Lesson 1: Introduction

Hey! Welcome to lesson 1 of ARB199 Advanced Arabic foundation. I am your instructor

Mohtanick Jamil.

Before we take this course on let me just congratulate each and every single one of you for
taking this course. This is a huge step towards proficiency in your Arabic language. What we
are going to teach you is reading, writing, pronouncing and listening skills for the Arabic
language. Now we don’t go into the grammar and morphology and conversational Arabic
but we give you these 4 skills plus a lot of vocabulary for words and phrases. You will be
taken from absolutely level zero right to the top. We teach you things that even scholars
don’t know. This course is designed for everyone. It is designed for people who want just a
little bit to get them going, and for those people who know absolutely zero and want to
make it right to the top so they can understand the most beautiful pieces of literature in
Arabic, even the Qur’aan. We give you the skills that facilitate deep understanding of the
Qur’aan.

But don’t worry we have a lot to do; we are going to take it in manageable chunks. We have
benchmarks at each level. We have exercises to make sure that you’re at the right level and
that you know what we’re talking about.

When you have finished this course you will be ready to take the Ivy League schools, the
best out there for learning Arabic. I’m talking about things like Shariah Program, Zaytoona
College, Bayyinah Institute. I’m talking about the top of the top of the top. You will be able
to take those courses and be light years ahead of everyone else. We’ll tell you stuff that
people don’t talk about when they teach you Arabic. Arabic is taught very very quickly. We
plan to go through it very slowly, at your pace actually. You can hit rewind, fast forward,
pause, take notes, do whatever you want. This is your course now. Do with it as you please.
Take it at your own pace. We are going to go slowly, step by step and hold your hand all the
way. We will talk about even cultural stuff in Arabic. We don’t want you to look silly. We
don’t want you to pick up a book and start reading from the wrong side for example.

This course is being taken at the same time as you are watching, people from all over the
world, literally tens of thousands of people are taking this course. Some of them are
beginners, for them we recommend taking 3 months. Some of them are advanced for them
we recommend taking 3 weeks. No less because we want you to do the exercises, improve
your penmanship, improve your reading and writing skills. Because there are so many
people watching these lessons at the exact same time, you might feel that sometimes this
course is slow if you are advanced. We want you to be respectful, because we’re all brothers
and sisters with one goal, and that is trying to attain perfect proficiency of the Arabic
language.
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Let’s get started.

Even before we get into the letters of the Arabic language, I want to look at the typology of
the script. Basically I just want to compare Arabic script to English script so we understand
some of the cultural and linguistic differences.

Understanding the differences between Arabic and English Script

1. Arabic is read from right to left, not left to right as in English or any of the other romance
languages. The sentence: “the Arabic language is easy” is read from left to right. But the
Arabic sentence is read from right to left: ‫اللُّغَةُ الْ َعَربِيةُ َس ْهلَة‬

Let’s talk about some of the details of this. But if you don’t want the further information
then this is what I want you to take away: Arabic is read from right to left.

Caveat of that is when you are reading books in one of the romance languages like English.
You are going to hold it with the spine facing left. You will turn the pages to the left and
start reading from the top left. In Arabic it is opposite; if you are going to hold the book like
that then it will be upside down. To read an Arabic book you will flip the book around so
that the spine is on your right. You are going to flip pages to the right and you will start from
the right page and begin reading from the top right.

Right to left progression vs. Left to right progression: Another important difference is when
you are looking at street signs or advertisements even. If you have a progression with
pictures for example. A person is very sad, he does something and then he is very happy. In
western culture we interpret that as left to right progression. In Arabic and Middle Eastern
culture that would be a right to left progression.

Commentaries/Footnotes: Another difference in culture (not even script) is commentaries.

In English when you pick up a textbook you expect to find just a textbook. But when you pick
up an Arabic book, especially if it is a classical book, you will find it has a commentary. There
is a rectangle in the middle of the page which is the actual text of the book, called the
“matan”. Around the text -the top, right, left, especially at the bottom (almost like
footnotes) you will find a commentary. It doesn’t fail; almost every single book in Arabic has
commentary/footnotes, sometimes it is written upside down, sometimes on a slant, it is
called “Haashiyah”.

Classical vs. Modern Arabic: In classical Arabic, from the beginning right to the very end,
you will find just text after text. There is no punctuations, no paragraph markings, no
indentation, no separation of chapters, no headings etc. In modern Arabic, if you pick up a
newspaper like “Al Jazeera”, you will find punctuation, headings, paragraph markings,
indentations, chapter headings, sub heading etc.
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Note: When I say classical Arabic don’t be confused. It doesn’t mean it isn’t used anymore. It
isn’t necessarily the case “it’s classical, nobody uses it anymore”.

About the punctuation that does exist in newspapers for example, it is exactly the same as
in English. You have your periods, commas, colons, semi colons, dashes, hyphens,
exclamations marks, questions marks, etc. All the rules are pretty much the same as well.

The only difference is that punctuation that is not symmetrical, e.g. ? in English will be
backwards in Arabic ‫؟‬. This also applies to the comma in English it looks like: , and in

Arabic: ،

Over line vs. Underline: Another difference especially between classical Arabic texts and
English is that in English you typically underline an important word. (You might bold it or
italicise it). I have underlined the word ‫“ مشس‬shams” (means sun). In classical Arabic you

over line it, not underline it. I’ve over lined the word ‫“ حياة‬hayaa” (means life).

We have talked about the typology of the alphabet. Now I want to talk about the letters
themselves. This is a mapping from English letters to Arabic letters.

A= _ F= ‫ف‬ K=‫ك‬ P= _ U= ‫و‬ Z= ‫ز‬

B= ‫ب‬ G= _ L= ‫ل‬ Q= ‫ق‬ V= _

C= _ H= ‫ه‬ M= ‫م‬ R= ‫ر‬ W= _

D= _ I= _ N= ‫ن‬ S= ‫س‬ X= _
E= _ J= ‫ج‬ O= _ T= _ Y= ‫ي‬

2. Letter Correspondence: As you can see some letters like the English letter b, correspond
exactly to the Arabic letter ‫ب‬. Some letters correspond exactly. In other cases the English

letters have no Arabic equivalent. Similarly there are some letters in Arabic, like the letter ‫ش‬

(sheen) that have no equivalent in English. ‫( ش‬sheen) is actually a combination of 2 English

letters: s+h. Other letters in Arabic actually can’t be reproduced in English, like the letter ‫ض‬

(daad). Arabic is the only language in the world that has the letter ‫( ض‬daad). They might
have it in their script but they don’t pronounce it. For this reason Arabic has the nickname
“lugatud daad”. Another letter that doesn’t exist in English is the letter ‫‘( ع‬ayn). You can’t
reproduce that letter in English.
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Some letters do have somewhat of a correspondence, like the English “j” is somewhat like
the Arabic letter ‫( ج‬jeem). I don’t think anyone will tell you there is a difference between
the two letters. But I’m going to tell you that there is. It is a very very faint difference,
between their qualities. They are close enough that we can draw this parallel but they are
not exactly the same. We will talk about it when the time comes. It is not like b and ‫( ب‬ba).

3. Cursive vs. Printing: The third difference is that Arabic doesn’t have printing. It is written
in cursive form. If you look at the English here, you have “abc”. Let’s pretend this is a single
word. All the letters are going to be written separately with a small gap in between. To write
another word you are going to have a relatively big space in between. English also has
cursive or handwriting where all the letters in a word are connected to each other. This is
how Arabic works (‫)بتث‬. So when you write it you don’t lift your pen. It’s a continuous
motion. When you are done you come back and dot the letters, just like you dot your i’s and
cross your t’s. There is also something that corresponds to crossing the t’s. We will talk
about it when the time comes.

There are a few exceptions to this. There are about 6 or 7 letters in the Arabic alphabet that

َ ‫( إَِر‬iraadah).
cannot connect to the letter after them. I’m going to give you an example: ‫ادة‬
This words means intention/to do something. This is a single word, but all the letters in the
word happen to be one of the letters in the language that cannot connect to the letter after
them. As is the case with a cursive language with cursive script, each word is separated by a
relatively long space. In the exercise for this lesson you will be asked to draw vertical lines
between words. You will notice that here are some letters that cannot connect to the letter
after them. You have to lift your pen, leave a little gap and start writing the next letter. It is
easy to tell their difference when the sequence is ending (tiny space) and the entire word is
ending (long space).

A single word can have multiple sequences. By the same token a single sequence can have
multiple words. I’m going to write a word: ‫( ِِبُبِّ َها‬bi hubbihaa). This means by/with her love.

The word starts with a letterِ‫ب‬, it is a letter but its already a word. َ‫( ب‬ba) means with or by. It

has 12 meanings. The word ‫ب‬

ّ ‫( ُح‬hub) means love. The word ‫ َها‬means “her”. It is a pronoun.
So there are three words but it’s all one sequence. From now on, when we talk about
writing, we are going to talk about sequences, you are not going to know whether it’s one
word, or group of words or if the sequence is half a word. We are not talking about words in
this course. We are talking about sequences. Why would multiple words come in one
sequence? That is because some words are very small, like the word ‫ب‬, prepositions and
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pronouns are like that. Prepositions are prefixed to the word some of the time. Pronouns
are suffixed to a word.

In conclusion Arabic is written in a cursive form, some letters however cannot connect to
the letter after them. So they split a word into what we call sequences. A word can have
multiple sequences. By the same token a single sequence can have multiple words. You
prefix prepositions and you suffix pronouns.

4. No uppercase or lowercase: The fourth difference is that Arabic does not have upper
case and lower case. You can have four versions of a letter: uppercase L printing, lowercase l
printing upper case L handwriting and lowercase l handwriting. In Arabic what you see is
what you get, the letter is the letter. There are different forms of a letter, that’s only
because we want to teach you what the letter will look like by itself, at the beginning of a
sequence, in the middle of a sequence and at the end of a sequence. It has 4 forms, that’s
just because we want to teach you how to write the word in the beginning, middle or end of
a sequence or by itself.

5. Vowels not part of the Arabic alphabet: The fifth difference is that vowels are not part of
the Arabic alphabet. Every letter that you see in the Arabic alphabet is a consonant. In
English the vowels are part of the alphabet: a e i o u. These are actually vowels within the
alphabet; they take up space in the alphabet. In Arabic that’s not the case. You need vowels
in a language, so where are they? They are little marks on top or underneath a letter. I’ve
chosen the letter ‫( ب‬ba) the English equivalent is b (you don’t have to know this letter, if
you don’t know it its fine) . So as you can see they are just little marks on top or underneath
a letter. In most cases you don’t write vowels, you pronounce them of course. That might
seem a little awkward because let me write an English sentence without vowels: th bk s n th
tbl. Now tell me that’s not confusing. It is absolutely confusing. Because how do you know
“bk” is book and not bike? You don’t. The only thing that can help you is the context; you
don’t typically have bikes on tables. That is because English is a pathetic language. Sorry!
Arabic is much more structured, it’s very systematic. If you learn Arabic grammar you will no
longer need vowels. The knowledge of Arabic grammar and morphology will be enough to
fill in the vowels for you. Filling in the vowels will become like second nature.

There are 3 cases in which vowels are written:

First is children’s books. That is because children might not know enough grammar to infer
the vowels.

Second is religious texts, like Qur’aan the Torah, Gospel. They are there because we don’t
want you making any mistakes.
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Third is in poetry, because poetry uses advance vocabulary, awkward grammar, inverted
structures. So in order to avoid making mistakes and mass confusion we add the vowels
there too.

How will we approach our future lessons?

We are going to take groups of letters and we are going to focus on those letters. We are
going to pronounce them, how to hone in on them (listening skills), read and recognise
them in writing and how to write them ourselves.

Like I said each letter has 4 forms. For pedagogical purposes, one is written by itself, in the
beginning of a sequence, in the middle and in the end.

We are going to go through and practice all cases. We are going to do words and a lot of
practice. Lastly at each stage we need some sort of a benchmark, i.e. how are we doing.
What I’ve done is that I’ve taken a short chapter of the Qur’aan, which is unanimously
considered the greatest piece of literature in the Arabic language, period. It doesn’t matter
if you’re Muslim or not. If you’re not Muslim or religious then just forget it’s a religious text.
It is the greatest piece of literature in the Arabic language even from an objective
perspective. Since this is the highest form of Arabic literature, we are going t compare our
knowledge to this, can we read it, can we reproduce it, can we write it and understand it.
When people are speaking can we identify the letters. We are going to take this peak of
eloquence and compare our knowledge. You’ll see at the end you are going to do pretty well
against this. So sit back, relax, enjoy the lessons with your family and have fun!