The relationship between fuSHaa and dialects
And there are a few important points about the distinction between fuSHaa and dialects:
1- There are different dialects for the different Arabic speaking countries
2- Some dialects can be grouped together, like Levantine, Maghreb, and Gulf groups since these dialects are similar to each other
3- Each dialect has an overlap with fuSHaa, many words and verbs either are the same as in MSA, or has an origin from classical Arabic
4- Each dialect has overlaps with other dialects, dialects with closer geographical proximity have greater overlap
5- Dialects are also influenced by other local languages, such as Egyptian Arabic being influenced by Coptic, and Maghreb dialects by Tamzight
6- Dialects are also influenced by foreign languages, such as French, English, Turkish … etc
Dialects can be grouped together, showing the overlap with fuSHaa and other local and foreign languages
Reading can be considered just one of the skills to learn a language. In fact, it is a very important skill if you are learning the language for any formal purpose: to read documents, read the news, or any content on the web. Learning to read in Arabic is no exception. However, there are some added challenges involved: mainly reading the script. This can be intimidating for some learners, as we can see in this picture.
Image of a bag with Arabic writing that reads that the writing has no purpose but to intimidate those who fear Arabic language
In reality though, learning the script can be accomplished in a very short time. However, is knowing the script enough to be able to “read” Arabic? Of course not: the writing of Albanian also uses almost the same script as English, but can the speakers of English “read” Albanian?
This is where it is important to break down the “reading” into a number of elements, or “skills”. These skills would cover the whole process of “seeing” something written in the language, up to “understanding” what is written. In psychology, these processes are referred to as “cognitive processes”, which involve processing information from different senses and from memory in parallel. Let’s lay out these skills one by one:
1- Main Skill for reading Arabic: Knowing and recognizing letters
You may have seen charts like these, mainly used for teaching children a list of alphabet letters.
Letters of Arabic Alphabet and their names
You may have found songs or rhymes for singing the names of Alphabet letters.
Video of Arabic Alphabet Letters song
How useful are these? Of course, this is an important step that even native speakers go through in order to learn their native written language. However, this is not enough, at least in Arabic. This is because there is one particular feature in the Arabic alphabet: letters take different shapes depending on where they are in the sentence. Therefore, a more sound approach is to learn the shapes of each letter, so that you can recognize it when you see it. Knowing the names of letters, then, would be useful because you will be able to point any letter you recognize with any shape to the name of the letter.
2- Knowing and recognizing diacritics
One peculiar aspect of Arabic writing is that short vowels are not letters. They are actually “diacritics”. These diacritics can be referred to as “harakaat” or “tashkeel”. It is important to point out that diacritics also include elements other than short vowels, such as “shaddah”, which doubles the sound of a letter. These are relatively few, and wouldn’t take long to learn, but it’s important to know how they sound when combined with letters.
Illustration of diacritics, showing how they sound when combined with the letter baa’ (sound “b”), an important skill for Arabic rading
3- Being able to “sound out” the words
Knowing letters and diacritics is important, and by using them you can go letter by letter in a word: identify the letter sound and the applied diacritics, and there you go: you can sound out a whole word in Arabic! Isn’t that great?
Illustration of how to “sound out” a word given the letters and diacritics, as an essential skill for reading Arabic
It is great; however, there is bad news here. In most Arabic writing, diacritics are almost non-existent. This can be challenging, even sometimes to native Arabic speakers. Here is where we start to apply what we have learned on actual words. When you are learning a new word, you need to pay special attention to how it is written. Try to associate the letters with the sound of the word. And by all means, when you’re learning a new word, make sure to have a resource that allows you to listen to how it is pronounced by an actual native speaker. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to know the correct pronunciation. When you learn many new words with their correct pronunciation, you will be able to formulate patterns for sounding out any word you read.
4- Learning “Function Words” for reading Arabic words
Moving to actual sentences, you will find that a large number of words (in any language) consist mainly of what is known as “function words”. What are function words? Just have a look at the first sentence in this paragraph and see the words in bold. These words can be articles, pronouns, prepositions, question words, and similar words. In linguistics, these words are referred to as “function words”, because they are mainly there for a grammatical function. In Arabic, there are many such words: such as articles, personal pronouns, possessive pronouns, relative pronouns, demonstratives … etc. Some of these are not actually words, but rather prefixes or suffixes. Knowing these words helps you in two ways. First, you are able to recognize many of the words within the sentence. Second, you are able to understand the structure of the sentence.
5- Identifying “Parts of Speech”
All human languages have different word types: such as nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs and more. It is absolutely important to know what is the word type of each word in the sentence you’re reading. One helpful aspect in this regard is knowing the function words. For example, if you know that the function word “in” is a preposition, it is unlikely that the word coming after is a verb.
Of course sentences can be very complex, but function words can give a broad structure of the sentence. Knowing the word types helps complement this structure. For example, saying “the girl is beautiful”, is different from “the beautiful girl”. So knowing which word is a noun, and which is an adjective can allow us to know both the content of the word and what it roughly means (even if we don’t know the exact noun or adjective), and also the structure of the sentence and understanding what is being written.
6- Learn “Content Words” for reading Arabic
In early childhood education in elementary schools, teachers sometimes teach children “sight word”. These are words that appear frequently and are useful in reading. These words can include function words that we talked about, and they can also include words related to a particular domain, such as the words used in story books. This is quite important here, because any language consists of tens and maybe hundreds of thousands of words. It is unreasonable to expect to know, especially for a non-native speaker, the majority of these words. What should we expect instead?
One thing to expect is to attain knowledge of words related to a particular subject, task or field: such as the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs used in the context of math, literature, art, news or so forth. Can we know all words for all the fields? Perhaps, but perhaps it is better to focus on the vocabulary of mainly the field you are interested in.
The other thing to expect is a very interesting statistical law. The name of this law is Zipf’s law, which indicates, in plain terms, that if you sort all the words in a language by their frequency, the first few words would take up a very large percentage of all the words in any given text. For example, the first word can occur 20% of the time in any text (think of the word “the” in English for example), then the one after will be perhaps 12%, and so forth.
How to make use of this frequency distribution?
This way, you will find that the first 100 words in the language can occur like 50% of the time in any given context. Of course, many of these words are function words. Still, if we move to content words, we will find that the higher frequency words account for a large portion of any text. For example, you will encounter the noun “question” or the verb “ask” much more frequently than you will encounter words such as “Accismus” or “aggrandize”.
Zip’s law word frequency distribution in English
What’s the main take of this? Focus on a particular field, start with the most frequent words in it.
7- Learn Morphology skills: building words
Finally, one of the very important skills for reading Arabic is to understand its morphology (the science of word building). Arabic words form according to “templates”. Templates consist of two things:
Root: any word in Arabic has a root (usually consisting of 3 letters)
Wazn: (literally means “weight”): any word has a format of how to add other letters to the root.
For example, the word “maktab”, which means office, has the root of KTB (the sound of “k”, “t”, and “b”). The wazn would show how to add additional letters to the word. In this case, it would be maktab, with the addition of the letter “m”, and the vowels “a”. This is an advanced topic, but it is important to learn it at some point. It will make many things make sense, including topics such as making plurals, and conjugations for certain verbs, and so forth.
roots appear in verb conjugation
How to build your skills for reading Arabic?
At Champolu, we provide many learning solutions to boost your skills for reading Arabic using Champolu Method. You can start to use the free app ALIF-laam to practice your alphabet, diacritics, and sounding out skills.
It might be helpful if you want to take the Udemy course “Basic Arabic Reading” to give you a clear explanation of these topics.
In addition, you may want to start with learning the basics of Arabic grammar and function words. As you have seen in the article, function words can be very important for understanding what is written. You can take the course “Basic Arabic Grammar” to start learning.
Also make sure to subscribe to Champolu social media, where you will constantly find new materials to learn more vocabulary and grammar.
Learning to read in Arabic can be challenging. In this article, we will talk about the challenges. In addition, check our simple guides for learning how to read in Arabic.
Why is Arabic so hard to learn?
If you type in Google “Why is Arabic …”, the autocomplete will suggest these searches which people do.
Why is Arabic …
Indeed Arabic is important and beautiful but it can also be hard to learn. Let’s explore this further.
One of the reasons for the difficulty of Arabic is that the writing is “backwards”; i.e. its direction is from right to left. Therefore, if you want to learn Arabic, you will need to be able to read from right to left.
There are other challenges surrounding reading Arabic script, which are explained in the video here.
Why is reading Arabic Challenging?
In a nutshell, the challenges for reading Arabic are:
Direction of Writing (right-to-left)
Letters are attached together
Letters take different shapes depending on their position in a word (beginning, middle, end, or separate)
Diacritics which guide the pronunciation of Arabic letters
How to Read Arabic in English Letters?
An important consideration when learning Arabic is that not all Arabic letters have an equivalent English sound. That’s why there can be different ways to for writing Arabic in English/Latin letters, which is sometimes referred to as romanization. Apart from the more Academic ways of writing Arabic, a popular way is known as Franco-Arab, which is how the Arabic speaking internet generation started to write Arabic on computers and the internet in the early days before support to Arabic language was available. In this way of writing, the letters of Arabic with no English equivalent as written as numbers that resemble the shape of the Arabic letter. In Arabic, there are three letters mainly that are written as numbers:
Sixth letter of Arabic the alphabet (the letter ح) is written as 7
Eighteenth letter of the Arabic Alphabet (the letter ع) is written as 3
The letter hamzah ء (which isn’t usually a separate letter in the Aphabet) is written as 2
There are other letters, but these are the most popular ones. You will notice that we have combined challenges here, to know the letters, and to be able to recognize and produce their sound.
Therefore, in this lesson we are providing an intuitive way to learn the alphabet letters, with their names, shapes, sounds, along with examples of each.