Language Learning

One characteristic of Arabic that makes its writing easy is that it is a phonetic language. That is, there is generally a one-to-one correspondence between the spoken form and the written form. In other words, there are no silent letters as is the case with English and French. This is especially true when writing isolated words. However, in writing natural connected speech, one…

The Inception of Arabic Grammar The person behind the inception of Arabic grammar was Imam Ali ben Abi Talib الْإِمَامُ عَلِيٌّ بِنْ أَبِي طَالِب, the cousin of Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) and his son in-law. He wrote the first rules that governed people's speech. Then he passed it on to Abu al-Aswad Dalim ben Amr ben Sufyan al-Duu’ali who was his companion and was famous for his …

If you want to learn Arabic online, Ibnulyemen Arabic provides directed and personalized learning. That is,  our lessons are conversation-, grammar-, or vocabulary-based. For example, we provide our students with thematic conversations that includes pronunciation and grammar components. For grammar, our lessons will help you construct sentences and assign parsing marks correctl…

In the previous lesson, you learn why a word in Arabic that is composed of the same letters can have multiple different meanings. The word سلم is composed of س, then ل, and finally م. Their shape in isolation is slightly different from their shape in a word. In this lesson, we will learn how to put Arabic letters together to form words. Unlike Romance languages, such as Englis…

Diacritics in Arabic (3) Diacritics in Arabic determines word meanings. In the previous lesson, you learned about the shape of the diacritical marks and where they are positioned in relation to letters, i.e. above or below the letter. This lesson is about the importance and role of diacritics. The fourteen diacritical marks listed in the previous lesson are collectively called…

Diacritics in Arabic (2) In the previous lesson, you learned that Arabic certainly has vowels, but they are not written, especially in Modern Standard Arabic, because they are diacritical, i.e. not actual letters. These vowels are called short vowels or الْحَرَكَاتُ الْقَصِيرَة al-Harakaat al-qaSiirah. Besides them, there are other diacritical marks. What are they? This lesson…