Arabic Baby Step Journey

In my post yesterday I wrote that I’ll challenge myself to read and study Arabic. So I’ve bought a book called A New Arabic Grammar for Written Language as well as two books usually used by pesantrens : Jurumiyah and Alfiyah. The last two are written to be easily memorised, like most of classic book. The English one is more structured, just like usual grammar book.

Fortunately for me, I can just skip the first chapter about huruf and their pronunciation and reading. I’m already able to pronounce ع correctly, thanks to my though teacher back then which gave me cane on hand every time I spelled them wrong. /s

Then came the hard part. I’m now not surprised people said that learning Arabic is though. The first part is about الإسم or the noun. Oh God of heavens, I saw the complexities already, the cases and noun gender change the vowel in the end. I thought I can just skim away. But no, it turns out I need to take paper and take a lot of notes and do the exercise several times until I can do it correctly.

I can’t imagine how people that hasn’t been educated to things like pronunciation. Things like moon letters or sun letters to decide how to just read noun with definite article correctly.

And then, the plurals, especially the broken plurals or جمع التكسير. I need to memorise a lot of nouns for their plural form which makes me feel remembering japanese Kanji a lot easier. Thankfully, there are a lot of free resources on the internet about word-formation الصرف. It is the complementary study for the grammar.

With many challenges, I think It might be faster if I take a course. But for now I’ll keep up even with nail pace. Wish me luck.