Why Think Arabic?

I am about one year into my efforts to learn the Arabic language and I am not nearly as conversant as I want to be.

This blog is my effort to spend more time, every day, learning something new. I will be posting here about words I am learning, phrases, grammatical rules, and other random thoughts on my journey to learn this fascinating and incredibly difficult language.

Formatting

Often when learning a new word I want to see the text in its vernacular script, its literal meaning in my language, and how to pronounce it with phonetics. With this in mind I created a new structure to highlight these elements of a word in an intuitive way. It is very similar to a structure in HTML called Ruby Text which is how Pinyin is often rendered. However it is not well supported in complex situations in all browsers so I used Flexbox to create this new pattern. See it a little more on Codepen.

Hello مَرْحَباً Mar-ha-ba

I am أَنا ana Kevin كڤين Kaf-in

Note: the phonetics are often going to be my own, meaning they will make sense to me but may not make as much sense to you. I am going to try and be consistent and improve my phonetic system but no guarantees. :)