History and Characteristics of the Arabic Alphabet
Arabic is among the top 5 most spoken languages worldwide, with 422 million speakers across various countries. It is estimated to be 1600 years old, originating from the Arabian Peninsula, where it evolved from diverse dialects primarily spoken by Bedouin tribes. The earliest known form of Arabic dates back to the 7th century, when it […]
4 Hacks For Those Hard-To-Pronounce Arabic Letters
A total of about 375.4 million people worldwide speak Arabic as their mother tongue, and over 110 million people speak it as a second language. Nonetheless, for beginners of the language, some of its 28 unique letters can be hard to pronounce at first. As a result, we thought we’d show you how four techniques can help […]
Ya’ni…Why Didn’t I Discover This Word Earlier?
As you’re learning Arabic, you’re likely to come across some versatile words that you’ll wish you had learned earlier. Take the word yaʻnee/يَعني for instance. Spend any time in an Arab country and you’ll likely hear yaʻnee/يَعني being used everywhere from the classroom to the coffee shop. So, if it’s used so much by Arabs […]
The Arabic SuKoon: What it is and How to Pronounce It
Hello and welcome to our blog where today we’ll touch on what is perhaps one of the most misunderstood symbols in Arabic – the sukoon/ سُكون. The sukoon/سُكون is the symbol ° which, as you can see, sort of looks like the symbol for “degrees” in English. In Arabic, the sukoon/سُكون represents an absence of the vowel on […]
Emphatic letters in Arabic
مَرحبًا بِكُم مَرّةً أُخرى/marHaban bikum marratan ʼukhraa/Hello and welcome back. Today is the final part of our lesson in our Arabic for Life blog series on the Arabic essentials. If you’ve missed the first two parts, then be sure to check out our blog so you don’t miss out on the essentials of Arabic we’ve […]
Definite articles in Arabic: hamzatu ilqaTʻ and hamzatu ilwaSl
/’ahlan/ أَهلًا welcome our lesson on Definite Article in our Arabic grammar series. In Part 3 of last week’s lesson on directions, we learned about the definite article in Arabic; however, we thought we needed to explain a little more about another aspect of the definite article that warranted a lesson all its own. It’s […]
Arabic Navigational Skills: Seeking Directions in Life
/ʼahlan wa sahlan/ أَهلًا وَسَهلًا Hello and Welcome back to Part 3 of our Arabic for Life lesson on asking for directions. Quite often when you’re giving directions in English, you’ll say something along the lines of “go past the library”, “take the next right”, or “it’s the last house on the left”? However, have […]
A Beginner’s Guide to Asking Questions in Arabic
When you first start learning Arabic, one of the most crucial steps in learning and understanding the language is knowing how to ask even the simplest of questions. Today’s post is a lesson in learning how to do just that. And to make it as easy as possible, we’re going to divide the lesson into […]
What’s Up with Arabic Prepositions?
Hello and welcome to Kaleela. Over the past few weeks we’ve been delving into Arabic grammar. Today we will continue as we talk about prepositions – those parts of Arabic speech that are usually placed in front of a noun or noun phrase and show the direction, time, place, location, or spatial relationship to that […]
Counting with Confidence: Mastering Arabic Numbers Grammar
Welcome to a crucial and often challenging aspect of Arabic: Arabic numbers grammar! Unlike English, where numbers rarely change for gender, Arabic numbers have specific rules, especially regarding agreement with the noun they count. If you’ve ever wondered about Arabic numbers masculine and feminine forms, or how to correctly say Arabic numbers 20-30 or Arabic […]