By now, you’ve probably heard all of the horror stories about how difficult Arabic is to learn: “Arabic letters look like hieroglyphics.” “There are too many strange sounds. It makes learning to speak it impossible.” “Arabic has an enormous vocabulary; I mean, c’mon! 400 words for a camel, and 200 for a lion?” “Arabic grammar is too complicated.” Indeed, when it comes to learning languages, Arabic gets a bad...
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Among the questions we get asked most frequently at Kaleela are questions like: “Is 1,000 words enough to speak a language?” or “How many foreign words can you learn in a day to speak fluently?” If we gave you an answer, you’d probably ask surprisingly, “It takes how many vocabulary words to be fluent in Arabic?” The truth is, however, because everybody has a different...
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Nearly every society around the world celebrates birthdays, but just as every culture is unique, so are their birthday customs and traditions. Today we’re going to look at how to wish someone a happy birthday in the most common spoken languages in the world and some of the birthday traditions within the cultures of those languages. So, let’s get this party started, shall we? 01 Happy Birthday...
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Okay before I start, I know some of you Millennials and Zoomers are going to be all like “Libraries? Aren’t those, like, those really old buildings where, like, they used to keep books and ancient texts and stuff on papyrus or paper or something? My grandmother used to work in one, like a long time ago before the internet.” And, like, you’d be somewhat correct...
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So, you’ve studied Modern Standard Arabic and you feel like it’s time you honed your language skills and you’ve decided to study the Jordanian dialect. However, with so many Arabic dialects to choose from, why learn the Jordanian one? “Well,” you might answer, “I’ve heard about the Egyptian dialect and how it got to be a popular dialect to learn because of the influence of Egyptian...
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The history of ceramics in Islamic art is unmatched by any of its contemporaries. When the rest of the world was making unglazed pottery, Islamic potters were developing a tin-opacified glazing some of which can be found on the blue-painted ware of Basra, Iraq, that dates as far back as 700 AD. Additionally, 9th century Iraqi Islamic potters also contributed to the creation of stonepaste ceramics,...
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