TTEARROA1E Language Course: Arabic

The course is a 10 ECTS crash course in classical Arabic. It is a demanding language to learn in just one semester, so please be prepared to work at it. The reward is getting to know the basics of Arabic grammar, enough to make sense of difficult texts like the Qur'an. Please make sure not to fall behind. Work through the exercises thoroughly, and only proceed when you grasp an exercise and remember the grammar.

The course is taught in the 'flipped classroom' style, which means that all the basics of the grammar are taught by video, and therefore contact with the teacher can be used for asking questions etc. rather than spending time on grammar lectures. You will have to watch the grammar lessons several times, and pause the video frequently as you digest the compact information given there.

Syllabus and exam

The syllabus for the exam is the first half of Sure 12, The Joseph Sure, in the Qur'an, pp 132-138 in the above-mentioned Chrestomathy (i.e. Rudolf-Ernst Brünnow and August Fischer, Chrestomathy of Classical Arabic Prose Literature). This book includes vocabulary, so you don't absolutely need a dictionary. However, The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic is a fantastic dictionary, even for classical texts (due to the similarity of the classical and modern written language). Note that the Chrestomathy uses Arabic numerals for the page numbers. You can find the numerals in §25 in Fischer’s grammar.

As for the Qur'an, there is a very useful, albeit not always exact word-by-word translation and grammatical analysis found at http://corpus.quran.com/wordbyword.jsp It gives you all the relevant info including pronunciation, literal translation, meaning, syntax, morphology.