Zurich - Writing Arabic

Practice Makes Perfect!

My Arabic classes resumed in January. In the classes our teacher always writes on the board in Arabic and I’m generally not confident enough to copy it down. Also, even if I do copy it down, I’m never quite sure I can read what I’ve written, so I transliterate it as well, thinking that I can piece the two together afterwards. Unfortunately, this is a lot of work to do in little time, as I need to concentrate on what he’s saying next as well, so I lose a lot.

Consequently, over the holidays, I’d decided to start practicing writing in Arabic. I had a book in Egypt that I bought ages ago called “Mastering Arabic Script”, so I’d waited until I was back there for my holidays so that I could work through this book. Looking at it briefly, it brought back memories of learning to write as a child – all the rows of letters you had to write, line after line. I can remember finding it quite dull and itching to move on!

Anyway, I hadn’t paid enough attention to the title of the book. The word “mastering” implies that you already have some knowledge and so the book was really teaching you how to handwrite in Arabic, which is different from the typed lettering. Apparently, at school, in the Arabic countries, children learn to write the typed lettering first and then look forward to learning how to do the handwriting much later at around the age of nine (I guess a bit like looking forward to doing joined-up writing, although joined-up writing isn’t so very different, whereas the handwritten Arabic is quite a change from the typed script).

As a result, the waiting was in vain, as I ended up ignoring the book after just a few chapters because I needed to get my head round how to write the typed script first. The workbook that comes with the book we’re using in class has quite a few writing exercises, so I worked through them, thinking it would also be a good vocabulary reminder.

It’s quite hard to correct yourself, as you don’t necessarily notice all your mistakes. I think my most common mistakes were to forget to use the different letter form at the end of a word (I tended to mistakenly use the one that came in the middle of the word), to notice that some letters (particularly at the end of the word) go below the line, and to fathom out how to write “l” and “a” when they come together in the middle of a word as it seems to differ as to whether the preceding letter is joined to the previous one or not and whether it’s a standalone combination.

Although I feel I would find learning new vocabulary more useful than learning to write, I could see the benefit of learning to write. It made me focus much more on the word’s pronunciation. For example, there are three “t” sounds in Arabic and I don’t really differentiate them enough when I try to speak. Consequently, when I’m trying to spell a word, I will often use the wrong “t”; to spell correctly, I have to be more aware of which sound it is. I’m not sure whether Arabic children would have the same difficulty as presumably for them the difference in sounds is much clearer than it is for my foreign ear.

It’s also surprisingly hard to write different letter forms where you’ve had no practice. Some letters had to be written in a slightly different way when working from left-to-right than right-to-left. For example, when writing a “g” shape I would normally start at the top of the top loop and go anti-clockwise; in Arabic, going from left-to-right, it’s easier to start at the bottom of the loop and circle clockwise.

I think all the practice did help me quite a bit, even just in being able to read my teacher’s writing more easily having now seen my own variations on the theme, but I can’t say I’m exactly a confident writer yet!