انا فرحا

[kumazuki]

I am so excited. I got my acceptance to the Arabic class. The Islamic Society of Wichita as part of their community outreach program, is offering free classes in Arabic. It is be held one of the 2 mosques here in Wichita. It is on Sunday for 16 weeks. When I called to find out about it I asked if it was just conversation or what type of class it

Comments

[madknits]

I had a semester of Arabic. Tough language. Hope you enjoy it, masha'llah.

[kumazuki]

Allahkem salam, I have studied a bit on my own. I am really looking forward to it. It can't be nearly as tough as Irish Gaelic.

[madknits]

I never studied Irish. I did study Welsh, and that was bad enough. I had three years of classical Hebrew and thought it would help me in Arabic. I was wrong.

[rafdfw]

That is really cool. I wonder if the mosques in my area are offering something similar.

Most Masjid's Offer Arabic

[bigbear1963]

Most Masjids and / or Islamic Centers do offer courses in Arabic. If you want to find out, go to http://www.islamicfinder.org/ and type in your zip code, which will give you listings with contact info on Islamic centers in your area. They will also list activities, which may include arabic/islamic studies. For example if you go to http://www.iatc.org/ [ Islamic Association Of Tarrant County ] you will find that they have listed arabic/islamic studies on Sunday's Activities. You would just need to contact them and see about joining the class, or just show up on Sunday and ask. Most courses are ongoing so you could probably join in right away.

Re: Most Masjid's Offer Arabic

[rafdfw]

Thanks, I appreciate that. I've wanted to pick up another language for some time.

Re: Most Masjid's Offer Arabic

[kumazuki]

Cool info. I will have to keep that in mind. Thanks.

[oskaar]

Silly boy, Latin conjugates EVERYTHING so you don't have to worry about awful things like "word order" =)

[kauko]

Not true, Latin only conjugates verbs, silly :P

[oskaar]

Ok, sorry, inflects everything. Yeesh.\
This is why I'm a syntactician and not a semantician.

[kumazuki]

I think Russian, Finnish and Icelandic conjugate just about everything...
Japanese is so much easier!

barak allah feek

[bigbear1963]

The real problem is that Arabic is just not offered in many colleges here, which is ridiculous since we have such interest in middle-eastern affairs. Or, rather, interest in blowing-up middle-eastern countries. Be that as it may, I doubt if you go to any faith-based organization you would not be subjected to their ideology. Not to worry, though. Muslims generally do the least in terms of indoctrinatory coercion. You will be studying the Koran, most likely, but that would be a good way for you to learn Arabic, because of the punctuation, which includes vowel sounds. In modern Arabic, the vowel sounds are understood, so they are usually absent. It would also be a good way to learn the Koran, which is often misquoted in order to boost advertising revenues on news programs and by political pontificators ( pun intended ).

Enjoy it!

Re: barak allah feek

[kumazuki]

The vowels were always my sticking point. I understand the vowels in most diacrital languages, but languages like Arabic and Hebrew where the vowels are somthing that you only know if you already know them. WOW! Crazy.

Re: barak allah feek

[bigbear1963]

In the Koran, the vowels are marked in there so you will know how to correctly pronounce the words. They appear above and below the writing as apostrophe, comma and circular shapes. When placed above they help the reader pronounce variations of vowels a e & i, and when placed below they usually sound like u. When used in combination they make ae & ei and below au, and eu, etc. You'll get the hang of it. My biggest problem, since I am a visual lerner, remains identifying lower-case letters within words. Because everything is written in script, naturally. It was that way for me when I was in grade school learning English as well. As a matter of fact, if we learned Arabic script to begin with, I probably wouldn't have had much trouble, since once you learn the method, you can pronounce any word correctly, no matter what language it comes from. Arabic is universal.

Re: barak allah feek

[kauko]

There's also the problem that Arabic has so many sounds that are alien to Western ears, making it hard to pronounce.

[ex_earthmonk411]

that's amazing!

[kumazuki]

yeah! I am really psyced!