January 1, 2009 This is my Arabic language learning journal. Right now it is organized according date, and the content is whatever random thing I decided to put up on that date. Please don't expect any of the uri's to be permanent, as I will likely update/edit individual pages in the future. I may also organize the content if I have time.
For now, I just want to point out that I'll be using the Arabic script to write out words in Arabic. My intention is to learn to read Arabic newspapers and children's books. As these are written in the Arabic script, I should learn to read and write in the script. I haven't decided to whether to include diacritic vocalizations or just phonetic transcriptions when I introduce new words, but I have decided that I won't bother with the diacritics after the word is initially introduced.
As for the phonetic transcriptions, I'll be using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to write out pronunciations. These will necessarily be broad transcriptions as I've heard lots of variations between individual native speakers as well as within the speech of a given native speaker. My reason for using the IPA is that I have many references in different languages, and even the references in English each have their own ideas about transcriptions. I have found all of these transcription systems awkward (another reason for favoring the Arabic script directly), but the IPA is unambiguous. So please take some time to become familiar with the IPA before moving on to the lessons.
One last note about technical issues: The Arabic script and IPA characters are not part of the ASCII character set. They are included in the Unicode character set, so these pages all use the UTF-8 encoding. So if you are seeing lots of question marks or diamonds instead of something meaningful, then you may need to change your browser's encoding settings. If that doesn't fix your problem, then you probably need to install a font that supports these characters. For the Arabic script I like to use "Traditional Arabic" on PC and "Geeza Pro" or "Al Bayan" on Mac. These fonts should have come with your operating system. For the IPA characters, I like to use "Charis SIL" from the Summer Institute for Linguistics (SIL). You can get this free font from their website.