Audio lessons

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Hi! pls am just a novice , so I need all round help
kind regards
Vincent .

hi
do u all pepole helps me in arabic

Ahlan Zaheen,

I hope you have managed to download your mp3 files - if you are still having trouble, please email support@rocketlanguages.com

Vincent and Hafeez - are you needing help with anything in particular? Please let me me know if you do!

- Amira

I am new at learning arabic .in my city they don't speak arabic and make dua I can learn and teach it.it is my dream.udh uh lee.durban south africa.

Hi Amira,

السلام عليكم يا اميرة

This is a great course. I bought it 12 days ago, and have already covered about 15 lessons (not to speak, but being able to listen and follow when sentences are spoken fairly fast).

Although it will be too late for me, I have two suggestions for you to think of before the next release.

1. (Minor) Erica's pronunciation for Sharm-el-Sheikh. It sounds like SheeSH, and that confused me initially as I did not know which of the two pronunciations to follow.

2. The pronunciation of 'L' - as in the definite article - before various nouns.
For example, 'the floor' in lesson 6.1 is sounded out in Arabic as 'iLL-door'. Then further, when the whole sentence is translated, it is "sha2ti fi iLL-door il tani".
When I thought I finally figured out how to say "iLL-door", suddenly it becomes "iDD-door" in the lesson!

This is thouroughly confusing to a student who is a non-Arab person.

In the initial explanation, it might be ok to have the iLL and door spoken separately, but where they are combined, the sound of 'L' should not be there in any instances!

It took a while for me to figure out what was going on. But getting rid of the 'L' sound in such cases will be a challenge after repeating it so many times!

Kind regards,
Hubert

Ahlan Hubert,

Thanks for your feedback and my apologies for the late reply.

The issue of pronouncing "L" before nouns is an example of elision in Arabic. Much like we would pronounce "unlike her" as "unlaikker" where the "h" just kind of disappears. Another example of elision in English is "comfortable" which is pronounced "comftabel".

If you were trying to pronounce "unlike her" to a non-English speaker you would probably say "un-like-her" clearly whilst pronouncing each proper sound, however when you speak fast the H is lost naturally. It's not something that native speakers would notice but to a non-native speaker there is a big difference!

However, the H is technically still there, much like how the "L" is still there in "iLL door" - you just might not hear it pronounced half the time.

It is a complicated topic but there are elision rules in Arabic. Unfortunately this isn't covered in Rocket Arabic since it is a beginners course with an informal setting but you might find this document helpful with explaining elision in Arabic (page 17):

http://www.arabic-studio.com/support-files/readingandwriting.pdf

I hope this helps to clear up any confusion and please let me know if you need any further explanations. All the best!

- Amira