menu Podcast

Shukran Shukran Shukran!
I think ur job is amazing. I love the simply and dinamic way you teach us arabic. Im very interested in learning arabic since I plan to travel to the middle east soon. And your lessons are helping me a lot.
shukran kaman!
wa mabruk for ur excellent job!

I have just fallen in love with Arabic.Al lugha tamaam.

HOLA CARMENALICIA! ME ALEGRA ENCONTRAR POR AQUÍ A HISPANOPARLANTES. ESTOY BUSCANDO A GENTE PARA HABLAR ÁRABE POR INTERNET DE NIVEL INTERMEDIO APROX. SI ESTÁS INTERESADA ESCRÍBEME A MI CORREO.
FUTXINA@HOTMAIL.COM
JOSE

اسلام علكم
انا اسباني اىدا الدروس منتاسة
شكرا جزيلا لكما

I'v seen some people uses latin teters to speak arabic. I think it's more didactic use arabic leters. The learning is quicker.
------------------
He visto que algunos usan letras latinas para expresarse en árabe. Creo que es más didáctico usar letras árabes. Se aprende más rápido.

Asalamuwa alaykum. I agree with everyone and say that this site is excellent mashaa-Allaah,
however, as I wish to learn arabic in order to better understand The Noble Qur'an, it would be great if modern words used in place of classic words were pinted out. This way, you can teach modern everyday chat but are also warning us which words or terms are not fus-ha / classical. I hope that makes sense, loll. barakallaahu feek.

Although vernacular speech is more mutable than the written language, certain elements are apparently resistant to change. The colloquial word "aywah", which is synonymous with "nam", and which occurs in the Arabic text presented in this podcast, is a case in point. It must have been in current use as far back as the nineteenth century, for it can be found in De Lacy O'Leary, Colloquial Arabic (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1900), p. 51. De Lacy O'Leary's transcription ("aiwa") is slightly different from that suggested by Ehab and Mohammed, but there is no reason to assume that there has been a change in pronunciation.

And I am from the Shona Tribe in Zimbabwe.
In my mother tongue, Aiwa means No.
Imagine how confusing it can be if I am in an arabic speaking country saying aiwa for No, yet actually saying yes to the people around me.And of course I would say Aiwa while I am shaking my head.
Languages!

isnt the word يعتقدون should be يعتقْْْْْدن because they re talkin about women? or doesnt it matter how u say it in daily language?

sorry i was going to write يعتقدن for the second one. مع السلامة

Well spotted Sheyma, in classical Arabic, the verb should be as you stated (يعتقدن), however, in the street, the colloquial Arabic drops some of the grammes, and as this dialogue is colloquial, we've chosen to keep it as people say it in the street.
Shukran for highlighting that.

'Shakluh waseem' the suffix on the first word is 'he'...'hu', while the suffix in Lesson #210 'I want a piece' in the sentence 'Sa2u36eeh ba3ad maa yukmel alwaajeb' is 'he'. So, masculine pronoun suffixes for adjectives like 'shakluh' are 'hu'? and masculine pronoun suffixes for verbs are 'he'?

Phillipa, if I remember correctly, 'naa' in Persian means 'no' too...so similar to the Arabic of 'na'am' which means yes...As an English speaking person I can appreciate the Arabic word for 'seller'...'ba'ya'...which sounds like 'buyer' in English...Course, we could go through the long list of Arabic words that sound like curses in English, like lesson #157 'air conditioner' in the sentence, '7aqan!! A6fe2 almukayyef en she2t.' I know it's only my imagination, but I can almost hear a laugh in the background when the word 'en she2t' is repeated. Reminds me of when I was a soldier in the early 90's and Sadam invaded Kuwait, my unit was called to the Saudi Arabian border but I was sent to a six month intensive course to study Arabic. being quite young at the time, a beautiful Lebanese woman was one of my teachers and she tried to teach me the phrase 'your house' in the Saudi dialect, she loudly pronounced 'ashufak'but I was a bit uneasy to repeat it correctly, I said 'ashufook' which promptly brought correction and eventually my relenting and repeating the word exactly as it should have been pronounced. But this episode in my life ended happily, as the gulf war ended and I did not have to go to war and had actually received a wonderful introduction to the Arabic language, which although intially sounded quite profane, became a wonderful learning experience.

You’ve misconstrued the penultimate sentence of “Handsome guy”, Vladimer. ﺸﻜﻞ isn’t an adjective, and the suffix doesn’t mean “he”. ﺸﻜﻞ is a noun meaning “appearance” or “shape”, and the suffix means “his”. The literal translation of the sentence is “Appearance + his handsome” or “His appearance handsome”. Since this is an equative sentence the verb “to be” has been omitted. The same construction can be found in several other podcasts (e.g. “Headache”, “You look tired” and “Three questions that baffled all”).

Desmond, thanks for the explanation, however to me there appears to be a little inconsistency to the suffix, sometimes it's pronounced phonetically like the sound of the English word 'he' and sometimes it's phonetically pronounced as 'who'. Does the pronunciation change according to the case of the word it modifies?

When I first listened to “Handsome guy” I immediately guessed that ﺸﻜﻠﻪ wasn’t a verb meaning “look”, and it didn’t take me long to figure out that it was a noun with a suffix corresponding to the English possessive adjective “his”. The phonetic problem, however, is a real brain-teaser, and since I’ve never taken a course in Arabic I’m not sure where the solution lies.

Nonetheless, I’ll try to formulate the problem clearly, for a well formulated problem is already half resolved. In “Handsome guy” and “Three questions” the constructions are slightly different, but we have exactly the same noun-suffix combination (ﺸﻜﻠﻪ in both cases. In “Handsome guy” the sentence under discussion literally means “Appearance + his handsome”, and in “Three questions” the sentence we are interested in literally means “Show me its appearance”. In “Handsome guy” the suffix refers to a man. In “Three questions” it refers to ﺃﻠﻢ (pain), and unless I’m greatly mistaken the word for “pain” is masculine. In “Handsome guy” the suffix sounds like the French conjunction “ou”, but in “Three questions” it is pronounced like the French preposition “à”.

This really baffles me, and I can think of only one plausible explanation. In “Handsome guy” ﺸﻜﻠﻪ is the sentence subject and is followed by another word, while in “Three questions” it is the direct object of a verb and is placed at the end of a sentence. If the sentences under discussion were translated literally into Latin, the equivalent of ﺸﻜﻠﻪ would be in the nominative case in “Handsome guy” and in the accusative case in “Three questions”. In Arabic “u” is a nominative ending and “a” is an accusative ending, and these are the endings we hear when we listen to the two sentences read by a native speaker of Arabic. I wonder if that could be the solution to the problem.