Arabic from the beginning

About the book:

The purpose of this book is to set students on the road to learning Modern Standard Arabic by equipping them with all the skills they need to read and write vowelised Arabic texts. By the end of the book students should be able to:

• identify all the letters of the Arabic alphabet in their isolate and joined forms
• know the difference between the long and short vowel sounds and how to read them, including the diphthongs ‘-ay’ and ‘-ow’
• read the tanween word endings
• understand the roles of sukoon and shadda
• read words containing a hamza, no matter its position within a word
• recognise the alif al-maqsura
• identify the sun and moon letters and understand their effect on the pronunciation of words defined by ‘al-’
• read fully vowelised Arabic text

Although this work is primarily intended for classroom use, it is also well-suited to self-taught learners