Let’s Speak Arabic (Learn Arabic Conversation in Just One Week!)

For Business or pleasure you need Let’s Speak Arabic for useful vocabulary and phrases. The book is organized to make Arabic learning easy and accessible.

Let’s Speak Arabic focuses exclusively on the most common, everyday situations you will encounter in Arabic-speaking countries.

It is just what you need to communicate successfully in basic Arabic

This book has been prepared to serve dual purpose to help the regular students of Arabic courses to be able to speak Arabic through specially designed courses basing their eyes on the Arabic script and to enable the self-learners for specific and temporal purpose of visiting an Arabic speaking area for short or long periods of work. For this category of self-learners we have used Roman script with specially designed equivalents or let us say near equivalents for some very typical only Arabic sounds. Therefore, it becomes very necessary here to talk about and explain Arabic sounds which, when written, are called letters.

As we have known, Arabic alphabet consists of twenty-eight letters. All of these twenty eight letters are consonant letters, however, three of them function as 'elongative vowels'. How and where these are used as elongative vowels, shall be explained at appropriate place.

We said, generally accepted there are twenty-eight consonant letters in the Arabic alphabet. However, for our convenience we can consider them to be thirty letters including ta. In fact, there is no harm in considering them as 29th and 30th letters. More so because they play crucial and independent role in the formation of Arabic words- ta marboota is always used as terminal letter indicating that the nouns ending thus are generally feminine gender nouns while hamza is severally used only as consonant as against alif which is used as elongative vowel also.

In this book in lesson one itself we have very clearly specified Roman substitutes for Arabic sounds and hence, thosewho would like to learn to speak through the roan script, they should learn Roman symbols very well with emphasis on correct pronunciation.

Each language of the world would have certain things that would be very peculiar of that language and that language when spoken would sound good and give the right meaning when pronounced correctly. Keeping this in mind, let us mention here some tips to say the Arabic sounds correctly or near-correctly.

The first and the second letters of the Arabic alphabet are simple and easy to say. The third letter is soft 't' as generally spoken by the Arabs and other groups of foreigners to the English language. The fourth letter is said as th' in 'the' or 'Elizabeth' etc. Fifth letter is said like'J'. The sixth letter is deep glottal aspirate 'H' which is hard to find an equivalent. The seventh letter is said as 'ch' together in 'Munich' or loch. This sound can be best compared with snoring sound. Eighth letter is soft 'd' while the ninth letter is said as 'dh' together as in 'dhow'. Tenth letter is ordinary 'r' while the eleventh letter sounds like 'Z' as in Zebra. The twelfth letter is said like 's' and thirteenth letter is pronounced like 'sh' as in 'shank'. Fourteenth letter is said like 'ss' as in 'b;essed' while the the fifteenth letter is pronounced like 'd' as in 'bad'. Sixteenth letter is said like 't' bat' while the seventeenth sound is not easy to give equivalent of. This can best be compared with 'echoed z' Eighteenth letter is deep glottal 'a'. Nineteenth sound is said exactly like Parisian 'r'. This sound can be compared with 'strong gurgle' sound. Twentieth letter is comparable with 'f' and the twenty-first sound is glottal 'k' , which is often replaced by English letter'q' as in quran. The next sound that is the twnty second letter is said like 'n'. Twenty seventh and twenty eighth letters are said like 'w' and 'y' respectively. We have given Roman equivalent in lesson one which have to be taken note of and learnt by heart if you were to learn speaking through the roman scripit.