Intermediate - 3 Questions that baffled all

Very good. This is something I was thinking to suggest to you guys: preparing wisdom stories are very good. And the eastern literature is very rich of them. I was reminded of three bulls which were eaten by a lion one after another, when the last bull said: "I have been eaten when my first (was it white?) brother died."

I hope you will find shorter stories and make lessons out of them.

i liked this lesson very much. sincerely thank you for the lesson.

and Our Prophet (sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) said to ‘Ali (radhiallahu anhu):

“By Allah (subhanahu wa ta’ala) if Allah (Subhanahu wa ta’ala) were to guide just one man through you it would be better for you than red camels.” [Fath al-Bari, 7/476, Kitab al-maghazi, bab ghazwah Khaybar]

Allah said in His Book, the Noble Qur'an: 015:026] And indeed, We created man from dried (sounding) clay of altered mud.
[007:012] (Allâh) said: "What prevented you (O Iblîs) that you did not prostrate yourself, when I commanded you?" Iblîs said: "I am better than him (Adam), You created me from fire, and him You created from clay."

The word ﻏﺎﺿﺒﺎ needs to be examined more closely for two reasons:

(1) It is apparently synonymous with ﻏﺿﺒﺎﻦ. Are the two words really interchangeable?

(2) Unless I misheard him, Ehab pronounced the letter ﺿ like a "b". This is apparently a kind of regressive assimilation (assimilation in which a following sound has an effect on a preceding one). Could the letter ﺿ have been pronounced like a "d" in this case, or is ﺿ always pronounced like a "b" when it is followed by ﺒ?

Desmond,

To answer you directly, both words are interchangeable.
However, the (anger) in (غضبان) is higher than the one in (غاضب), this is because (صيغ المبالغة) which are (exaggeration patterns), as in (غضبان), are stronger in meaning than (إسم الفاعل) which is the doer of the action, as in (غاضب).
One of the common patterns of these (exaggeration patterns) is (فعلان), so you see (غضبان), (عطشان), (نعسان)...

Regarding to the pronunciation issue, I did listen to both letters (ض) and (ب) carefully and could not spot them being fused or (ب) is taking over the (ض). The best thing one can do to practice listening to these letters is to go to the Sharepoint and under Flash subtitle you can find Arabic Pronunciation Guide, which should be very helpful in distinguishing the difference between both letters.

Thanks for your very detailed answer, Ehab. Perhaps you might devote one your podcasts to exaggeration patterns. It’s very hard to find information about these patterns on the Web. I’ve managed to discover the French and German equivalents of ″exaggeration pattern″. The French term is ″schème d’exagération″, the German term ″Übertreibungsform″. In one document the Arabic term is transcribed as ″sighat ul-mubalaghah″. This seems plausible since ″siigha″ (ﺼﻴﻐﺔ) means ″paradigm″, ″pattern″ or ″formula″, while ″mubaalagha″ (ﻤﺒﺎﻠﻐﺔ) corresponds exactly to the English noun ″exaggeration″.

On one website I discovered the term ″ism (ﺍﺴﻢ) al-mubalaghah (ﺍﻟﻤﺒﺎﻠﻐﺔ)″. (For technical reasons I have to write the elements of the compound from left to right.) “Ism al-mubalaghah” is defined as a “hyperbolic participle” and appears in a list of “derived nouns”. (There are apparently seven types of derived nouns in Arabic.)

This raises two interesting questions:

(1) Are the terms “siigha al-mubaalagha” and “ism al-mubaalagha” interchangeable?

(2) Can “ism al-mubaalagha” denote nouns as well as adjectives? I wouldn’t be surprised if “ism” could denote words belonging to both categories since the boundaries between Arabic word classes do not always correspond to the boundaries between European word classes.

In the dialogue, I heard حلُمت for "did you dream". Is this verb used with this stem vowel for the meaning "to dream", because before now I've only heard حلَم. I thought حلُم meant "to be calm, gentle".

Really thank you both for these amazing podcasts I think they're all very helpful and I really like how they're divided into levels so everyone can learn. May Allah bless you both.

well about what you said: "It's not a religious dialogue, it's more logical. well if you see most of our religion is based on logic or wisdom more precisely, but not for all the legislations and laws does god give the logic or wisdom behind it to see who of us are true believers in God (Allah), His oneness or existence (what the conversation is based on). Just wanted to clear this out as being muslims we are to believe that everything about God, whether his Laws, His oneness or our existence itself has logic and wisdom behind it..

anyhow again thanks alot for posting all these audio..very creative :)

What is the best way to translate "it's worth it" in Arabic?

@wolfenstein11x, you can say

يستاهل
Yastaahil

or تستاهل if the subject is feminine. This also means deserves it

@Ehab and Mohd:

On page 4 of the dialogue, the teacher asked

المعلم: ھل خطر ببالك

خطر means "danger," doesn't it? Is there some semantic connection between "danger" and something "crossing" your mind?

Thanks in advance for the answer!

Very cheap kind of logic and another example that religious people try to solve everything by using violence but it never works because logic is very cheap and violent