Arabic Learning Tools

New rotation, new materials. Here’s the Modern Arabic Reader (6.5 MB) and the Listening Comprehension (83.3 MB). The “Girl’s Education” listening exercise wouldn’t upload, so either cross you fingers you don’t have to do it or you’ll be spending a bit of time in the lab. Sorry.

Listening to الجزيرة   or Scola is one of those things your teachers are always trying to tell me to do while I’m “sitting around not doing anything.” Here’s the problem: I’m of the generation where I fill every waking second with worthless consumption of some kind of media. Solution: Arabic news podcasts for those times where you really can zone out, like on the subway or when your mom’s number comes up on caller id.

The following links will open in iTunes:

HNK Radio Japan in Arabic 

Radio Sawt Al-Ghad (Lebanon)

So, all you have to do is subscribe to the free podcasts and they’ll automatically sync to your iPod. I have it set to only keep the most recent five, regardless of whether I’ve done my listening, to make sure I at least have some idea what they’re talking about.

I’ve recorded a quick (three minute) tutorial on setting your keyboard to Arabic QWERTY for the Mac. I find this super helpful, especially for making flash cards. It’s much quicker for a native English speaker to learn the key mapping because it’s basically the same sound we make in English. It’s hosted on YouTube, or you can watch it here:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAbyRsnNI2Q

FSI lives and dies on the language lab…and I’ve never understood why. Often the programs are from the mid-90s or are available for you to use at home. The biggest thing that they say you must have are the flashcard programs, but you can do them all at home. I’m a big fan of the online Quizlet.com, if only because it makes the cards really portable and easy to share. When at home, I have been using iFlash (Mac only), which allows multiple sides to cards (so, you could have one side in Arabic script, one side transliterated, and one with the English meaning). It also allows audio and has a pretty big sharing library online. I comes with a free two-week trial and costs $15 if you like it.

Of course, RapidRote, which FSI uses, has all of those sets pre-made by your teacher, so it’d be a waste to not get some of that love at home. It turns out, it’s remarkably easy. Notice that the filetype is .b4u? That stands for Before You Know It, and is available free for both Mac and Windows. Each of those files is pretty small, so you can email it to yourself for use at home. I’m also building a little library of them and will have a link here in the next few days.

It’s also worth checking out Linguastep.com, which has a free beta period right now. It has all of the vocab from Al-Kitaab, so you can kiss the annoying DVD goodbye for that part. It sends you annoying emails frequently, but you can turn that off easy enough. I tend to not like Al-Kitaab, so I don’t use this all that often, but you might like it (HT D.W.)

Shocker: I’m someone likes to do as much work as I can on the computer. At home on my Mac, working with Arabic is easy as pie. At work, that’s a different story all together. Here are some tools to help you get you touch typing away (and spellchecking to boot).

With Windows (Boo!)

Your first step here is to install the Arabic language pack. To be honest, I don’t know if this costs extra or not, but you have to go to Control Panel -> Languages. There are two options for Arabic, and they both suck. I don’t know why pressing the ‘f’ key should get me a ب or why hitting the ‘b’ key should make a لا appear. The whole thing just makes no sense. Your best bet is to print out the AZERTY guide, buy those little stickers for your keyboard, or memorize the dumb system. I can’t be bothered. Going to Yamli.com lets you type the word transliterated and they’ll pop up a selection of words in Arabic. Click the “Quick Tips” link to see how to make an ‘ayn and other shortcuts. For me, cutting and pasting there is faster than pecking around on the keyboard.

On a Mac (Yay!)

Fortunately, on the eighth day, God invented Macs. This is much more intuitive for a native speaker of English. They have a layout (Arabic QWERTY) that basically follows transliteration. A q gets a ق, a g is a غ. It just makes sense. The few that don’t fit on the keyboard are easy enough to memorize (shift-C for a ض, for example). I can touch type and get about 15-20 wpm on this system. Voweling is also easy, with a simple control-A, -I, or -U getting the fatha, kesra, or damma. To set it up, go to System Preferences and bring up International. Go to input devices and select Arabic QWERTY. I even disabled my Spotlight hot keys so I can switch between English and Arabic by just hitting Cmd-Control-Space. The little green crescent pops up on my menu bar letting me know I can Alif Baa’ away.

Spell check in Arabic

If I’m doing all of my work on the computer, I want to make sure I’m not mistyping. For that, I need my Arabic spellcheck. Sure, you can get this for Word if you fork over the cash for the language pack. Or you could get it for free. I prefer Google Docs, because I can just save my docs there and print them out (as a PDF, no less) from work without worrying if they software will be compatible. 

Another option is OpenOffice.org. On the Mac, you can use NeoOffice, which is the Mac OS port of the same. These are desktop apps that work with Microsoft files, as well. The language packs are an extra download. This is much more complicated than Google Docs, but can be used without an Internet connection. Their dictionaries seem to be a bit more complete, as well.

FSI tried, and failed, to withhold the real secret of Arabic from me. Hans Wehr, you beautiful, dead German guy. I want to kiss you. Your book is simply delicious. Once you learn the root system and figure out what the forms are, this will make sure you can literally translate anything.

But the most fun part is seeing how different words are related. Some of these relationships make the logic of the system seem much stronger. Others leave you scratching your head. The good thing is that, unlike two-way dictionaries and Google translation, Hans helps you ferret out the nuance of the word used and explains its grammatical use. It’s also fun to find little puns by finding the word that uses the emphatic partner of the word you were looking up. I like to say that the crisis with الفائدة is due, in part, to القائدة. I guess that’s funnier written than it is spoken, but what a difference a dot makes, huh?

Hans even has a Facebook group or two dedicated to fun finds. My favorite to date is نهد, which has VERY different meanings between forms I and V. Seriously, if you are trying to learn Arabic and don’t own this book, you will fail. End of story.

book

I’m a big fan of Quizlet.com, an online flash card program written by a 15-year-old kid to help him study. You can enter or import your terms and study them whenever you get the chance. There’s also an option to print out the word list or flash cards that you just need to cut up to use. Pretty nice.

The best part is the Learn function, where you get quizzed on all of the words in a particular set. The site keeps track of which words you miss and then quizzes you on them again right after. You can even create a new set out of those words to work on later.

A happy bonus is that it’s all collaborative. It’s likely you’ll not have to enter a single word, as some simple searches will get you most of what you need. For FSI-specific vocabulary, try searching for “FSI” and you’ll see a bunch of results. I’m hwonder, and the group Ahmed’s Angels was my first class group, so you’ll probably see some of our stuff. Al Kitaab can be found by searching “Kitaab” and is entered by unit. You can also export cards to use on your favorite desktop flash card program.

I use it as the repository for all words I’ve written down. There are some typos, to be sure, but I’ll put up a private post that shows you how to edit those.

Learning about the economy, political affairs, and security matters sounds like it’d be interesting. You’re forgetting of course that it’s in Arabic, so you’ll actually just want to cry. Whatever, go ahead and download the whole thing here (91.9 MB).

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