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7 Essential Skills for reading Arabic – A Blueprint

Reading can be considered just one of the skills to learn a language. In fact, it is a very important skill if you are learning the language for any formal purpose: to read documents, read the news, or any content on the web. Learning to read in Arabic is no exception. However, there are some added challenges involved: mainly reading the script. This can be intimidating for some learners, as we can see in this picture.

Image of a bag with Arabic writing that reads that the writing has no purpose but to intimidate those who fear Arabic language

In reality though, learning the script can be accomplished in a very short time. However, is knowing the script enough to be able to “read” Arabic? Of course not: the writing of Albanian also uses almost the same script as English, but can the speakers of English “read” Albanian? 

This is where it is important to break down the “reading” into a number of elements, or “skills”. These skills would cover the whole process of “seeing” something written in the language, up to “understanding” what is written. In psychology, these processes are referred to as “cognitive processes”, which involve processing information from different senses and from memory in parallel. Let’s lay out these skills one by one:

1- Main Skill for reading Arabic: Knowing and recognizing letters

You may have seen charts like these, mainly used for teaching children a list of alphabet letters. 

Letters of Arabic Alphabet and their names

You may have found songs or rhymes for singing the names of Alphabet letters. 

Video of Arabic Alphabet Letters song

How useful are these? Of course, this is an important step that even native speakers go through in order to learn their native written language. However, this is not enough, at least in Arabic. This is because there is one particular feature in the Arabic alphabet: letters take different shapes depending on where they are in the sentence. Therefore, a more sound approach is to learn the shapes of each letter, so that you can recognize it when you see it. Knowing the names of letters, then, would be useful because you will be able to point any letter you recognize with any shape to the name of the letter.

2- Knowing and recognizing diacritics

One peculiar aspect of Arabic writing is that short vowels are not letters. They are actually “diacritics”. These diacritics can be referred to as “harakaat” or “tashkeel”. It is important to point out that diacritics also include elements other than short vowels, such as “shaddah”, which doubles the sound of a letter. These are relatively few, and wouldn’t take long to learn, but it’s important to know how they sound when combined with letters.

Illustration of diacritics, showing how they sound when combined with the letter baa’ (sound “b”), an important skill for Arabic rading

3- Being able to “sound out” the words

Knowing letters and diacritics is important, and by using them you can go letter by letter in a word: identify the letter sound and the applied diacritics, and there you go: you can sound out a whole word in Arabic! Isn’t that great?

Illustration of how to “sound out” a word given the letters and diacritics, as an essential skill for reading Arabic

It is great; however, there is bad news here. In most Arabic writing, diacritics are almost non-existent. This can be challenging, even sometimes to native Arabic speakers. Here is where we start to apply what we have learned on actual words. When you are learning a new word, you need to pay special attention to how it is written. Try to associate the letters with the sound of the word. And by all means, when you’re learning a new word, make sure to have a resource that allows you to listen to how it is pronounced by an actual native speaker. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to know the correct pronunciation. When you learn many new words with their correct pronunciation, you will be able to formulate patterns for sounding out any word you read.

4- Learning “Function Words” for reading Arabic words

Moving to actual sentences, you will find that a large number of words (in any language) consist mainly of what is known as “function words”. What are function words? Just have a look at the first sentence in this paragraph and see the words in bold. These words can be articles, pronouns, prepositions, question words, and similar words. In linguistics, these words are referred to as “function words”, because they are mainly there for a grammatical function. In Arabic, there are many such words: such as articles, personal pronouns, possessive pronouns, relative pronouns, demonstratives … etc. Some of these are not actually words, but rather prefixes or suffixes. Knowing these words helps you in two ways. First, you are able to recognize many of the words within the sentence. Second, you are able to understand the structure of the sentence. 

5- Identifying “Parts of Speech”

All human languages have different word types: such as nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs and more. It is absolutely important to know what is the word type of each word in the sentence you’re reading. One helpful aspect in this regard is knowing the function words. For example, if you know that the function word “in” is a preposition, it is unlikely that the word coming after is a verb.

Of course sentences can be very complex, but function words can give a broad structure of the sentence. Knowing the word types helps complement this structure. For example, saying “the girl is beautiful”, is different from “the beautiful girl”. So knowing which word is a noun, and which is an adjective can allow us to know both the content of the word and what it roughly means (even if we don’t know the exact noun or adjective), and also the structure of the sentence and understanding what is being written.

6- Learn “Content Words” for reading Arabic

In early childhood education in elementary schools, teachers sometimes teach children “sight word”. These are words that appear frequently and are useful in reading. These words can include function words that we talked about, and they can also include words related to a particular domain, such as the words used in story books. This is quite important here, because any language consists of tens and maybe hundreds of thousands of words. It is unreasonable to expect to know, especially for a non-native speaker, the majority of these words. What should we expect instead?

One thing to expect is to attain knowledge of words related to a particular subject, task or field: such as the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs used in the context of math, literature, art, news or so forth. Can we know all words for all the fields? Perhaps, but perhaps it is better to focus on the vocabulary of mainly the field you are interested in.

The other thing to expect is a very interesting statistical law. The name of this law is Zipf’s law, which indicates, in plain terms, that if you sort all the words in a language by their frequency, the first few words would take up a very large percentage of all the words in any given text. For example, the first word can occur 20% of the time in any text (think of the word “the” in English for example), then the one after will be perhaps 12%, and so forth.

How to make use of this frequency distribution?

This way, you will find that the first 100 words in the language can occur like 50% of the time in any given context. Of course, many of these words are function words. Still, if we move to content words, we will find that the higher frequency words account for a large portion of any text. For example, you will encounter the noun “question” or the verb “ask” much more frequently than you will encounter words such as “Accismus” or “aggrandize”. 

Zip’s law word frequency distribution in English

What’s the main take of this? Focus on a particular field, start with the most frequent words in it.

7- Learn Morphology skills: building words

Finally, one of the very important skills for reading Arabic is to understand its morphology (the science of word building). Arabic words form according to “templates”. Templates consist of two things:

  • Root: any word in Arabic has a root (usually consisting of 3 letters)
  • Wazn: (literally means “weight”): any word has a format of how to add other letters to the root.

For example, the word “maktab”, which means office, has the root of KTB (the sound of “k”, “t”, and “b”). The wazn would show how to add additional letters to the word. In this case, it would be maktab, with the addition of the letter “m”, and the vowels “a”.  This is an advanced topic, but it is important to learn it at some point. It will make many things make sense, including topics such as making plurals, and conjugations for certain verbs, and so forth.

roots appear in verb conjugation

How to build your skills for reading Arabic?

At Champolu, we provide many learning solutions to boost your skills for reading Arabic using Champolu Method. You can start to use the free app ALIF-laam to practice your alphabet, diacritics, and sounding out skills. 

It might be helpful if you want to take the Udemy course “Basic Arabic Reading” to give you a clear explanation of these topics.

In addition, you may want to start with learning the basics of Arabic grammar and function words. As you have seen in the article, function words can be very important for understanding what is written. You can take the course “Basic Arabic Grammar” to start learning.

Also make sure to subscribe to Champolu social media, where you will constantly find new materials to learn more vocabulary and grammar.

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Animal Alphabet Printable Guide

This animal alphabet printable guide is a free resource for learning Arabic. In this guide, you will learn the following:

  • Arabic Vocabulary words for 73 animal names.
  • The alphabet letters of these words
  • Colorful illustration of the pronunciation

In addition, this guide has printable Arabic sheets with tracing. It helps learners trace the words to practice writing.

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Learn to read and write the names of animals in Arabic

More Arabic alphabet printable PDF guides are coming soon!

There are many resources for learning to read in Arabic by Champolu. In addition, you can also enroll in our Basic Arabic reading course, which explains the alphabet and diacritics guide in more detail.

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Why is Arabic so hard to read?

Learning to read in Arabic can be challenging. In this article, we will talk about the challenges. In addition, check our simple guides for learning how to read in Arabic.

Why is Arabic so hard to learn?

If you type in Google “Why is Arabic …”, the autocomplete will suggest these searches which people do.

Why is Arabic …

Indeed Arabic is important and beautiful but it can also be hard to learn. Let’s explore this further.

One of the reasons for the difficulty of Arabic is that the writing is “backwards”; i.e. its direction is from right to left. Therefore, if you want to learn Arabic, you will need to be able to read from right to left.

There are other challenges surrounding reading Arabic script, which are explained in the video here.

Why is reading Arabic Challenging?

In a nutshell, the challenges for reading Arabic are:

  • Direction of Writing (right-to-left)
  • Letters are attached together
  • Letters take different shapes depending on their position in a word (beginning, middle, end, or separate)
  • Diacritics which guide the pronunciation of Arabic letters

How to Read Arabic in English Letters?

An important consideration when learning Arabic is that not all Arabic letters have an equivalent English sound. That’s why there can be different ways to for writing Arabic in English/Latin letters, which is sometimes referred to as romanization. Apart from the more Academic ways of writing Arabic, a popular way is known as Franco-Arab, which is how the Arabic speaking internet generation started to write Arabic on computers and the internet in the early days before support to Arabic language was available. In this way of writing, the letters of Arabic with no English equivalent as written as numbers that resemble the shape of the Arabic letter. In Arabic, there are three letters mainly that are written as numbers:

  • Sixth letter of Arabic the alphabet (the letter ح) is written as 7
  • Eighteenth letter of the Arabic Alphabet (the letter ع) is written as 3
  • The letter hamzah ء (which isn’t usually a separate letter in the Aphabet) is written as 2

There are other letters, but these are the most popular ones. You will notice that we have combined challenges here, to know the letters, and to be able to recognize and produce their sound.

Therefore, in this lesson we are providing an intuitive way to learn the alphabet letters, with their names, shapes, sounds, along with examples of each.

More Arabic Reading Resources

There are many resources for learning Arabic reading by Champolu. You can also enroll in our Udemy Basic Arabic reading course, which explains the guide in more detail.

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Arabic Alphabet and Diacritics Guide (Free)

In this guide for Arabic alphabet and diacritics reading, you will learn about the following:

  • The Arabic Alphabet letters. In addition, you will learn some letters that are not normally included in the alphabet
  • The shape of each letter in different parts of the word
  • The Arabic diacritics/harakaat/tashkeel. These are mainly short vowels in Arabic.
  • How to sound out Arabic words using letters and diacritics
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Sample of the guide, showing different shapes of Arabic letters

There are many resources for learning Arabic reading by Champolu. In addition, you can also enroll in our Udemy Basic Arabic reading course, which explains the alphabet and diacritics guide in more detail.

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Lesson 10 – Question Words in Arabic

Let’s learn about question words in Arabic. In this lesson, we will discuss interrogative sentences in Arabic. Mainly, we will introduce the main question words and the corresponding structure.

Arabic Question Words Example

In this video, let’s learn about question words in Arabic.

Question Words Lesson on Youtube

Question Words أدَوات الاسْتِفْهَام

مَن؟
man?
Who?
مَا؟
maa?
What?
مَاذَا؟
maadhaa?
What?
أيْنَ؟
ayna?
Where?
مَتَى؟
mataa?
When?
كَيْفَ؟
kayfa?
How?
كَم؟
kam?
How many?
لِمَاذَا؟
limaadhaa?
Why?
هَل؟
hal?
…? Yes/No

Yes/No Questions

The word “hal” is a word we use for forming Yes/No questions in MSA.
In classical Arabic, sometimes the letter alif is used before the verb in a similar way:
Did you want to eat?
a-tureed an ta’akol?
أتريد أن تأكل؟

هَلْ؟
hal?
For asking Yes/No Questions
هَل نِمْتَ جَيِّداً؟
hal nimta jayyidan?
Did you sleep well?
هَل أنْت مِصْرِيّ؟
hal anta misreyy?
Are you Egyptian?
هَل تُرِيد أَنْ تَأكُل؟
hal tureed an ta’kol?
Do you want to eat?
هَل وَصَلَ الضُّيُوف؟
hal wasala ad-duyoof?
Did the guests arrive?
نَعَم
na’am
yes
لا
laa
no

Where = ayna = أينَ

أيْنَ الحَقِيبَة؟
ayna al-haqeebah?
Where is the bag?
أيْنَ المُدِير؟
ayna al-mudeer?
Where is the manager?
أيْنَ تَسْكُن؟
ayna taskun?
Where do you live?
أيْنَ أَنْت؟
ayna ant?
Where are you?

Who = man = مَن

مَن هُوَ؟
man huwa?
Who is he?
مَن قَالَ لَكَ هَذَا؟
man qaala laka haadhaa?
Who told you so?
مَن هُوَ مُؤَلِّف الكِتَاب؟
man huwa mu’allif al-kitaab?
Who is the author of the book?
مَن هُوَ مُخْتَرِع الهَاتِف؟
man huwa mukhtare’ al-haatif?
Who is the inventor of the phone?

When = mataa = متى

مَتَى وَصَلْتُم؟
mataa wasaltum?
When did you (pl-m) arrive?
مَتَى حَدَث هَذَا؟
mataa hadatha haadhaa?
When did this happen?
مَتَى سَافَرُوا؟
mataa saafaroo?
When did they travel?
مَتَى وُلِدْت؟
mataa wulidt?
When were you born?

What = maa = ما

مَا مَعْنَى هَذِهِ الكَلِمَة؟
maa ma’naa haadhihi al-kalimah?
What is the meaning of this word?
مَا هِيَ عَاصِمَة فَرَنْسَا؟
maa hiya ‘aasimat faransaa?
What is the capital of France?
مَا هِيَ المُشْكِلَة؟
maa hiya al-mushkilah?
What is the problem?
مَا هَذَا؟
maa haadhaa?
What is this?

How = kayfa = كَيفَ

كَيْفَ عَرَفْت؟
kayfa ‘araft?
How did you know?
كَيْفَ نُصْلِح الهَاتِف؟
kayfa nuslih al-haatif?
How do we fix the phone?
كَيْفَ يُمْكِن أَنْ أُسَاعِدَك؟
kayfa yumkin an usaa’idak?
How can I help you?
كَيْفَ حَالُك؟
kayfa haaluk?
How are you?
(Literally: How is your condition)

How much/many = kam = كَم

كَم عُمْرُك؟
kam ‘umruk?
How old are you?
(Literally: how much is your age)
كَم شَخْصَاً قَابَلْت؟
kam shakhsan qaabalt?
How many people did you meet?
كَم تُرِيد؟
kam tureed?
How much do you want?
كَم تَكَلَّفَت الرِّحْلَة؟
kam takallafat ar-rihlah?
How much did the trip cost?

What = maadhaa = ماذا

مَاذَا حَدَث؟
maadhaa hadath?
What happened?
مَاذَا قُلْت؟
maadhaa qult?
What did you say?
مَاذَا تُرِيد؟
maadhaa tureed?
What do you want?
مَاذَا فَعَلُوا؟
maadhaa fa’aloo?
What did they do?

Why = limaadhaa = لِمَاذا

لِمَاذا تَبْكِي؟
limaadhaa tabkee?
Why are you crying?
لِمَاذا وَقَعَت الحَادِثَة؟
limaadhaa waqa’at al-haadithah?
Why did the accident happen?
لِمَاذا فَعَلْتَ ذَلِك؟
limaadhaa fa’alta dhaalik?
Why did you do so?
لِمَاذا تَأَخَّرْوا؟
limaadhaa ta’akhkharoo?
Why are they late?

Other Question Words in Arabic

There are other question words that will be covered in later lessons.

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Arabic Videos with Subtitles

Using Arabic Videos with Subtitles can help in learning the spoken language. It is important to show in the subtitles what the speakers are actually saying. In addition, it is also important to show the English translation. For learners who can’t read in Arabic, it can be useful to provide the transliteration of the Arabic text in Latin letters.

This triple subtitle format is part of the Champolu method. In fact, it provides complete transparency about what the spoken language. Therefore, learners can know the actual words in the speech, the meaning of each word, and how these words map to the meaning in the translation. In order to do this mapping, we do color-matching between the phrases and words in the original script, the transliteration, and the translation.

In the Arabic materials, we include clips from the show “Alice in Wonderland”. This is a popular children show with a version in Modern Standard Arabic. In this show, you can learn the basic Arabic phrases and expressions in a fun context.

Alice in Wonderland video clip with triple subtitle format

Here is a list of all multimedia material in Arabic. In this material, there are Arabic Videos with Subtitles with the triple subtitle format.

You can also check the Youtube playlist:

Check our course on Udemy:

Basic Arabic Reading

Download Arabic Reading Guide

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Learn Arabic Videos with Subtitles (3) Alice shows the hat to her mum أليس تُري أُمَّها القبعة

Let’s learn Arabic language through Arabic Videos with translation subtitles. It is possible to find Arabic videos with subtitles either in Arabic script or translated into Arabic. In our videos here, we focus on providing videos with both the original spoken content in Arabic, in addition to the transliteration of what is being said in English letters, to help learners who are yet comfortable enough with the Arabic script. The subtitles also include the English translation. In addition, all the three-line subtitles are color-matched, in order to allow the learners to glean the meaning of words and expressions.

videos with Arabic subtitles/transliteration in English letters, and English translation. We will watch a videos from the animation series “Alice in Wonderland أليس في بلاد العجائب”, which are dubbed in Arabic.

Dialogue – subtitles Arabic/Transliteration/Translation

اُنظُرَا مَاذا اِشتَرَيت

indhuraa maadhaa ishtarayt

Look what I bought

يا إلَهي!

yaa ilaahee!

My God!

اِقلَعي هَذِهِ القُبَّعة القَذِرَة فِي الحَال

iqla3ee haadhihi al-qubba3ata al-qadhirah fee al-7aal

Take off this dirty hat immediately

القُبَّعة لَيسَت قَذِرَة، لَقَد تَفَحَّصتُها بِدِقَّة

al-qubba3ah laysat qadhirah, laqad tafa77astuhaa bi-diqqah

The hat isn’t dirty, I inspected it carefully

أشُكُّ في ذَلِك

ashukku fee dhaalik

I doubt it

فأنتِ تَعرِفِين أنَّ الجَراثيم تَنقُل الأمراض إلى الإنسان

fa-anti ta3rifeena anna al-jaratheem tanqil al-amraad ilaa al-insaan

Since you know that germs transmit diseases to humans

هَيَّا

hayyaa

Let’s go

لا أعرِف لِماذا تُريدين هَذا الشَّيء القَديم

laa a3rif limaadhaa tureedeen haadhaa ash-shay2 al-qadeem

I don’t know why you want this old thing

فَلَدَيكِ قُبَّعَةٌ جَمِيلة

fa-ladayki qubba3atun jameelah

Since you have a beautiful hat

نَعَم، ولَكِن ما تَفْعَلْهُ هَذِهِ القُبَّعَة لا تَفْعَلْهُ قُبَّعَتِي

na3am, wa-laakin maa taf3alhu haadhihi al-qubba3ah laa taf3aluhu qubba3atee

Yes, but my hat doesn’t do what this hat does

إِنَّهَا تُنَاسِبُكِ جِدَّاً

innaha tunaasibuki jiddan

It suits you very well

يَجِب أَنْ نَنَطَلِق أَسْرَع

yajib an nantliq asra3We have to move out faster

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Basic Arabic Reading

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Learn Arabic Videos with Subtitles (2) – Alice buys the hat أليس تشتري القبعة

Let’s learn Arabic language through Arabic Videos with translation subtitles. It is possible to find Arabic videos with subtitles either in Arabic script or translated into Arabic. In our videos here, we focus on providing videos with both the original spoken content in Arabic, in addition to the transliteration of what is being said in English letters, to help learners who are yet comfortable enough with the Arabic script. The subtitles also include the English translation. In addition, all the three-line subtitles are color-matched, in order to allow the learners to glean the meaning of words and expressions.

videos with Arabic subtitles/transliteration in English letters, and English translation. We will watch a videos from the animation series “Alice in Wonderland أليس في بلاد العجائب”, which are dubbed in Arabic.

Dialogue – subtitles Arabic/Transliteration/Translation

كَفَى! إنَّه يُزَغْزِغ!

kafaa! innahu yuzaghzigh

Stop! It tickles

أَتُرِيدِينَ شِرَاء القُبَّعَة يَا آنِسَة؟

a-tureedeen shiraa2 al-qubba3ah yaa aanisah?

Miss, do you want to buy the hat?

يَجِبُ ألَّا يَرَانِي

yajib allaa yaraanee

He must not see me

أَنَا؟ مَا ثَمَنُهَا؟

anaa? maa thamanuhaa?

Me? What is its price? 

الأَفْضَل أَن تَقُولِي أَنْتِ كَم مَعَكِ؟

al-afdal an taqoolee anti kam ma3aki?

Better that you say how much do you have?

عَشَرَةُ قُرُوش

3asharatu quroosh

Ten piasters (cents)

حَسَنَاً، هَذَا يَكْفِي

7asanan, haadhaa yakfee

Ok, that’s enough

هَاك، تَفَضَّل

haak, tafaddal

Here is it, here you are

شُكْرَاً، وَوَقْتَاً مُمْتِعَاً مَعَ القُبَّعَة!

shukran, wa-waqtan mumti3an ma3a al-qubba3ah

Thanks, and have an enjoyable time with the hat

هَل تَعْتَقِدَ أَنَّ مِن الصَّوَابِ أنْ أُطعِمَهُ جَزَرَاً؟

hal ta3taqid anna min as-sawaab an ut3imahu jazaran?

Do you think that it is right to feed him carrots?

القُبَّعَة؟

Al-qubba3ah?

The hat?

لَا شَيْئ، لَا شَيْئ، شُكْرَاً!

laa shay2, laa shay2, shukran!

Nothing, nothing, thanks!

سَأَكتَشِفَ ذَلِكَ بِنَفْسِي!

sa-aktashifa dhaalika bi-nafsee!

I’ll figure this out on my own!

See More videos with Arabic Subtitles

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Check our course on Udemy:

Basic Arabic Reading

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Arabic Lessons

This post contains an up-to-date list of Arabic Lessons. Please make sure to bookmark the page and subscribe to get updates with new lessons.

In general, the lessons cover areas in Arabic grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and alphabet. In addition, they include PDFs and Animated Google Slides, quizzes, and more.

Also, check our Udemy Course for Basic Arabic Reading.

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Lesson 9 – Prepositions in Arabic حروف الجر

In this lesson, we will talk about prepositions in Modern Standard Arabic.

In Modern Standard Arabic, prepositions are very important. Therefore, in this lesson, we will introduce Arabic prepositions with examples. In fact, prepositions can be best understood in context. For example, the preposition ” min مِن” usually means “from”, but it can have different meanings. For instance, the famous expression “min fadlik مِن فَضلِك” means simply “please”.

Let’s start by introducing a list of widely used Arabic prepositions. Then, we will go deeper into each preposition. In addition, we will contrast the use of different prepositions. In the beginning, these are the most widely used Arabic prepositions:

مِنْ، إلَى، عَنْ، عَلَى، فِي، بـ ، لـ ، كـ

Arabic Prepositions – Google Slides

In these slides, we will see more explanation for these prepositions.

Arabic prepositions – example phrases and sentences

مِنْ الَبَيْت
min al-bayt
From home
إِلَى الَمَطَار
ilaa al-mataar
To the airport
عَلَى الأَرْض
‘alaa al-ard
On the floor/on earth
فِي الحَدِيقَة
fee al-hadeeqah
In the garden
عَنْ المُشكِلَة
‘an al-mushkilah
About the problem
بِالقَلَم
be-l-qalam
With the pen
مَعَ صَدِيقِي
ma’a sadeeqy
with my friend
لِسَلَامَتِكُم
le-salaamatikum
For your (pl) safety

The preposition “min مِن”

مِنْ أَيْنَ أَنْت؟
min ayna ant?
Where are you (m) from?
أَنَا مِنْ الهِنْد 🇮🇳
ana min al-hind
I am from India
نَحْنُ مِنْ نَيْجيريا 🇳🇬
nahnu min Nigeria
We are from Nigeria
مِنْ أَيْنَ أَنْتُم؟
min ayna antum?
Where are you (pl) from?
مِنْ
min
from

Arabic Expressions with “min مِن”

Expressions with “min مِن”
مِنْ فَضْلِك
min fadlik
Please
مِنْ البِدَايَة
min al-bidaayah
From the beginning
مِنْ
min
from

The preposition “ilaa إلى”

إلَى أَيْنَ تُسَافِر فِي الصَّيْف؟ 🏖
ilaa ayna tusaafir fee as-sayf?
Where do you (m) travel in summer?
أنَا أُسَافِر إلَى لُبْنَان 🇱🇧
ana usaafir ilaa lubnaan
I travel to Lebanon
إِلَى
ilaa
to

إلَى اللِّقَاء
ilaa al-liqaa’
Goodbye
مِنَ الألِف إلَى اليَاء
min al-alif ilaa al-yaa’
From A to Z
إلَى النِّهَايَة
ilaa an-nihaayah
To (till) the end
Expressions with “ilaa إلى”

The preposition “‘alaa عَلى”

عَلَى
‘alaa
on
عَلَى المَائِدَة
‘alaa al-maa’idah
On the table
The preposition “ ‘alaa عَلَى” can simply mean “on”
عَلَى الكُرْسِي
‘alaa al-kursee
On the chair

عَلَى الأَقَلّ
alaa’ al-aqall
At least
عَلَى أَيْ حَال
alaa’ ayy haal
Anyway
Expressions with “‘alaa عَلَى”
عَلَى
‘alaa
on

فِي
fee
in/at
فِي المَغْرِب 🇲🇦
fee al-maghrib
In Morocco
فِي مِصْر 🇪🇬
fee misr
In Egypt
The preposition “fee فِي” is used as the English prepositions “in/at”

فِي
fee
in/at
في أكتوبر *
fee October
In October
في الصَّيف
fee as-sayf
In summer
The preposition “fee فِي” can also be used with time

  • Note that month names differ between Arab countries

مَعَ
ma’a
with (person)
أنَا أَعِيش مَعَ أُسْرَتِي
ana a’eesh ma’a usratee
I live with my family
سَافَرْتُ مَعَ أصْدِقَائِي
saafartu ma’a asdiqaa’ee
I travelled with my friends

مَعَ السَّلامَة
ma’a as-salaamah
Goodbye
Literally: with safety
مَعَ تَحِيَّاتِي
ma’a tahiyyaatee
Best regards
Literally: with my greetings
Expressions with “ma’a مَعَ”
مَعَ
ma’a
with (person)

قَرَأتُ كِتَابَاً عَنْ العُلُوم
qara’tu kitaaban ‘an al-’uloom
I read (past) a book about science
عَنْ
‘an
about
تَكَلَّمَ المُدِير عَنْ المُشْكِلَة
takallama al-mudeer ‘an al-mushkilah
The manager spoke about the problem

When the preposition “le- لـ” comes before “al- الـ”,
it becomes “lel- للـ”
لِـ
le-
to/for
البيت 🏠
al-bayt
The house
لـ البيت ← للبيت
lel-bayt
To the house

لِـ
le-
to/for
لِلأَسَف
lel-asaf
unfortunately
لِلعِلْم
lel-’ilm
For information
Expressions with “le- لـ”

When the preposition “be- بـ” comes before “al- الـ” , it is pronounced as “bel-” instead of “be- al-”
الكتاب
al-kitaab
The book
بـ الكتاب ← بالكتاب
bel-kitaab
With the book
بِـ
be-
with/by
(object)

بِـ
be-
with/by
(object)
The preposition “be- بـ” can be used to make adverbs
ثِقَة
thiqah
confidence
بِثِقَة
be-thiqah
confidently

بِـ
be-
with/by
(object)
The preposition “be- بـ” can be used to make adverbs
أَنْتَ تَتَكَلَّم بِسُرْعَة
anta tatakallam be-sor’ah
You (m) speak fast
مِن فَضْلك تَكَلَّم بِبُطْء
min fadlik takallam be-bot’
please speak slowly

The preposition “fee في”

أيْنَ الكَلْب؟
ayna al-kalb?
Where is the dog?


الكَلْب فِي السَّيَّارَة
al-kalb fee as-sayyaarah
The dog is in the car


الكَلْب عَلَى السَّيَّارَة
al-kalb ‘alaa as-sayaarah
The dog is on the car

The prepositions “ma’a مع” is for people, while “be- بـ” is for objects

أنَا ألْعَب مَعَ أصْدِقَائِي
ana al’aab ma’a asdiqaa’ee
I am playing with my friends
أنَا ألْعَب بِالكُرَة
ana al’aab be-l-kurah
I am playing with the ball

The prepositions “ilaa إلى” and “le- لـ” can sometimes be used interchangeably

أَنَا أذْهَب إِلَى المَكْتَب
ana adh-hab ilaa al-maktab
I am going to the office
أَنَا أذْهَب للمَكْتَب
ana adh-hab lel-maktab
I am going to the office
What is the preposition “to” in Arabic: إلى لـ

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