I’m learning arabic and i just finished learning the alphabet. The problem is I can only read arabic with harakat (vowels) and all the good beginner lingQ content is written without harakat (vowels). should I just listen to the word from the audio and learn it like that. Because i know every letter from the alphabet so i would just see Mrhb → listen to the audio and would hear marhhaba. and just learn like that. Or does somebody else have a tipp?
By the way i’m also using pimsleur and i learned how to say: good morning. And when I saw the arabic text of good morning on LingQ without harakat (vowels) i could after some thinking still read it.
I’m going to comment from the perspective of someone who learned Hebrew to a certain degree, which has similar grammar. Most of the time, Hebrew is written without vowels. The exceptions are poetry and the Bible. So, I would start right away to read without vowels, to get used to it.
I know Lingq doesn’t emphasize grammar but the way to realize how without vowels make sense is to learn the root systems. There are specific patterns of vowels are roots that go with the verb tenses and structures (in Hebrew, the are called Binyan, building. It refers to different type of vowel and root patterns, and different types of verbs. For example, indicative, reflexive, causative, past principle. It’s not exactly equal to these things but it’s hard it explain.
Many verbs and nouns are build around a triconsonant system. That means the root will be three letters. There may be prefixes/ suffixes/ other letters as part of the verb tense, but the root is 3 letters. The letters get different forms and vowel patterns depending on verb tense and grammatical use. So if you see a certain grammatical structure, you will know the vowel pattern if you recognize that structure.
also, if you ever use a physical dictionary, you look things up by the root word. So you would have to have a certain level of grammar just to do that, and it is worth doing, in my opinion . (Though modern electronic dictionaries will tell you the root for you.)
in sum, you could probably pick up some of the grammar just by reading. Maybe learn words w vowels (or by audio) and soon after that switch to no vowels. But it might make it easier to review some grammar to see how it all makes sense. Of course, reinforcing and remembering these structures will come with practice and lots of input
