Arabic Alphabet etc.

[maeve66]

So. In my classes, during the 7th grade World History portion (which I am not really even supposed to be teaching the beginners in my afternoon class, but whatever), we are exploring The Rise of Islam. We look at the life of Muhammad, the Five Pillars, the Sunnis and Shi'ites, and the first four caliphs. We also look at the role of literacy in the spread of Islam, and at cultural forms. So right now in class we're doing a mini art project where students design repeating patterns after looking at examples of Islamic art, and as part of it, they incorporate their names, spelled phonetically in Arabic. Which means they have to get familiar with the Arabic alphabet. Therefore, I made a simplified version, and here it is. People with expertise can feel free to correct me severely, but I'll tell you that I already know I haven't included all the letters or ALL the forms of all the letters, or the other non-alphabetic marks. Believe me, it's an advance that I got two forms of the letters. I'm actually slowly starting to recognize and be able to sound out SOME of the letters, and write them without consulting this chart. I'm good at A, R, M, N, S, L, Ayn, Sh, Wow, Yay, one of the Ts, (the one that looks like a lowercase italic B, sort of), and K.



I like this. I want to learn Arabic. I also want to learn Farsi and Hindi, but for starters, Arabic.

Comments

[toastykitten.livejournal.com]

Hey! I did something similar for my boyfriend. What texts/audio stuff are you using to learn Arabic?

Also, your 7th grade curriculum sounds way more comprehensive than the one I had.

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

I haven't actually started, apart from this preliminary stuff I'm using with my students. But the Pimsleur method Eastern Arabic thing seems like a possibility, though I quail at the thought of not using the crutch of reading and writing while learning a language. I'm guessing Eastern vs. Egyptian (and certainly vs. Western) would be the most useful, though I don't really know. Yemeni kids... would they speak Eastern Arabic? And Iraqis, and Syrians and the Lebanese?

If you have suggestions, I'd be interested to hear them. Are you a native speaker? Why (if you don't mind me asking) were you doing this for your boyfriend?

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

Oops -- okay, not a native speaker of Arabic... I just went back to your userinfo for a second. Wow, you're going to China?

[(Anonymous)]

My boyfriend is Arab. I did a painting of his name as a Christmas present once. I'm sure compared to the masters of calligraphy, mine is terrible, but I wanted to make something nice for him.

Anyway, yes, I go to China in two days with my family on a tour. It will definitely be interesting.

[toastykitten.livejournal.com]

grr. that last comment was mine.