I don’t know why when most people just get to learn arabic they learn it as a textual language… by the way we (arabs) never use the formal one in conversations !! just we use it to in school to pass tests & i think it’s the same thing at english…if you want to learn english you must listen to informal spoken english and never get to study grammer , and about the dialects i think every arabic country has its own dialect but it’s much difficult as most learners think.! =)
I am learning the best way I can in Canada 
That’s cool…but you need to train on listening to informal arabic just to know more slangs and idioms = )
Wow, this thread is really inspiring. It is this kind of enthusiasm for languages that made me come here in the first place. Thanks for sharing your passion with us. I look forward to reading more about your “Arabic adventure”.
I put my arabic journey aside for a bit because I am currently concentrating on Russian. I problem I faced was that I couldn’t work out how to join characters. I can write them (I still have the link you posted on a different thread), but can’t join them. Have you got any resources to learn to do so?
I decided in advance that I would not learn to handwrite Arabic. There is no big need for it in this age of virtual keyboards eg http://www.yamli.com/
My goal was to learn to sound out words. This requires I only recognise the characters. I then use transliterations (Arabic with familiar alphanumeric script) to fill in any vowels that are not present. This transliteration is what many Arabic speakers use to text message and type in computers anyway.
@James123 If you do enjoy handwriting (I think it is a great aide), there are plenty of beginners books around which show you how some of the letters change when you use joint-up writing (there’s generally a table showing the letter according to whether it’s at the beginning, in the middle or at the end.) There must be tables like that floating around in the ether?
One of the best ones I have come across is The Macmillan Arabic Course. I have both books, but don’t know whether they are still in print.
One of the best ones - I meant: one of the best courses I have come across …
I’ll look out for it. I’ve tried looking for such charts which tell you how to link everything and the way characters are formed, but they either just show them formed in isolation or aren’t suited to me. It may sound boring but for me it is quite fun writing in a different alphabet.
I understand that fascination. Handwriting also helps some people to deepen their learning. My son writes his scripts always by hand before typing them up.
hello all of you , hi Mr, Dooo
i think we can help each otherm how ?
i will tell you>>>> i really need to learn english and i read alot about how to learn english but till now i am not sure that i can speak english well with people because i live in arabian country and no body is here to practice with,
so i think maybe if we talk to each other daily or whatever maybe you will get the benefit from me and i will get the benefit from you
and i will appreciate that. i dont know wether this idea work with you or not
and i want you and all people here to tell me how is my english now ?? is it good enough?
if no body understand what i write then i will know that my english still need more improve to make me a biggener
thank you
@hodifa
Your English is quite clear and understandable. I’m sure sure if you speak with a native English speaker you will soon speak very naturally. : )
thank you for your encouragement, i am looking for any one around here but it is quite difficult here this why i start looking for frinds in the Internet
thanks again Mr. Maths
مرحبا,
. فكرة جيد
But I don’t have a lot of time now for speaking. Thank you. I will let you know in the future.
ok thank you anyway, i will be waitting for you
@James123: I think YouTube may be our very present help in times of need. Try, eg http://bit.ly/jAIQ4k.
Russians laugh at my handwriting too. Fortunately they very rarely get subjected to it.
Edward, since you are learning arabic with another LingQ language, did you find any way to make google translate pronounce your flashcard word in arabic instead of the ‘other’ LingQ language ? Is there any way we could explore this option. Since google translate already has this option pretty much figured out, it would be just be a matter of expanding the drop down menu’s on to make for a correct pronounciation IMHO. Maybe we can get Steve to chime in on this.
Thx in advance
On Windows and Chrome, I right-click the “speaker” icon on the flashcard and then left-click “open in new window”. Then I get a black audio player window. The URL of that window has an “it” in it which represents the language the player is being told to pronounce. I change that to “ar”, press enter, and the player plays the Arabic translation. I am using the Italian slot for Arabic.
On Ubuntu and Firefox the “speaker” icon is just a picture, it is not a link to anything. I am not sure why. In that case I just keep the google translate window open and copy-paste.
Both are not great solutions. I wonder if there is a way to tweak the source code on the flashcard page to make it work.
Thanks Dooo !
Will try it this evening and report back.
Tried it. It works great! Thanks again!