I like this idea. But I am not sure about its ease of use. There is a much less precise but significantly speedier way to convey Arabic words using the Roman alphabet on a QWERTY keyboard using the Arabic chat alphabet. [1]. The more difficult sounds in Arabic are conveyed with numbers. For example ح is 7 - and ع is 3. In both cases the Arabic letters are visually similar to the character that represents them.
Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script
31–40 of 70 posts
Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Come to the middle east. Plenty of English words written in Arabic. McDonald's and subway immediately come to mind.
Always got a chuckle when Canadian tourists would take pictures of Tim Hortons written in Arabic: http://cdn.torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/tim-ho...
I prefer to write Tim Hortons like this "تِم هُرتُنز" in Arabic but that's just me.
Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script
#33I like this idea. But I am not sure about its ease of use. There is a much less precise but significantly speedier way to convey Arabic words using the Roman alphabet on a QWERTY keyboard using the Arabic chat alphabet. [1]. The more difficult sounds in Arabic are conveyed with numbers. For example ح is 7 - and ع is 3. In both cases the Arabic letters are visually similar to the character that represents them. [1] ht…
The problem with this system, besides the appearance and inherent ambiguity to name a few, is that it doesn't cover essential parts of the language like "stress" and "tonality" where other writing systems do.
Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Come to the middle east. Plenty of English words written in Arabic. McDonald's and subway immediately come to mind.
Aside from that, Spanish, Catalan, and Occitan have historically been written using both the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets, by their respective user communities. Same for Yiddish, linguistically a Germanic language, which was often written using Hebrew script. Turkish seems to flip from Arabic to Latin and vice-versa every few decades. English written in Arabic script looks surprisingly natural to me.
Is there a simple algorithm for Latin letters to Arabic ones (meaning logic input letters, not shaped ones)? Or are there lots of complexities? My understanding of the Arabic language is that most vowels are omitted in writing, but that might be wrong.
Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script
#35I'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.
Same here, but in college. Got the Cyrillic alphabet in a couple weeks but it was by far the easiest part of a very difficult semester.
I switched to French.
Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script
#36This is not a good idea. From a language learning perspective, it is essential to become immersed in the sounds and shapes of a language as soon as possible. Approximations will not do. Arabic is equipped with sounds that foreign speakers are not able to produce without significant effort and coaching.
This will make it more difficult to become proficient.
Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script
#37This is a good idea, and one that I could certainly have used when learning Arabic— but its real utility is not for Modern Standard Arabic- it's for 'amiya/3amiya (spoken Arabic), which, to those not in the know, differs from region to region and is vastly different from both written and spoken forms of Modern Standard Arabic.
As someone suggested above, learning Arabic script is the first-- and smallest--of many challenges for those trying to learn formal Arabic.
There are few good systematized sources available for people trying to learn spoken Arabic, particularly if they're not particularly interested in reading the news or classical texts. I'm thinking of aid workers, diplomats, vagabonds, whatever.
A system such as this has great utility to these people— except it already exists in much of the Arabic-speaking world, particularly the Levant and Egypt, where numbers are used to represent sounds not found in the Latin alphabet.
For example: "You will speak Arabic soon" (Levantine) - "إنت رح تحكي عربي قريبا" - can also be rendered as "inta ra7 ti7ki 3rabi 2areeban". This makeshift system is used widely in texts in Lebanon and elsewhere. Utilizing this existing method will be easier and have wider applicability.
Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script
#38I'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'll play devils advocate here. Their solution is too complex and tries to fix a non-problem.
I'd say you are on the wrong side. All Arabs continue to write in Arabizi. I have lived in this region for years, as a non-native speaker. When I first arrived as a student for my first rodeo in 2006, I once wrote SMS in Arabic letters. That Egyptian kid later asked why I would do that. He was terrified it was a plant or a trap or something, that is how rare it was then.
However, I will give you a point. None that we are moving beyond basic SMS encodings and the limit of standard cell phones and on to Unicode and emoji-rich smart phones, WhatsApp and others have enabled a renaissance in Arabic writing amongst some.
But many continue to write to me in English characters. And re your point learning in one day: the reading is fun, the writing on a keyboard for a society where Arabic literacy (not English, mind you) is largely de-emphasized and many cannot read/write formal Arabic, the desire for Arabizi hides deficienies people would not rather admit.
Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script
#39I'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 excell…
Except romaji isn't used to teach pronunciation, it's meant to help the student read while they are still getting familiar with kana; much like furigana for kanji.
Japanese characters have one pronunciation in all circumstances (excluding diacritical modifications). Respectively in romaji, consonants and vowels will always have the same pronunciation. Compare that to American English where accents have been removed and even native speakers can have trouble pronouncing new words.
Re: Show HN: Eskéndereyya – Learn How to Read and Write Arabic in Latin Script
#40Super slick and exicitng. Since this is my wheel house I will check it out later and report back something more constructive.
Thanks for the work, sami. I love to see people bringing Arabic to the open source world. It needs love.
People might also like Qalb (heart or template, not sure which romanized as tired, validating comments later in this thread), which was an awesome idea to me.