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Archive for February, 2020

Relative pronouns in Spoken Arabic, 1 Posted by on Feb 28, 2020

mosque

In this post, we’re going to look at a subtle aspect of Arabic grammar that can be confusing for some learners of Spoken Arabic, even advanced ones. This aspect is that of relative pronouns ضمائر الوصل A relative pronoun is a pronoun that follows a noun in order to add extra information about it, in…

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Letter of the Week (ث) thaa Posted by on Feb 26, 2020

Moving on to our fourth letter of the Arabic alphabet (ث), we will look at a number of vocabulary words beginning with ث, though there may not be many Arabic words that begin with ث, the Arabic word for “culture” being ثَقافة begins with ث and this post will focus on some of the major…

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Winter in Fairuz’s Love Songs (2) Posted by on Feb 21, 2020

This is the second part of my previous post where we started looking at the common theme of the connection between winter الشتاء and love الحب in Fairouz’s songs. The second song I chose is رجعت الشتوية  “Winter is back”. As in the previous song, the tone in this song is sad. The singer/girl (main…

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Letter of the Week (ت) taa Posted by on Feb 19, 2020

Moving on to our third letter of the Arabic alphabet (ت), we will look at various words and phrases beginning with (ت) along with more culture/language related facts. Let’s begin with looking at your basic forms of the letter ت. Initial ‍ت‍, as in the word “تُربة” meaning “soil/dirt”. Medial ‍ت‍, as in the word…

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Letter of the Week (ب) baa Posted by on Feb 12, 2020

american university of beirut

Moving on to our second letter of the Arabic alphabet (ب), we will look at various words and phrases beginning with (ب) along with more culture/language related facts. 🙂 Let’s begin with looking at your basic forms of the letter ب. Initial ‍ب‍, as in the word “بَيْت” meaning “house”. Medial ‍ب‍, as in the…

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Winter in Fairuz’s Love Songs (1) Posted by on Feb 10, 2020

Girl alone on a rainy day

In this post, we’re going to learn about a common theme in Arabic music and that is the association between winter الشتاء and love الحب. In this post, I’m focusing on two works by the Lebanese singer – Fairuz – and look at the words/phrases used to address this theme. In the first part of…

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Letter of the Week (أ) alif Posted by on Feb 5, 2020

A vectorized image of Egyptian poet Ahmed Shawqi.

Hello Arabic learners! In these series of posts titled “Letter of the Week”, we’ll be focusing on one Arabic letter from the alphabet. We’ll begin with 10 random words/phrases beginning with that letter with examples for each one including culture/language related facts about a few. There will also be a word/phrase beginning with that letter…

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