It opens with two extensive introductions to the third edition 7 and 8 pages long respectivelyaddressed to teachers and students. At the end of the volume p. See each listing for international shipping options and costs. Al-Kitaab with CDs included.
Dust jacket, disc or access code may not be included. Syracuse University Press, Lesson 3 online demo. This textbook is structured around the story of Maha and Khalid Abu El-Ila and their family, presented in both Fusha and spoken Egyptian.
Answer Key for Alif Baa: Has a decent bit of marginalia inside. The novelty of the fii edition is the appearance of new characters originating from Syria: Solid binding, all pages and CD are Webinar for Teaching Al-Kitaab 3rd Edition Item in very good condition!
A Textbook for Beginning Arabic by Item in good condition. The spline is tight and NOT creased. Audio and video files are in Mp3 and Mp4 formats, and can therefore be read by any computer or DVD player. Log In Sign Up. This Alif Baa Taa Dot Book is designed for dot markers, bingo daubers, dab markers, and do dot markers. For each letter, there is an illustration of an animal beginning with this letter, to see an example take a look at the book rear cover. Please click on the Author Name - Reem Djawad - to find more Arabic language learning books for kids.
This lovely Alif Baa Taa book will help your kids learn their first Arabic words. Grab your copy today! Also, be sure to click on our name KawkabNour Press to check out other Arabic books for kids! Learning Arabic Letters for kids.
Great letter learning for Children. Learn to write animals and sound the word out. Perfect for beginners ages 3 to 8. Repeating the exercise will develop your accuracy and help you visually memorize the shapes of the Arabic alphabet letters. This rule applies to all languages, even Arabic. Our goal is that your child likes this funny workbook and enjoys practicing all the activities. What does this workbook include?
This workbook includes: 28 Arabic letters For each letter, there are two pages. One page the left one contains one letter wrote in a sizeable non-colored font for coloring.
As adult learners we can speed up this process with visual material as well, but the more you can integrate sound and shape and associate the two together, the faster your progress to fluency in Arabic will proceed. Engage more than one faculty at the same time: Repeat aloud while you are listening, and rather than write silently, say and repeat whatever you are writing out loud.
Listen to the audio and video material and practice writing the letters many times. Whether you are pronouncing new sounds, writing new letters, or studying vocabulary, you should repeat the activity until you can produce the sound or word comfortably and be able to "hear" it in your mind or write it in a shape that you are pleased with.
Remember that you are training your brain and your muscles to do new things, and this takes practice. Make the words you are learning relevant to your life by using them to talk about your world. Personalizing vocabulary is the fastest way to memorize it. Own the sounds too: Once you learn them, they are not foreign sounds, they belong to you. Language is cumulative, and while you are learning new words and expressions, it is important to integrate them with previously learned material.
Pair up each new word with an old one. Using the new to review the old will take some organization, but it will pay off in greater fluency and accuracy. When you learn new words, take the opportunity to work on previously learned sounds. When you learn new letters, go back to old vocabulary to see if you can write any of them in Arabic script.
The idea is to have fun while building skills. Both entail lots of repetition and exercises that build mental and physical strength. Expect to feel tired occasionally. Being tired is a good sign—it means that you are concentrating and learning actively.
Learning language requires exposure, time, and effort. The single most important factor in your success is your belief in your ability to learn Arabic. We wish you a successful and enjoyable learning experience! We ask that you, the instructor, read the Preface to the Student before reading this guide, that you have your students read it at home, and then discuss it with them in class so everyone understands the approach underlying the structure and contents of these materials.
It is crucial that you read through this entire book before teaching it so you can formulate your own vision of what the students can learn by the time they finish: What they will be able to read, write, and most importantly, say.
This vision will affect the way you teach these materials. You also need to be well acquainted with the interactive materials that accompany this textbook, precisely because the students will be using them outside of class more than in class. Students will take their cue from you, the instructor, in the importance they attach to working with these materials and the way they approach them.
The book is designed to work best with the companion website, www. If either you or your students do not have reliable internet access, a DVD is included that contains all of the same audio and video material that is included on the website.
We encourage you to become familiar with all of the features of the website before you begin to teach. Unit 1 provides an overview of Arabic, including the transliteration system that is used to introduce vocabulary that cannot yet be written in Arabic.
In this third edition of Alf Baa, the transliteration system has increased importance because of our decision to introduce vocabulary according to its functionality, not spelling; that is, many words are introduced to the students to be actively learned before they can write them in Arabic. Units 2 through 8 present the alphabet in groups that follow the modern Arabic order, with the exception that 3 and Ls are presented in unit 2.
Each unit contains a number of recorded listening exercises and drills on the alphabet and sound system, including reading, writing, connecting letters, and dictation. Students should complete all of the listening exercises and writing practice exercises at home. In this edition many of the listening drills have been transformed into interactive, autocorrecting exercises that the students will also do at home. This will result in less correcting for the instructor but will increase the importance of the correcting you will do to make sure satisfactory progress is being made.
In describing the sounds, we have avoided technical descriptions, opting instead for a more practical approach that uses tips and exercises that focus on the points of articulation of the sounds. Following the description of each sound, we have provided a brief explanation about the writing of the corresponding letter that is meant to accompany the video showing calligrapher Sayyid El-Shinnawi drawing each of the letters.
Please encourage students to watch these video portions as they work through the book. The materials are designed so that you do not have to waste time explaining the sounds and letters in class. Students should prepare at home and be ready to read and write in class. Teacher's Guide Materials in Alf Baa integrate formal and spoken registers of Arabic and lay the foundation for the approach that is used throughout the AI-Kitaab series.
This third edition of Alf Baa differs from the second edition in several important ways. You will notice the addition of Levantine Arabic scenes, filmed in Damascus, that run parallel to the Egyptian scenes.
A more important change, however, is the way in which the colloquial materials have been incorporated into the pedagogy. In this edition spoken forms of vocabulary are presented alongside formal Arabic forms in writing, and vocabulary lists give students the option of learning a set of words in formal Arabic, Egyptian, or Levantine.
In addition, many of the vocabulary exercises and activities include colloquial words and expressions, and students are given opportunities to practice and activate these forms. We believe that you will be pleased with what your students can do with Arabic by using just a few colloquial expressions and having the freedom to create with the language.
Alf Baa, third edition, gives you, the instructor, more choices. In addition to the letters and sounds, each unit contains vocabulary and dialogues designed to be prepared at home and activated in class. The vocabulary is introduced in formal Arabic as well as in two dialects, and you must choose which of these varieties you will ask students to activate.
Our experience working with multiple varieties in class has demonstrated to us that students have no trouble being exposed to more than one variety of Arabic, as long as they are not held responsible for "purity"—that is, as long as you allow them flexibility to decide which form they want to use.
The main philosophical principles that underlie the design of these materials can be summarized as follows: 1 Arabic is one language, rich in registers and varieties. Each register of Arabic reflects vital parts of Arab culture, so students need to learn formal and informal varieties to understand the language and the culture.
Our decision to include an introduction to colloquial Arabic is also a natural consequence of our desire to use language forms that are appropriate to context. A basic colloquial vocabulary of approximately twenty- five words out of approximately two hundred presented in this book gives learners the tools they need to begin to express and communicate with native speakers in their immediate environment who will not speak to them in formal Arabic.
In this third edition you and your students have new Syrian versions of the colloquial dialogues so you can have a choice of which dialect to teach. We have included formal Arabic vocabulary for those who prefer to work in this register, but we have not recorded dialogues in formal Arabic because of its artificiality in such contexts. This is not the time to worry about the mixing of registers in speech or in writing.
Students' ability to choose appropriate vocabulary for the situation or context will evolve over time. The three crucial speaking skills to develop at this stage are pronunciation of sounds, gender agreement, and correct use conjugation in context of the forms of the verb we have included here. Not only is this an excellent opportunity for you and your students to focus all of your attention on the phonetic aspects of Arabic, it is also better to form good habits from the start.
We believe that all language skills are important and that they reinforce each other. Your attitude as a teacher of Arabic should be that everyone can learn to produce these sounds. It is our job to expect a high degree of effort from students in preparing for class, and to reward this effort by spending class time doing interactive and small-group activities that permit maximum participation from all students.
The book is designed so that the students can do much of their learning outside of class, each person working at his or her own pace so differences in learning speed will not affect the class as a whole. It is also important that students realize right away that the burden of learning is on them, because this helps them to become active learners.
Finally, it is essential to follow through on the expectations you set. By "teaching" them what they should have done outside of class, you might inadvertently reward students who have not prepared and punish those who have. Grammar is necessary but not difficult; more important, the grammar that a student needs at the Novice level is simple and can be activated along with vocabulary.
A major shift in this edition with regard to the treatment of vocabulary is our decision to introduce words and expressions in functional rather than alphabetical order; that is, words are introduced when they can be productively used, not when they can be written in Arabic script. Please note that the vocabulary used in listening and handwriting exercises is not active vocabulary. The meanings of some of these words are given merely as entertainment, so the learner knows that he or she is writing meaningful words.
We have used only meaningful words throughout these materials because word structure in Arabic is based on consonant—vowel patterns, and we believe that listening to a large number of words, even if one does not know their meaning, will help learners begin to internalize these patterns and facilitate learning vocabulary.
Active vocabulary is introduced in the vocabulary charts and recorded for students to listen to and learn at home. Our decision to introduce vocabulary in spoken and formal Arabic may blur the boundaries between these two registers; however, the reality of Arabic today is that these boundaries are quite porous. Even in the most formal of contexts, spoken forms of Arabic are often heard mixed in with formal Arabic.
Moreover, most Arabic-speaking populations living in communities outside the Arab world, or in the Gulf, are exposed to and interact with dialects different from their own on a regular basis, and in such multidialect situations, few speakers maintain "pure" dialect. We do not need to expect a level of "purity" from our students that does not exist in the community or in the world around them. If your students will interact with Palestinians, Lebanese, Egyptians, or Moroccans outside of class, they will be exposed to different words.
We can embrace this variety and richness of Arabic. Students' attitudes toward Arabic may reflect your own, so think carefully about what you project to them. Students should be told from the outset to expect two hours of homework for every hour in class.
We suggest the following schedule as a rule of thumb in planning your syllabus. Class Homework Notice that units 4, 5, and 6 are longer than other Unit units, in part because of the extra work needed Hours Hours on emphatic letters and sounds. Because of their 1 1 2 length, these lessons have been constructed with 2 2 4 two different sets of vocabulary and speaking work 3 2 so that a balance of alphabet and speaking work can be maintained day-to-day.
An extra class hour 4 3 is built into unit 7 because of the large number of 5 3 6 -7 activities in it. This time projection rests on several 6 3 key assumptions: 1 The purpose of a textbook is to present 7 3 6 7 - information to the learner for acquisition outside 8 2 4 5 - of class, and the purpose of class time is to activate not present or explain the material that 9 2 4 students have prepared at home.
These materials 10 1 2 have been designed so that students can do most Total 22 44 50 - of the preparation and studying of new material outside of class in order for class time to be spent doing interactive activities, practicing writing in the form of in-class dictation exercises, and practicing conversations. Assign all of the listening and writing exercises as homework so that students learn the sounds and letters at their own pace at home. In class, have them activate what they have studied through dictation practice of your own design and in-class exercises.
As a new feature in this edition, the vocabulary lists include all of the expressions in the colloquial dialogues and allow students to prepare everything, even the dialogues, at home before coming to class.
This approach has several important pedagogical benefits. First, it allows students to work at their own pace and avoids the frustration that can be experienced by students of different backgrounds and abilities. Second, the steps that we have provided in these exercises will help students develop listening strategies and encourage them to think not just about what they are listening to but how they are listening.
These are strategies that you can encourage and build upon in class as well. Third, it allows more class time for activation: Rather than spending half an hour listening passively to the dialogue, students can come to class prepared to discuss what they saw and heard with a partner, listen one more time in preparation for activation, and spend at least twenty minutes in conversation with their classmates, moving from one partner to another for variety. Working in pairs and small groups is essential for students to build language skills and confidence.
While it is true that the instructor may sacrifice a degree of control in this kind of classroom, the success of this approach in building speaking skills is clear. You will not be able to correct every utterance, but accuracy will improve if students see it rewarded. In the end, it is self-correction, not teacher correction, that underlies accurate speaking. Our goal is to train students to correct themselves and help each other, and our challenge is to create an atmosphere that demands accuracy in pronunciation with encouragement to create freely.
We believe that it is good policy to reassure students that they will never be penalized for trying to say something new using the words they are learning. Many of the exercises autocorrect on the interactive media, which has the advantage of giving students immediate feedback. However, the fact that you will not see this work makes it all the more important that you collect and go over the dictation and letter-connection drills to make sure that the students are making good progress.
Students should devote around two hours a night to homework and class preparation. All of the listening exercises in the textbook are meant to be done at home, and the drills are all labeled At home, In class, or both. For in-class dictation, use your own words rather than those in the book or on the homework. In the beginning you will want to repeat words many times and have students repeat as a group to take the pressure off individual performance.
It takes several repetitions of a new or unfamiliar sound in order to identify it, and several more to be able to produce it. Later, as students' skills develop, you may want to limit your repetitions to three to five times to help students develop their "active memory" listening skills It is very important to give students feedback on their dictation skills during the activity.
If you can have some or all the students write on the board, you can check their progress most easily. It is also beneficial, if possible, to have an assistant in class who can go around the room and help students individually during dictation time. An advanced nonnative student can fill this role if your program allows it, and it is encouraging for beginning students to see nonnative peers who are successful learners of Arabic.
Native speakers of Arabic start their study of Arabic in school already knowing six years' worth of vocabulary; the foreign learner has none and needs to catch up before mastering the intricacies of formal Arabic syntax. In the forthcoming third editions of the other books in the Al-Kitaab textbook program, there will be increases in the amount of vocabulary and exercises, and this new edition of Alf Baa is no exception. Each unit includes at least one vocabulary section and several exercises and activities for activation, most of which are designed to be prepared at home and activated in class.
You will also find interactive vocabulary activities with phrases and sentences. The key to this achievement is time spent activating vocabulary in context. Of course, no textbook can take the place of a good teacher. It is our hope that these materials will help you to enrich your classroom and make learning Arabic an enjoyable and productive experience for your students.
Units 2 through 10 introduce these letters and symbols individually. You will work with the workbook and the interactive media in tandem, and in the text you will see this media symbol , which indicates that you should listen to or watch the interactive media. The chart below shows the twenty-eight letters. Starting in the upper right-hand corner, the chart reads across from right to left, which is the direction Arabic is written and read. Listening Exercise 1. Arabic letters and sounds At home Watch the videos to see and hear the pronunciation of these letters.
Z 3 L L L9 6 The next chart shows the fourteen extra-alphabetical symbols and their names. They include short vowels, pronunciation symbols, grammatical endings, spelling variants, and a consonant that, for historical reasons, is not represented in the alphabet chart. These symbols will be introduced in units 2 through 10 along with the alphabet.
One consequence of this directionality is that Arabic books, newspapers, and magazines are opened and read in the opposite direction from European and American printed materials. The following individual letters are written one after the other.
However, even though these letters occur in the correct combination and order, they do not form a word when they are written this way: u I y When they are connected, however, they do spell a word: y L11 al-baab the door. Notice that not all the letters in yI. JI connect to the following letter. This is a characteristic of certain letters that you will master as you learn to write. See if you can identify the nonconnecting letters in the following words: 4 1. When you write words, it is important not to lift the pen or pencil from the page until you get to a natural break at a nonconnecting letter.
The alphabet chart at the beginning of this unit gives the forms of the letters when they are written independently; however, these forms vary when the letters are written in initial, medial, or final position.
Unit 1 "Final position" means that the letter is connected to the preceding letter. Most letters have a particularly distinct shape when they occur in the final position, similar to the way English uses initial uppercase letters for words that begin sentences. The chart below gives you an idea of the extent of this variation. You will see that each letter retains a basic shape throughout, which is the core of the letter. If the letter has a dot, the number and position also remain the same Note that the last three letters, which all connect, appear to have a "tail" in their independent and final forms that drops off when they are connected and is replaced by a connecting segment that rests on the line.
Look for the core shape of each letter; its dots, if any; the connecting segments; and the final tail in the following chart. Final Medial Initial Independent position position position shape L L As you learn each letter of the alphabet you will learn to read and write all of its various shapes. You will be surprised how quickly you master them with a little practice! The basic skeleton of a word is made up of the consonants and long vowels. Short vowels and other pronunciation and grammatical markers are separated from the consonant skeleton of the word.
This second layer, called vocalization or vowelling, is normally omitted in writing, and the reader recognizes words without it. In scripture this precision has religious significance: The extra markings on the text leave no doubt as to the exact reading intended. Thus the texts of the Qur'an and Bible show full vocalization, as you can see in the following excerpts.
The following example is taken from an elementary reader used in Qatar. You will learn Most books, magazines, c. Ji 11r. In the rare cases in which there may be some ambiguity, a clarifying vowel may be added.
In the Al-Kitaab textbook program, vocalization marks will be used when new vocabulary is introduced, but thereafter you will be expected to have memorized the pronunciation of the word, and these marks will be omitted.
Since Arabic speakers normally read and write without vocalization, it is best to become accustomed to reading and writing that way from the beginning. Pronunciation of Arabic In addition to recognizing the characteristics of the Arabic script, you should also be aware of certain features about the sounds of Arabic.
Consider the plural marker sin the words dogs and books, and note that the sound of the first is actually z, not s.
Compare also the two different sounds spelled as th as in think and those. These are two distinct sounds, and Arabic has two different letters to represent them. American English speakers sometimes confuse pronunciation and spelling without realizing it. For example, think about the word television. This word has been adopted into Arabic and is pronounced something like tilivi7joon. It is also spelled with the Arabic letter that corresponds to the sound z because that is the way it is pronounced.
English spelling, on the other hand, requires an s, even though there is no s sound in the word. The letters we use to write English can represent different sounds, so it is better to associate Arabic sounds not with individual letters but rather with words so you can remember which sound corresponds to the Arabic sound you are learning.
For example, associate the sound th with three, and s with so. This will be particularly important when you learn Arabic vowel sounds. If you learn to recognize and pronounce the sounds correctly from the beginning, you will avoid spelling problems and you will learn and retain vocabulary more easily.
To properly produce these sounds, be aware of the parts of the mouth and throat you must use while you are able to focus the most attention on them. You will learn to make new sounds, and to do so you must become familiar with the set of muscles that you use to make sounds like gargling or coughing but not to speak English. Your muscles are capable of making all these sounds, but you need to become conscious of what they are doing and practice constantly in the beginning.
Unit 1 Like sports, learning a language takes physical work along with mental focus. Just as you train your arm through repeated practice to hit a tennis ball, you must train your mouth to produce new sounds and combinations of sounds, and this takes constant repetition. Just like you keep your eye on the ball in tennis, you must also keep your mind on the sounds you are making at all times. An investment of time and effort into developing your pronunciation habits during the first month of learning Arabic will pay off later in that you will be able to learn, pronounce, and spell vocabulary more easily; you will understand other people better; and people will also understand you, which in turn will encourage them to speak with you in Arabic rather than in English.
Formal and Spoken Arabic Every language has different registers levels of formality and varieties dialects that vary according to speaker or writer and situation or function.
For example, I dunno is rarely written, except for special effect, and I do not know is rarely used in speech. Americans, Britons, and Australians learn to understand each other's accents merely by being exposed to them. With its long history, rich heritage, and wide geographical distribution, Arabic naturally encompasses greater variation in its written and spoken forms than English. These differences present challenges to native speakers as well as to students of Arabic. You will need to learn some pronunciation variation, but these are easy to learn with listening practice.
Sometimes you will need to learn two different words for the same concept. However, the more Arabic you learn, the more you will see that the overwhelming body of vocabulary and expressions are shared among most or all forms of Arabic. Arabic consists of two registers, formal and spoken.
Formal Arabic, also called Modern Standard or Classical Arabic, is learned in school rather than at home and is more a written than an oral register. It is highly respected and constitutes the "intellectual" register of Arabic. It is impossible to speak about topics of public interest, such as politics, economics, or even popular culture without using the vocabulary of formal Arabic. Hence, you will hear formal Arabic on news broadcasts and in other public contexts. However, educated speakers will often mix formal and spoken forms even in formal situations, because interacting with others in formal Arabic can seem impersonal.
However, some variations are social and might signal class or sectarian identity, whereas, others distinguish rural and urban communities. The greatest variation in spoken Arabic is found in the most commonly used words in daily life, and what we call "accent"—the way certain sounds especially vowels are pronounced and words are stressed.
For some examples of the similarities and differences in spoken Arabic, listen to four different regional varieties in Listening Exercise 2. Listening Exercise 2. Dialect variation in Arabic At home Listen to the sample phrases from four different dialects of Arabic.
You will hear "good morning," "how are you? Which sound completely different? To be fluent in Arabic, you must have control of both the formal and spoken registers, including the mix that naturally occurs in academic and other intellectual discussions. As you learn more and more Arabic, you will see that the majority of words and structures are shared among varieties and registers, and you will learn to transfer knowledge from one variety to another.
In this textbook program we will introduce both formal and spoken forms of Arabic. The interactive media contain Egyptian dialogues filmed in Cairo and Levantine dialogues filmed in Damascus. In addition, the vocabulary and expressions that these dialogues contain are presented in Egyptian, Levantine, and formal Arabic.
There are no dialogues in formal Arabic because this register is not used for social interaction in real life. The materials thus permit both learners and instructors to choose the variety they want to activate. Listening to two or even to all three forms will help you understand more Arabic, but with the guidance of your instructor, you should choose one variety as the one you will learn to use actively.
In this way you will build both recognition and production skills. Both skills are important, and distinguishing between words you will recognize and those you will actively use will make the wealth of material more manageable.
A Transliteration System It takes about twenty-five class hours plus at least fifty homework hours to master the Arabic alphabet and sound system introduced in this curriculum. We want you to spend a lot of this time learning and practicing basic greetings and expressions so that you can start speaking right away.
We have devised a simplified system that we use for words that you cannot write in Arabic because you have not yet learned all the letters in them. We recommend that you learn and use this system unless you are a trained linguist and have another system you prefer. However, using transliteration should be a temporary, transitional stage. You should start writing words in Arabic script as soon as you learn all the letters.
It will take longer to write words using Arabic script at first, but using it is the only way to develop proficiency in reading and writing, and with practice your writing speed will pick up. The key to a good transliteration system is that each different sound should have its own unique symbol.
Contrast this to English spelling, in which one letter represents many sounds, like s in sun, prism, and treasure, or one sound can be represented by different letters, like the sound f, also spelled gh in laugh and ph in philosophy. English vowel sounds and spellings are particularly fraught with ambiguities: the u in but sounds quite different from the u in duty, and o sounds quite different in dot, one, OK, and office.
English uses the combination th to spell two different sounds, whereas these are distinct letters in Arabic. The following exercise will help you learn to distinguish these two sounds and learn to separate sound from English spelling.
Drill 1. Differentiating the th sounds At home Distinguish between the sound th in the word three and th in the word other. These are two different sounds, and in Arabic they are written with different letters. Look at the list of words and repeat each one out loud several times to determine whether th sounds like three or that, and assign the word to the appropriate box. The technologies of texting and chatting mean that more and more Arabic speakers are communicating in Arabic with Latin script, and new transliteration patterns are emerging that include numerals.
Can you see why the following correspondences have become popular? We developed this system to be simple, and the main difference between it and other systems is that it uses uppercase letters rather than dots and symbols to represent emphatic sounds, and we use doubled vowels aa, ee, ii, oo, and uu to represent long vowels. Listen to the pronunciation of letters on the alphabet videos again as you go through the consonant sounds in the first chart below.
Consonants: Transliteration symbol Arabic Transliteration symbol Arabic and sound letter and sound letter Z as in zip 3 as in bet as in sip t as in tip C. Formal Arabic has only three vowel sounds that are normally represented as a, i, and ti, and each can be short or long. However, spoken Arabic has an expanded system that includes two additional vowel qualities, which we will indicate with e and o.
In addition, Levantine pronunciation sometimes uses a schwa sound, which we will indicate with the schwa symbol, a, which indicates a very short, unstressed vowel sound. Arabic distinguishes between short and long vowel sounds, and we will indicate length by repeating the vowel, as the chart shows. Pay particular attention to vowel sounds because they help you to distinguish emphatic consonants from their nonemphatic counterparts. The only words that are transliterated are those that contain letters you have not yet learned.
Remember that transliteration does not take the place of listening to the vocabulary on the interactive media. By listening and re- peating new words several times, you will learn them well.
Drill 2. Reading in transliteration In class The words in the following list are names of places you should be familiar with. With a partner, sound them out and identify as many as you can. Where is Arabic spoken? At home The map shows countries where Arabic is the main language of education and where it is widely spoken in everyday life. You will see the names of the Arab countries and their capitals in English.
Listen to the audio to hear the name and capital of each country in Arabic, and choose ten to write out using our transliteration system. Morocco Rabat Lebanon Beirut 2. Mauritania Nouakchott Syria Damascus 3. Algeria Algiers Iraq Baghdad 4. Tunisia Tunis Kuwait Kuwait 5. Libya Tripoli Saudi Arabia Riyadh 6. Egypt Cairo Qatar Doha 7. Sudan Khartoum Bahrain Manama 8. Somalia Mogadishu United Arab Emirates Abu Dhabi 9. Jordan Amman Oman Muscat Vocabulary is presented in the interactive media as well as in the book.
You will refer to the vocabulary list in the book from time to time, but it is essential that you first learn it by using the interactive media so that you can hear and copy accurate pronunciation. You will remember vocabulary more readily if you repeat it out loud several times rather than read silently or listen passively. A good rule of thumb is to say each word out loud as many times as it takes to make it feel comfortable in your mouth and for you to be able to "hear" yourself say it.
Egyptian and Levantine Colloquial The decision to include three varieties of Arabic in these materials rests on our conviction that competence in Arabic necessarily entails mastery of both spoken and formal registers. We have chosen Egyptian and Levantine because they are the most widely understood dialects across the Arab world. Levantine is a collection of dialects with many local flavors, but the pronunciation differences are small compared with the large amount of shared vocabulary and structure.
The "flavor" of Levantine that you will hear in the dialogues is that of Damascus. Egyptian is represented by the dialect of Cairo, which is well-known from the films and music from the largest entertainment industry in the Arab world. Each vocabulary chart contains three columns: formal, Levantine colloquial or shaami , and Egyptian colloquial or maSri. The shaami and maSri words are indicated in different colors throughout the materials.
Our intention is for you to choose one spoken variety to master, but you might want to listen to the other dialect once to develop passive comprehension and recognition skills. You will notice that most of the words you will learn are shared among all three varieties, sometimes with a slight shift in accent or a vowel.
You will soon develop a sense of the characteristics that identify each dialect. For Egyptian, these include the hard g sound in place of the j of other dialects, and a distinctive accent pattern that emphasizes the second-to-last syllable.
Levantine dialects are distinguished by a final e vowel sound on certain nouns and adjectives where other dialects have a, and their own distinctive intonation. Choose one greeting and prepare to use it in class, and prepare to introduce yourself to others. Lr" my name - - z.. AA the city of We recommend that you choose one to learn actively, though you may choose to watch both varieties for the exposure and for comprehension practice.
It is important to study the vocabulary from these dialogues before watching them, and to watch them at home before coming to class.
The dialogues have three purposes: a to give you some speech models to imitate so you can start speaking; b to show you some aspects of polite interaction in Arab culture; and c to develop listening comprehension skills that you will use in class and in the real world, skills that help you understand what people are saying without knowing all the words they are using.
You will find instructions for steps to take as you listen to these dialogues, and these steps are meant to help you reactivate and exploit the same listening strategies you used subconsciously to learn your native language. Each time you listen, you will get more out of the dialogue, especially if you set some specific goals and expectations for each "listen" "listen," as usual, here is meant as a step; you will find it helpful to listen more than once at each stage, especially in the beginning.
The final listen should take place after you have understood all you can, and it is the "activation" listen, in which you pay attention not to what is being said because you presumably already know that , but rather on how it is being said, in pronunciation, vocabulary, and structure. In this activity, which should take place in class, you are preparing to use material from the dialogue in your own interactions with your classmates.
Drill 4 below introduces the first dialogue. For this time only, listen to it in class with your instructor. Scene 1: Ahlan wa sahlan Formal and Colloquial In class In scene 1, people from across the Arab world introduce themselves. There are two versions, one formal Arabic and one spoken Arabic. Choose one to start with and watch it several times according to the following steps: 1. Before listening, ask yourself, "What do I expect to hear?
First listen: Listen to see if your expectations are met. What do you hear? Second listen: Which greetings do you recognize? Third listen: What kinds of information do the speakers give? How do they express it, and what do you notice about the phrasing? Fourth listen: Activate some of what you learned by introducing yourself to some of your classmates. After you have understood and activated the variety you chose to begin with, listen to the other variety. What similarities and differences do you notice?
The same principle also applies to a loosely defined "space" that someone regularly occupies, such as an outdoor work area or a guard's position outside a building.
When you enter a space that is occupied, you must say hello. Whether or not you greet a guard or shopkeeper as you pass by depends primarily on your gender. In general, women do not say hello to men they do not know if they are not conducting business with them. Practice polite behavior by always saying hello to anyone in the room when you enter your Arabic class. J1 Unit Two In this unit: Consonants Alif has two functions, the first of which will be introduced here, and the second will be discussed in unit 3.
Here we are concerned with its function as a long vowel whose pronunciation ranges in sound from the e in bet to the a in bat to the u in but. Say these three words aloud and notice the difference in the quality of the vowels: the first is pronounced in the front of the mouth, the second slightly lower, and the last low in the mouth.
The pronunciation of alif has a similar range; we refer to these differences in pronunciation as vowel quality. Two factors influence the vowel quality of alif: regional dialect and surrounding consonants. In the eastern regions of the Arab world such as the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq, the sound of alif is generally deeper, similar to father, whereas farther west, especially in North Africa, it tends to be frontal and at times it approximates the sound of e in bet.
You will notice this regional variation when you interact with Arabic speakers from different countries. The other reason for variation in the quality of alif has to do with surrounding consonants. Arabic has several "emphatic" consonant sounds that are pronounced farther back in the mouth, and these consonants deepen the sound of a neighboring alif so that it resembles the u in but.
Learning to discern and produce this difference in vowel quality will help you understand, speak, and write Arabic accurately. The following exercises will get you started, but remember to keep paying attention to vowel quality as you work through this book.
Frontal and deep alif At home To hear the frontal and deep variants of alif, listen to the following pairs of words by clicking on them. The first word in each pair contains a frontal alif that contrasts with the deep alif in the second. Listen to and repeat these sounds aloud several times until you can hear the difference clearly and produce it. These deeper sounds are often called emphatic consonants, and they affect the pronunciation of surrounding vowel sounds.
Listening for the difference between frontal and deep alif is the best way to distinguish between emphatic and nonemphatic consonants.
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