Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Learning Arabic
This year is starting off kind of slow. But, I think slow and steady is better than rapidly burning out. I have decided for the third year in a row to try and teach myself the Arabic alphabet. I think I tried too hard at first in 2005 and 2006 and grew frustrated at my lack of progress and thus gave up too early. This year I am going at a slower pace and as a result I am retaining more of what I have studied. My modest goal is to be able to read newspaper headlines and street signs in Arabic by 1 January 2008. I think the key is to make sure I learn a little bit each day.
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3 comments:
have no idea what stage you're currently at - but a textbook with really LARGE TYPE worked wonderfully for me. it was some obscure pakistani-published Quranic verses textbook that i found at the university of iowa library. i never managed to move past the alphabet, though...
best of luck to you and thanks a lot for all your writing! and happy new year!
veronica
Thanks for the comment. I am just starting out trying to learn the Arabic alphabet. I am using the Teach Yourself Arabic Writing book. I used the Teach Yourself Turkish in 2000 before going to Turkey and it worked pretty well. I managed to learn enough Turkish to get from Istanbul to Ankara and back again.
Best thing, which I used, would be to lay out all the letters in a table and try to learn a chunk of them at a time.
It does work, but of course you will have to refer back to the book every so often. It helps if you associate each letter with a sound, or maybe what is similar to in English.
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