Tag: Arabic

Arabic books

I’ve bought a couple of Arabic books.

The other day when I was feeling all enthused about learning Arabic I got online and ordered a couple of books from Amazon just to get me started. I don’t have time to do a course at the moment so I thought books would be a good way for me to at least begin familiarising myself with the language. Today they arrived.
 

The first one is a child’s book – ‘The Usborne First Thousand Words in Arabic’ by Heather Amery and Stephen Cartwright. The slim volume is slightly bigger than A4 sized and consists of a series of double-page, full-colour pictorial spreads, each on a different theme e.g. the kitchen or the hospital. The main picture shows a large array of items in situ, whilst around the border there is a selection of the items which can be found in the main picture. These each have the relevant word written in Roman and Arabic scripts. At the back of the book is a dictionary with each of the words from the books written alongside the English equivalent. This seems to be a good book for me to leave lying around so I can keep dipping into it.

 

The second book is ‘The Arabic Alphabet: How to Read and Write it’ by Nicholas Awde and Putros Samano. This A5 sized slim volume has an introductory chapter on the language and then goes into detail about each letter and how to write the different versions of it. There don’t seem to be any exercises in it, but the letters are laid out in such a way that I can easily copy them to practise my writing.

I read a lot of reviews of different books before choosing these two. They both had plenty of positive reviews and they seem to fit my needs at the moment. When I improve, and when I have more time, I’ll look for a book which includes grammar and sentence structure and has exercises I can work on.

I want to speak Arabic

A meal in a Lebanese restaurant motivates me to learn Arabic sooner rather than later.

This evening I took the various family members who are staying with me at the moment to the Curry Mile for an Indian meal. Once there, we had a change of plan and went to a Lebanese restaurant called ‘Beirut’ instead. The food was wonderful and we spent several hours eating from the buffet and the menu. We had desserts and soft drinks as well as mint tea and the whole thing came to less than £10 a head.

The staff were really friendly and helpful and extra nice to the children. They were all speaking Arabic to each other; a language I love hearing and would love to be able to speak. They sometimes didn’t quite understand what we were saying and it was so frustrating not to be able to just say it in Arabic to them. Usually this wouldn’t bother me too much, but because this is a language I’ve been wanting to learn for years, it frustrates me I think because it makes me aware that I haven’t done anything about it yet.

I don’t think it would be overly difficult too learn because I’ve learnt Hebrew in the past and the roots of many words are the same in both languages. Whenever I’ve looked at the alphabet I can see how some of the letters relate to the Hebrew letters and have obviously come from the same source even though they are very different now.

I’ve got learning Arabic on my list of 60 things, but didn’t plan to do anything about it for next few years as I know I really don’t have the time. But after this evening I’m wondering if I should really try to make the time and start now.