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well I "broke my teeth" on this topic on AlJazeera & BBC news cites, till this podcast. I think that now it's going to be little bit easier to read the news.

Great lesson, guys. Lots of valuable vocabulary... I will be adding ردّ ة فعل and
مخلوع and ولولا ذلك to my own vocab lists.

BTW, I've learned one of the popular protest chants: "الشعب يريد إسقات النظام" = "the people want the fall of the system", did I get it right?

But, there also seem to be lots of variations on this (chanted in a similar rhythm). Can you help identify some of the other versions of this chant?

By the way, why is شعب translated as "people" when it literally means "youth"... can old people be part of this "شعب", too?

شعب
sha3b
= people, folk, nation, public
root ش ع ب

شباب
shabaab
= youth
root ش ب ب

شائب
shaa'ib
= grey (white) haired person, old man
root ش ي ب

Excellent. Thank you. These topical lessons are immensely helpful. (How about one on Saudi women's push for the right to drive?)

Thanks for the topical lesson.

Regarding chants, the ArabicPod theme tune (Let's Go?) reminds me of more tuneful, melodic version of the English football chant 'Here we Go' ( which uses Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever").

A question: is there a reasoning behind the use of the various 'mu' forms eg 'musta' etc added to adjectives to make them adjectival nouns?

Finally, a couple of suggestions:
1
Your website works very well but, if possible, ir would be useful to receive alerts on our profile pages when there are new comments on discussion threads we've asked questions on - it's a tedious business to wade back to keep checking whether anyone has offered an answer.

2
I've started using the iMemento iPhone app for flashcards to memorise vocabulary from the Beginners & LI levels and I have to say it works extremely well - better than my old 'Flippers' study cards which were useful too (& still recommended for anyone wanting a low tech approach). I usually expand the detail to include plural/perfect/imperfect as appropriate. It occurs to me that others may well be interested if you were to make available, at a reasonable price, files in a suitable format that could be imported into this & similar flashcard apps.

@psibear, about your question about prefixing ‘mu-‘ in Arabic, let me share what I know.

Participles (Active and Passive) are derived from Verbs.

In Arabic, a Verb can have many Forms – a basic form (Form 1) and derived forms (Form 2 to 10) (All these forms have the SAME root, but there is subtle variation to the meaning.)

So, given a particular root, each form of the verb can have its own active and passive participle.

It is interesting to note that ALL the Active and Passive Participles of DERIVED FORMS of Verbs (Form 2 to Form 10) begin with the prefix ‘mu-‘ and have a predictable pattern.

In other words, if you know the root of an Arabic word, and, IF it begins with ‘mu-‘, it has to be an active or passive participle of one of the derived forms (Form 2 to 10) the verb.

If you are familiar with these patterns, things are much easier. For example, participles of Forms 5 & 6 begin with ‘muta-‘; of Form 7 with ‘mun-‘; of Form 10 with ‘musta-‘, etc.

It may also be noted that in Arabic, the active and passive participles (though derived from verbs) can function as a noun or an adjective, depending upon the context.

كاتب (kaatib) (Active participle of Form 1)
= writing / writer

مسجون (masjoon) (Passive participle of Form 1)
= imprisoned / prisoner

Hope this explanation helps.

@psibear
Thinks for the tip about iMemento iPhone, do you happen to know if they have a version of this app for Android? Personally, I've been using a flash card style program called "Byki", made by Transparent Language, and the thing I like about them is that they have a list central where you can share your lists, plus I think you can save the list files in a variety of formats... the flashcards contain text as well as pictures and audio (for the pronunciation)... but it has a lot of missing features, such as the ability to search your lists. Nor the ability to prioritize certain words that are more important/common than others and which you'd want to learn faster. So any alternative SW out there would be nice. I also second your suggestion about offering the ArabicPod vocabulary in this kind of format... t'would make life easier since now you have to go through the pdf transcribe (accurately) the spelling and then you're still missing the audio unless you are willing to record your own voice (which isn't a good idea for beginners, probably).

Thanks again for your help, vinood. Although, I'm beginning to recognise patterns, but have not studied the various forms enough to be able to refer to them yet. I still find myself wishing that adjectives & adjectival nouns were the same like they are in English!

I also started wondering, comparing موْجود for 'found' = 'existing and مفْقود = missing or disappeared but discovered, in spite of some similarities, they are derived from different roots. So I guess some extra study of the forms is overdue!

Hi jenkki, the good news is that I found iMemento Flashcards for Android through google at: http://www.rawapps.com/184849/imemento-flashcards/

They are more simple - text only - compared to others like iFlipr (& others) which I read a good review (it handles pictures and, I think, audio) for but there is a suggestion that the online servers for iFlipr will no longer be maintained.

The simplicity of iMemento is appealing as files in a variety of formats can be compiled with a simple text editor. I use txt files (utf encoding) with Arabic on one line, English on the next and a line space before the next entry to create 17 stacks of about 50 cards each, covering new vocabulary in all the Beginners & LI lessons so far. Files are uploaded direct via a web page to connect with my iPhone. It's easy to flip Arabic & English and tweak how they appear and the '3 box' algorithm works pretty well. I began by retyping the words &, later, the only glitches have been if I copied & pasted from the pdfs to the text files as some word ligatures didn't transfer properly although that might be because I'm using a Mac.

I'm not sure whether these are available on Android but there are some reasonably good app dictionaries: EEAR DIct for English to Arabic and ArabicEnglish for A to E as they both show short vowels unlike most of the rest. They're not perfect - the EEAR - has some mistakes (eg ha often appears instead of ta marbouta at the end of words. ArabicEnglish is good because it also breaks down words into parts eg pronouns etc & root although no link to the meaning of the root. There's still a way to go. I hope, eventually, a good A-E-A dictionary is compiled with short vowels and (what neither of the above do) giving plurals as well when looking up the singular form and both perfect and imperfect forms.

Don't know how easy it is on Android but the built in Arabic keyboard on the iPhone (although small) works very well so hope to get an iPad when I can afford it as it should be much easier to use than my laptop! - I've tried using an indelible marker to add Arabic characters to the keys but they wear off quickly & using an on screen keyboard is sooo fiddly!

@psibear
"Don't know how easy it is on Android but the built in Arabic keyboard "
This is a very good point... at the moment, I'm struggling with a bug in the Gingerbread OS of my Android (Samsung G2S), which has something to do with the internal Arabic font (not the keyboard program, I use a Swype style keyboard called SlideIT) so that the automatic letter connection is not working... so, even though my Android phone supports the characters themselves (and definitely has no problems if you open a pdf file), it is very difficult to use right now due to the lack of letters linking when you type in Arabic... i.e. very difficult to read what you write. There's supposedly some fix for this issue in the form of a ROM, but the "easy" process of installing that seems extremely complicated to me. So, I guess, first, I have to wait for this fix before moving on to those flash card programs. Right now I do all my flash carding on my PC with Byki... and sounds/pics are very well supported.

only one thing to add... maybe it is not he level of Lower Intermediate, but the thing that I was pleasantly surprised by is the word "هَذَا". it is not only "the" but also "such". for a while I was confused by the translation until I found out that there is another meaning for "هَذَا"...
anyway one of the best lesson for me now !!!
thank you so much !!!

@psibear & @ Jenki

concerning the flashcards

I would like to share with you my method, if you please. there is studystack.com (it's free) that I use for almost 3 years. this is web based opportunity to build & operate the building up vocab. I see an advantage of this cite in it's simplicity & availability. as I use PC on XP, mac, symbian & android it's easy to save the page as webpage & use it on every platform I use.

btw what you think if will start to create some common vocab base from arabicpod ? it'll save us tons of time

@ BPetrenko

What would your "vocabulary base" look like? Would it be updated at regular intervals?

@BPatrenko

I think the key is getting the vocab lists in a universal (or at least standard) file format. The actual flash card program is probably not important... I've seen a couple of them... and the key is to be able to include text (english and Arabic) AND to also include audio since it's way better to have a word being remembered aurally (not just visually)... pictures or video are also of great assistance in helping remembering the word.



But, as I said, the really challenging/hard part would be to get a full set of the ArabicPod vocabulary (i.e. from all 430 or so podcasts) including audio pronounciation of each word to be learned. A lot of the vocabulary repeats itself... so another question is how do you deal with the accumulated overall list of all vocabulary?

BTW. I love your new edit button, guys! Good work.

@ jenkki

Here are two short articles devoted to colour adjectives. What do you think of this?

'akhdar [adjective] ('akh pronounced like Ger. ach, dar like dar in Fr. radar) ﺃﺨﻀﺮ : green
F.: khadraa' (kh pronounced like ch in Ger. ich, ad like ad in Fr. administration, raa' like rah in Ger. Rahmen) ﺨﺿﺭﺍﺀ
PL.: khudr (kh pronounced like ch in Ger. ich, u like Fr. ou, dr like der in Ger. Hader) ﺨﺿﺭ

'akhdar ghaamaq [adjective] ('akh pronounced like Ger. ach, dar like dar in Fr. radar, ghaa like rah in Ger. Rahmen, maq like maq in Fr. maquignon) ﻏﺎﻤﻖ ﺃﺨﺿﺭ : dark green
NOTE: ﻤﺬﻫﺎﻢ (mudhamm), a classical Arabic word meaning ‘very dark green’ or ‘blackish green’, is used in the sura al-rahman (55: 64). Mudhamm occurs in the form mudhaammataan (ﻤﺬﻫﺎﻤﺘﺎﻦ, which is the dual of a feminine active participle (cf. Elsaid M. Badawi / Muhammad Abdel Haleem, Arabic-English Dictionary of Qur’anic Usage (Leiden: Brill 2008): 316).

@Desmond
Regarding adjectives of colour

Dark (in colour)
غامق
3’aamiq
or
داكن
daakin

Light (in colour)
فاتح
faati7

@ vinod

I'm compiling my own Arabic dictionary. So far I've written 510 pages. I've recorded most of the lexical items that occur in the Arabicpod podcasts, and I've added hundreds of other words and phrases, including the three colour adjectives you have cited in your latest comment.

Some of the articles are long and complex since they contain a considerable amount of grammatical information. Unfortunately, a lot of things (e.g. italics and indentation) disappear when I copy excerpts from Word documents into this comment box. If I were to put my example sentences in this box all the Arabic words would be in the wrong order.

@ Desmond
I wish you all the success on compiling your own Arabic dictionary.

By the way, which system of transliteration are you using in your dictionary? Is there a standard (universally accepted) method for transliterating Arabic alphabets to English? I see that the transliteration varies from book to book (or, from site to site).

@ vinod

Thank you for your kind wishes. The dictionary is geared to my own needs and is not intended for publication.

There is no standard transliteration system for Arabic (cf. Ambros, Einführung in die moderne arabische Schriftsprache: 382-383). The systems vary from country to country and from author to author. I’ve invented my own system, and I’ve tried to make it as simple as possible so that I can look up words quickly. Thus, for instance, I use “kh” for the final consonant in ﻴﺼﺮﺥ (he screams), “aa” for the long vowel in ﻴﺼﻄﺎﺪ (he hunts / he fishes), and “ii” for the initial vowel in ﻠﺤﺎﻒ (blanket).

A monolingual native speaker of German might be tempted to use “ch” instead of “kh” since the Arabic phoneme in question sounds just like “ch” in German. “Aa” is probably the best way to represent the long vowel in “yastaad”. “Aa”, like “ch”, is very common in German (cf. Ger. Saat). A native speaker of English might use “ee” instead of “ii” (cf. Engl. see), a native speaker of German would use “ie” (cf. Ger. dieser), and a native speaker of French would probably prefer “i” (cf. Fr. limer).

I’ve tried to devise a transliteration system that is not too closely linked to any particular European language. I can’t identify completely with any particular linguistic community since I'm equally at home in three languages and three cultures and have to switch from one language to another every day.

@Desmond
I'm trying to keep the tempo 2 lessons a day. new words to studystack + I'm making my own mp3 files of new words (10 words per file) & then listening it all over the day, thanks G-d I do have an opportunity to be most of the time with earphones.

@ jenkki
about "accumulated..." well I built simple system for myself, but as I can see it is kind of hard to explain the algorithm.
I have two banks ~500 words each one that I'm adding every week 70 new words.
every day I learn 10 new words. 70 per week. (via f.cards + mp3 made by me)
every day I listen to 70 words (7 mp3 files) of last 4 weeks in cycle period. + renewing visually last 100 words (10 stacks)
once a week I'm getting over one of the bank files visually.
thats it.
every day it takes me 2 hours to get 10 n.words + create mp3 + add to studystack. I use every minute of free time, like waiting on the queue or minutes before I fall asleep, in studystack on my mobile phone. Also during driving I'm listening to my mp3 list.
I hope it's understandable =). that's it.

@Desmond
woooow your own vocabulary o0 !? you are awesome !!!

@ BPetrenko

I've just updated my dictionary, which now extends over 512 pages. All the information is arranged clearly and systematically, and there are a lot of cross-references which enable me to find synonyms. Some of the entries are also tagged. This facilitates comparisons between example sentences which display similar grammatical or stylistic features.