The quest to get a grasp on arabic

Last night, I began, once again, my attempts to learn arabic. I've had several fits of starting and stopping over the years, starting with a semester of independent study at college, all of which I have forgotten. More recently, I went on a spree and labeled everything in our apartment in arabic. Well, it's been a year, and I still don't know the word for cupboard.

Thursday is deen night in our household, where the husband and I turn off the television and computer, and attempt to spend the evening doing something deen related. The husband prepared a little khutbah on sustinance from Allah (swt), but that didn't fill the whole night. So got out the Easy Dictionary of the Qur'an I downloaded from the Sunnipath Library and one of my teach yourself arabic books that I've aquire over the years and got to work.

One of the sections contains an almost word for word translation of several shorter surahs. Since my ability to actually decifer the arabic script is long forgotten, I decided that the first thing I would do is attempt to deconstruct every word, figure out which letter was which, and from there, work on pronunciation. It was actually kinda fun, if unstructured. I figure I get a two for one deal here - get better at pronouncing arabic from the script, and I may memorize some additional surahs while I'm at it.

So, inshaAllah, that's going to be my Thursday evenings from now on.

In other arabic related webcontent, while I'm not fond of the content on the rest of the site, this selection of arabic books available for download looks pretty spiffy. It's the stuff from the Islamic University in Medina. I've downloaded the arabic writing practice book, because if there's one thing i remembered last night, it's that my arabic writing sucks big time.