Learning Arabic

Our journey to mastering Arabic has been one that has had many ups and downs, trials and errors, mostly on my part, of course.

The little Arabic I gained from five years of it in high school, I'm embarassed to say, is truly little. I can understand maybe like 20% of what is recited of the Quran, and what is exchanged between Arabs in their extremely 'speedy' conversations.

Gateway to Arabic by Dr. Imran Hamza Alawiye is what I use now to teach the kids Arabic.

The Arabic CD I use, I bought when they were toddlers. We still use it now and Alhamdulillah i think it is really beneficial in enriching their vocabulary. We also have
Alif Ba Ta Yaseen which I also like.

We are in book two for the 'Gateway to Arabic' for S and N, but still book one for H, since he hasn't yet mastered the art of connecting the Arabic letters. S's writing is very good and neat, even from a few years back Masyaallah, as can be seen from her writing of Surah Al-Aadiyat in the previous post. We struggled with her scrawly writing in English, but for some reason, her Arabic handwriting seems to be very well arranged. Whatever it is, Alhamdulillah.

The first step to teaching Arabic, in my opinion is attaining vocabulary. This is also how we learn any other languages. Book one teaches individual letters, and how to connect them. Whether a letter is Al Qamariah(The moon letters) or As-shamsiah (the sun letters) is also taught in Book One.

Book Two moves on to gender, which I think is a somewhat difficult aspect of Arabic, especially when it comes to nouns that are feminine depending on what they are. Body parts for example are feminine in Arabic regardless of having a ta marbuta or not. Earth in Arabic is feminine even though it doesn't have a ta marbuta. These, I don't teach the kids yet, as it might confuse them at this point.

However, we did go in to the muannas (feminine) and muzakkar(masculine) words. the way of differentiation that they know is whether the word has a ta marbuta or not. That's the general rule. So far, they are handling it well Alhamdulillah.

Nest step is to introduce the word Haaza (this is (masculine)) and haazihi(this is (feminine)). This is when things start to get a litte bit more complicated. However, it's good practice and comparatively easy. After they have gotten the hang of stringing together 'this is' and a noun, adjectives are introduced.

So now, instead of just constructing a sentence, "This is a house," they have to construct the sentence, "This is a big house."

Introducing the adjectives were quite a feat for me, for I had to figure out a way for them to remember the words. So we had a little charade. I'd never do this in public. They got a kick out of my silly actions depicting 'big', 'small', 'light','heavy','tall', and 'short'. Even I got a kick of it, thinking, I hope no one videotapes me.

I also began to write the arabic words for items in their room on index cards and taping them onto the items. However, that soon failed as the labels fell off and I gave up.

For a while we abandoned Arabic because I was too tired. Every now and then we would visit it again. ALl the while I realized consistency is the key. Alhamdulillah they didn't forget what they learned, not yet anyway and I was able to resume our lessons.

At one time, N even said to me while we were unpacking the groceries in the kitchen, "This is 3eenaab(grapes)."

N seems to have a natural skill for acquiring language. She's the only one who didn't have difficulty saying 'R'. She doesn't speak a lot, but when she does, she does it perfectly, ALhamdulillah. So naturally, she picks up Arabic quicker than S and H, or even me.

Now, I would say a sentence in Arabic, and they have to write it down in Arabic. So far, it seems to be working well. When they master this stage insyaallah, we'll move on to the next, which is using conjunctions.

Pretty soon, I'll be out of their league and would have to sit in class WITH them under a more qualified teacher. Insyaallah. O Allah, please make it easy for us to learn the language of the Quran so we can understand it better. Ameen.