September 25, 2009 — amlearningarabic

I haven’t been posting here in a while. Too busy with other stuff. In fact I had been going through Pimsleur Eastern Arabic I and managed to get up to lesson 14. But, it just seemed that I wasn’t making much progress. Something was missing: I just seem to be able to learn better with visual material and Pimsleur relies almost exclusively on audio. A few days ago I got the “Magic Key To The Arabic Alphabet” – it’s a course that teaches the Arabic writing system with a twist. Instead of needing to copy the letters out by hand repeatedly, the system uses “memory aids” in the form of pictures. For example the letter ba’ look like a boat and the letter fa’ looks like a phone.

I was really surprised how quickly I picked up the letters with this system. You just have to visualize the pictures and then it’s easy to recall the shapes of the letters later. The course also contains a chapter on remembering the order of the letters in form of a story and a chapter on calligraphy (which I haven’t looked into yet). It comes as a PDF document with 70 pages and lots of pictures. Now I can go on to other courses that use written Arabic. Hopefully that’ll help me learn Arabic faster.

Now, the best part of the course is that it comes with a copy of FSI Modern Written Arabic. The FSI course looks really good and has more than 400MB in MP3s. I had been searching for other places to get the FSI course, but the cheapest I could find before was for 40 bucks.

If you are looking for an easy way to learn the Arabic alphabet, then I can really recommend this course. It costs $27 and you can get it at www.arabicgenie.com. I’d give it 4 out of 5 stars.

I’ll post again once I made some headway with the FSI course.