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Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script

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Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script

#11

Post by _samihasan_ »

Raed667 wrote: post #5

This looks a lot how many Arabs write using Latin keyboards. Example : "أهلاً بكم", becomes "ahlan bekom" I find it a cook 'quick-an-dirty' trick to start speaking/writing with locals without worrying much about proper grammar (which is EXTREMELY complex)

Well, "أهلاً بكم" which means "Welcome" for second person plural in English is transliterated into "Eskéndereyya" as "ählan bekom".

Note the umlaut mark on the letter "a" as it's a Hamzat Qaŧў همزة قطع and should be pronounced with glottal stop. Of course, in colloquial speech across many dialects, it softened to just a plain "a".

Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script

#13

Post by _samihasan_ »

wisam wrote: post #6

I was going to ask "why?" before I read in the overview the reason being helping non Arabic speaking learners of the language. It still defeats the purpose of learning a language to be able to read literature written in original script and communicate in writing with the language readers. The only case where I see this useful is when verbally communicating using words memorized using this Latin script as tourists do…

Author here.

Thanks for the feedback.

Regarding the concern of this substituting the Arabic script, I addressed this in the intro section of the project where I laid it out plain and clear that the target is novice learners of Arabic as I noticed that they suffer with pronunciation and reading skills and I wanted to help them overcoming this gap to make the transition to the Arabic script smoother and less painful.

As far as I can tell, the project was not ideologically or politically motivated but to be honest with you, the Turkish language was an influencing factor on the development of this project whether which parts to use and which parts to pass but I am not sure if you know that Turkish throughout its history was not written only in Arabic script but in other scripts like for example Armenian but the Ottomans adopted the Arabic script for their official communications until came Mustafa Kemal and introduced his reforms and switched to Latin which was a good idea since writing Turkish in Arabic script was a nightmare.

Re your last concern, like I said in that part, it's for regional languages/dialects not the standard variety and I outlined the reasons for that.

Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script

#14

Post by cagataygurturk »

If you are Turkish and opted-in for religion classes in the school, you learn some parts of the Qoran reading them in Latin alphabet. Because we don't know arabic alphabet, but Turkish one (Latin alphabet with 3-4 extra letters). Actually one of the letters in "extended Eskéndereyya", "ş" is a Turkish letter, created for Turkish language. I don't understand why Eskéndereyya is different than the alphabet we used to use in high school.

Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script

#15

Post by ue_ »

thekid314 wrote: post #3

I'll play devils advocate here. Their solution is too complex and tries to fix a non-problem. For someone learning Arabic the letters are the first of many challenging steps. I learned the Arabic letters in 1 day with flashcards. That single day was easy compared with everything that came afterwards. Using a romanized scripts makes all these subsequent steps with grammar and accents much harder. I can see how this wo…

>Using a romanized scripts makes all these subsequent steps with grammar and accents much harder.

This is the exact problem with learning Japanese using roumaji (rouma ji = roman character; ローマ字), because you of course start to read the latin script with your starting accent (assuming of course your first language is written using the latin alphabet).

However some textbooks persist with using it, despite being excellent otherwise (Japanese: The Spoken Language being one). I can't stress enough the need to move off reading Latin characters. It is also useful to learn the characters by sound rather than their roman equivalents. i.e instead of learning that ロ is "ro", you could learn it by listening: https://youtu.be/aLEtZ2CRoho?t=1m53s

The mental association is everything.

Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script

#16

Post by School-Cotton »

thekid314 wrote: post #3

I'll play devils advocate here. Their solution is too complex and tries to fix a non-problem. For someone learning Arabic the letters are the first of many challenging steps. I learned the Arabic letters in 1 day with flashcards. That single day was easy compared with everything that came afterwards. Using a romanized scripts makes all these subsequent steps with grammar and accents much harder. I can see how this wo…

I studied Russian for one semester when I was in middle school. I didn't learn very much and can remember even less: only a few simple words like яблоко (yabloko -- "apple").

But I can still sound out words in the Cyrillic alphabet without any difficulty. Learning another alphabetic script really doesn't take that much time or effort.

Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script

#17

Post by planteen »

Has anyone ever tried writing English in Arabic script? From working with complex text layout, I know Arabic letters have 4 forms (isolated, initial, medial, final). It would be kind of cool if I could spot check the shaping engine is working properly by testing with English in Arabic script...

Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script

#18

Post by tps5 »

thekid314 wrote: post #3

I'll play devils advocate here. Their solution is too complex and tries to fix a non-problem. For someone learning Arabic the letters are the first of many challenging steps. I learned the Arabic letters in 1 day with flashcards. That single day was easy compared with everything that came afterwards. Using a romanized scripts makes all these subsequent steps with grammar and accents much harder. I can see how this wo…

Agreed. I have some proficiency in MSA and Levantine Arabic after studying for 4 years in college and the alphabet is the least challenging part.

Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script

#19

Post by Jugurtha »

thekid314 wrote: post #3

I'll play devils advocate here. Their solution is too complex and tries to fix a non-problem. For someone learning Arabic the letters are the first of many challenging steps. I learned the Arabic letters in 1 day with flashcards. That single day was easy compared with everything that came afterwards. Using a romanized scripts makes all these subsequent steps with grammar and accents much harder. I can see how this wo…

>For someone learning Arabic the letters are the first of many challenging steps.

Exactly, for most other languages as well. I only needed flashcards with Hebrew (as an Arabic speaker, I only needed to remember shapes because sounds are similar). To learn Cyrillic was more figuring out what changes and connecting it to Greek alphabet (р is rho, г is gamma, д is delta, п is pi, etc).

Transliteration for most languages is just another layer of complexity in my opinion given the tiny amount of time I needed to acquire alphabet (the letters, not Google's parent company).

Here's something I started. Need to get back to that:

https://github.com/jhadjar/Language-Acquisition

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