Tom Facchine – Beginning Classical Arabic Lesson 02
AI: Summary ©
The importance of understanding Arabic language and the three types of sentences is emphasized, along with the use of "has" in Arabic and the importance of asking open-ended questions. The speakers also discuss language learning and the challenges of learning a language, including the use of tools and language awareness. Additionally, the speakers provide examples of exercises and practice writing out exercises for understanding Arabic and writing in a classroom setting. The conversation ends with a brief discussion of the topic of "the La Sol" and a brief mention of a summer vacation.
AI: Summary ©
So I want to come up to
the morning
okay,
we'll get started insha Allah.
This will augment Rahim Al hamdu Lillahi Rabbil Alameen wa salatu salam ala l mursaleen nabina. Muhammad, I have been asked to sing like Mr. Alpha Allahumma Illumina Divine Feminine when found to be my London I was in an element era, but I mean,
very good. So last class, we began with just
dipping our toes into the ocean. That is the Arabic language. We talked about some pretty theoretical things, we didn't really get into a ton of examples. Inshallah, today, we'll get into more examples.
But we do want to recap some of those things that we learned that were somewhat theoretical, because they are going to make everything kind of stick better. In our minds. Understanding, I always give the example of a house, imagine that Arabic is a house,
it has certain rooms inside of it. Right? If you know what room you're in,
you're going to find what you're looking for more easily than if you're kind of just groping around, searching everywhere for something. So knowing, for example, that there are certain types of words, and there's certain types of sentences and being able to recognize, oh, I'm working with this type of sentence and this type of sentence, it has to have this part to it and that part to it, that all might be foreign to you. But it's going to really, really help things. When it comes to acquiring Arabic, especially as we get out of the really, really basic stuff and move on to more and more advanced things. It's really going to help you. So just to review, a little bit.
I don't know if I mentioned this explicitly last time or not. But I will say it now in Arabic, there are three types of words.
Okay, three different types of words.
They are yes, some
fair
and have
Okay.
In translation,
we could say that that corresponds to nouns that's not completely accurate. It's a little more broad than nouns,
verbs and particles, or everything else.
Okay,
those are all let's just make it easy. All Arabic words can fit into one of these three categories is some fair have. Great. Now when it came to making a sentence,
we said that there were how many sentences in Arabic or how many types of sentences?
Can anybody recall?
Yes, excellent. Very good. There are two types of sentences.
Can anybody give me one of those two types of sentences? What's the name of it?
Grammatical?
Group grammatical sentence? No, regretfully all of them are grammatical.
So, oh, you're thinking about types of languages. Very good. So our brother Ibrahim is recalling something else. Not quite what I'm asking. But he's recalling the different types of languages.
From a linguistic kind of point of view, we have analytic languages, and synthetic languages, that was the first thing I had kind of gotten into in order to demonstrate, to open up your brains and realize that Arabic isn't like English in that it's not so dependent on the sequence of words. It's not so dependent on word order.
In a sentence to make meaning, it's much more dependent upon putting things on the actual words in order to communicate meaning.
So how to finally have some good guesses, but no one's no one's hitting on the head. And that means that I didn't teach it right. No many sentences is starting with now. Oh, you save the day, you save the day, very good. I was going to start to by myself. So when it comes to sentences in the Arabic language, there's a reason there's a method to my madness. So look at here I just laid out for you the three types of of Arabic words are the three types of words in Arabic.
Why did I do that because we can make sentences beginning with that. So we can make sentences beginning with verbs.
But when it comes to half,
that's not something that
we do. Or at least that's the rule that you're going to learn now to make things very easy for you.
So all sentences are the two types of sentences that we are concerned with in Arabic. The word for sentence by the way, and Arabic is Joomla
Joomla.
So we have a Joomla is smear.
See how it resembles SM and we have a
Joomla. Fair Lea, see how it resembles fair.
Those are our two main types of sentences.
One of them is going to begin with an ism.
The other is going to begin with a fair
and we said that for the time being, we are going to completely ignore number two.
And we're going to solely focus on the first type. Because this is where our book begins US has that Vatan This is a set a sentence that begins with an ism. This is a sentence that begins with an essence. Very good. So imagine again, take the house metaphor, take the house metaphor, Arabic is a house. Okay? You walk into the door.
The rooms are the types of sentences that you can make.
Okay, there's two rooms inside the house.
You have on your left you have the gym that is me. You have on your right you have the gym near Alia
we're going to completely disregard the door on the right for the time being. We're just going to look right over to the door on the left to say Hey, I wonder what's behind this door. We're curious. We open up the door. What do we find inside?
We find inside that there's actually
a curtain in the middle of the room. Dividing the room into two parts. The Joomla is Mia has two parts.
Let's see why the draw a little
try to erase this.
If we have
Okay, I'll just clear it all.
We have here our
Joomla
ischemia
okay, then we have two parts.
And I'm gonna go from right to left since Arabic is right to left.
Can somebody give me one of the two US
essential parts of a Joomla Izmir, what does a Joomla Izmir have to have,
in order for it to be a complete sentence
the shahada family already answered this in one of their earlier comments.
They said
that
it has to have a
move to that,
which we translate as the subject. But as I mentioned before, we want to learn the grammatical terms in Arabic, because some of them are going to translate, and some of them aren't. So up to that, you know, hamdulillah translates pretty, pretty accurately to subject but things later on are not going to translate at all. And then we have cover
roughly corresponding to subject and predicate, and we said, our archetypal sentence has that base turn
was an example of this an action hack that was demoted up and they turn was the cover.
So that's a nice brief review. Let's get back to the book.
And
there we go.
Do some reading.
So I will call on a few people.
Dr. Mohsen, can you refer us our first example from yesterday here on the right,
might
have a base tune? Good. We're going to use the 10 wean for now, because it's going to be important to distinguish between grammatical concepts as we go forward. Once your prose and Arabic then you can drop them and everyone will know what you're talking about. But for now, we'll keep them how they're Batum. Good. Now, what type of sentences is Dr. Mohsen?
is very good. How can you tell?
How do you know?
Is this a minute? Where
is the gym? Esmee? A simply a, a sentence with an SM somewhere in it? Or does it matter where it is?
Discarding Excellent. Excellent. Very good. Yes. It starts with an SMS Ha, here isn't isn't this. This is a house very good.
Ibrahim.
What part of the sentence is have? We said that it is an essence. But we said that the Joomla is Mia has two parts. Move to the uncover? Heather? Is what is which one of those two parts?
No data. Excellent. Very good. You're correct is moved to that. Why is it moved to that? Because move to that, just like the subject is the thing that we're talking about. Right? This. And the hover is literally the information that we're giving about that thing. And this was all of our examples had a beta and had MSG don't have that baboon, I recommend for you all, as a study technique to take a separate notebook.
And to make it into a kind of like a dictionary, right? Because we've only learned maybe, what, six words, nine words yesterday, but the words are gonna pile up. So one thing that we used to do was we used to take us a small notebook and make it a a dictionary. At the top of each page, we would put a letter of the Arabic language and then we would put in entries for that letter. So for example, I would go to the page that had that at the top and write baits when I learned bait and then I go to the page that hadn't meme and I write bait on the masjid of Babel kita I won't call them until the end of it and we learned all of those words.
Today, we're going to add a wrinkle.
Okay, we're going to add a wrinkle upon this pattern.
All of the sentences that we learned last class are affirmative statements, meaning that we're stating something in the positive.
We're not asking a question.
We're not negating anything.
We are stating this is this is. Today we're going to look at how to ask a question
with the Joomla, Izmir. Okay, so we started with our formula had that, and then another word, another noun. Now we're going to learn another formula to help us ask questions about nouns about ism. And that formula is Ma, Heather.
The word math in Arabic has many meanings,
not just the meaning that we're going to learn here. However,
you can tell the difference between the meanings depending on the context. Here, it's obvious because we have a nice big fat question mark, that this math means? What?
If we want to ask about what's in Arabic? We're going to use math.
And it is going to come before the thing that we're asking about, just like an English, they say, What is this?
You could say this is what, but people might look at you funny. It's not the automatic thing that you would assume.
So I need two volunteers. Because we're going to have kind of a conversation here. The column on the right is will be one person and the column on the left will be another person.
They can be one volunteer. Okay. Dr. Mohsen is one who else
okay, Rahim. Go for it. I can't see everybody on the video while looking at the Arabic books. So forgive me if you're waving your hand at me and I can't see you. Okay, so Dr. Marcin, he will be the participant
on that is responsible for the right column, the column on the right of the screen and in Raheem will be on the left. So start us off Dr. Morrison.
And Ibrahim will respond to him with the answer on the left side.
Bait done.
Excellent. Next question.
Oh, very good.
Go ahead the answer? No. have beaten. Okay.
My dad
had
me please call me soon. Good. Call me. So stop right there. Just for a second, I'll point out a couple of things. First of all, you've learned a new vocab word armies, armies, which is the word for a shirt or even in classical Arabic, even a what we call today a foe. The Spanish word for shirts Cammisa actually comes from the Arabic commies.
No, notice what happened here. We had a question on a response. Now the first one was very obvious. Madhava. What is this? It's a completely open ended question. Right? It's using a question word. If we're thinking about making questions, we can divide all of questions into two categories.
The first category uses question words. What when, why how where? Right. Basically, the answer is open ended. It is not a yes or no question. Okay. And therefore, the second category is simply how to ask a yes or no question. So here in this lesson, they're teaching you both. You have the first example here is how to ask an open ended question about some things identity Madhava. What is this? The possibilities are endless. It could be a shirt, it could be a bird, it could be a plane, it could be lunch, it could be anything. Right? And so Ibrahim responded that they tune. This is a house.
The second question that Dr. Marcin asked
just demonstrates to us how to ask a yes or no question.
With this Hamza right here.
Hamza before however, I had beaten,
asks, Is this a house? Aha, the Batum? Is this a house and the response can no longer just be had the Batum? Abraham had to say none. Yes, have Batum. So we learned that we have two different ways to ask questions depending on the type of question we are trying to ask. We have open ended questions. Mather aina. We will learn more of these in the future and then we have yes or no questions, which there are only a couple of ways to ask them right now. We've learned the most important one, which is with a Hamza
all the times in the Koran where you hear out our Atia
LM TelaDoc, a fair amount of Volca be us have it and feel right. That Hamza in the beginning is the same type of questioning. Hamza.
Lm, Tara, haven't you seen here we have, meaning the answer is yes or no. Here we have a ha that beaten, Nam had beaten. So now you all have the tools that you need
to ask lots of different questions about everything that you learned in the previous class, you should be able to state to make an affirmative statements. This is a pen, this is a key. You should be able to grab an object that's unknown to you and ask what is this thing that had?
And you should also be able to ask a yes or no question about it when you have an idea, but you're not sure is this? Do you call this a myth tack? I had a miftah I had a column I had Akita and so now you have many tools, how to ask questions about these things. And why the author of this book made this the first lesson because now you can take off and ask questions about anything that you come across.
Good. Can I have two other volunteers to continue the dialogue?
I see a finger pointing at Syrah.
Rashad Are you there?
Yes. Yeah, there'll be a little thing. Okay. So Syrah and Rashad very good. So Saira is responsible for the column on the right Rashad for the column on the left go for it
very close. I had Seth re rune.
Notice how we have a flat top on top of the scene. Which means we have to go with a set and then the casserole on underneath the rock re roll so go ahead and try it again.
Excellent. And the response
course feel very good and you gave a very definitive confident no no that is not a bed. That is a chair law. However costume very good the next one go ahead
Very good. Miss Tahoe Look at that nice long as I forgot to stretch it out. Miss
God try it again.
Excellent. And the answer.
Cool. Very good. We can't quite get anything right here. Excellent. We think that the pen is a key we think that the chair is a bad but that's how you learn a language. I can tell you all sorts of embarrassing stories from when I was starting out in Arabic that make you laugh.
Okay, last one, go for it.
Very good.
Next month, very good. So you've learned a new vocab word star najman which is one of the sources of the Quran Surah 53. So let's imagine that
Excellent.
You know, that reminds me to say a very, very one of the most important skills you can have when learning any language is almost a sociopathic
indifference to making mistakes.
Right? When we're concerned about
not seeming intelligent, or we're concerned about making mistakes in front of other people, that is, by far when it comes to language, the biggest thing that holds us back from learning, and I speak just from my own experience, not from anything I saw from anyone here, but just, you know,
we kind of because of the school system and our wanting to accomplish and achieve, we kind of look at failure as an obstacle to success or the opposite of success. Whereas with language, failure is the path to success. Right, you have to throw yourself into the failure, you're gonna make the mistakes anyway, the quicker you force yourself to make them, the quicker you'll learn and overcome them.
Very good. Excellent. So now we've got a new exercise. And so we need, we need some new volunteers.
Now they've, they've upped the difficulty. Look, they're just giving you questions, and they're giving you pictures. And now you're going to have to recall the vocab words you're supposed to have reviewed and memorized for this class.
Of course, I won't be able to flip through the page or I won't be able to see you flipping frantically through the pages to see what they were.
Let's hear from someone else. Mohammed Ali, Mohammed, are you there?
Yes, I'm here. Okay. Would you accept
my invitation to participate?
Yes, sir. Okay.
So go ahead and read the question here.
Excellent. Now, how are you going to formulate a response? I'll ask you this. First, I'll ask you a question. First. Is this question? Is it an open ended question? Or is it a yes or no question?
This is not a yes or no question. Excellent. So we can't say for example, if someone asks, You Mahathir you say nah.
Which is something I've done before. This requires a response exactly requires a response with a little more information than that. Good. So you're going to take the part of the question, you're going to spit it right back out. As part of the answer. I'm asking my father. So what's the response?
I'm gonna say this is a key. Okay, excellent. If this were an English test, you would have passed with flying colors. Masala Tabata cola?
Because I gotta say,
I don't know how to say key. Okay, good. You missed the first lesson. I understand. But that was what I appreciate your courage. So the more important thing than knowing the word because you can always go back and learn the word is that you started your response with Heather, which is exactly what you have to do. Right? If I'm asking you marhaba you're grabbing what's in the question. And you're spitting. It's just like in school, when they tell you that answer with a complete sentence, you grab the part of the question, you spit it back out as part of the response marhaba hada. This is in this case, who wants to help them out?
Yes, Miss Tahoe. Excellent. Yes. So in this case, how the left tackle. Okay, I'm going to now just be the questioner and you all are going to have to answer and know it. For those of you who were here last class. No looking at the first page with these with the vocab words. So Ibrahim
Maha Madhava.
The key Tab key key tab. Very good. I heard a page flipping but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and harder. Key.
Okay, very good. Let's go to
let's see who else we have here. And forgive me again because I can't look at the PDF and look at everybody's the all the participants at the same time. So let's hear from the shahada family, a representative from the shahada family Madhava.
Excellent, Heather Barlow moon. Very good. What about Rashad Malhotra
Babylon Babylon. Excellent, very good.
Let's go to
Saira. Mahara
bacon. Excellent. Very good.
What about Nyima? Marhaba
she might have the kids know she's at work. Oh, she's at work. Oh, brides is listening.
Now volunteer okay.
Oh, you forgot how to say Cherokee who wants to help her? I heard someone else speak up.
Yes sir.
It's
good to see you. Excellent. Good job. Yes. How that could see you. Excellent work. Okay.
Good. Now that we've done those sorts of things, those were the open ended question now they're going to give you an exercise that shows the other type of question which was the yes or no question. Okay, so we have for example,
a had that beaten
and the response would be
that Okay, finish it. What is it
last day mosquito Excellent. La had I must have eaten Is this a house? No, la ha This is a machine MSG don't have them if Tacon Dr. Marcin
yeah
Excellent. Very good. Um
Rashad I had Tommy soon
Excellent. Buddy soon Yes, very good. You can just say no or you can say no, I'm Hannah permisson
I have a Nigerian
Who do we have
to had a family I had a Nigerian
honestly forgot the star but I believe it is yes. Masala, correct accent now, so he had a measurement. Okay, very good. This will be the end of I think I will stop here for today. I recommend going back and writing these exercises out especially, especially these exercises where it says read and write. Right. So grab a piece of paper, preferably a notebook, right, have a key tab and have them as you don't have a column. And if you can write even more than this and write some of the things that were earlier on in the chapter then that's even better. Notice and I'll point this out as a last thing. Notice that what they didn't do for this exercise, it says how the MC tebboune
But they took away that 10 When
they took away all the tenant we've had MSgt on Hala column
if you've ever wondered, how is it possible that people can read Arabic without the haircut without the 10 when you're doing it right here
this is your first little exposure and pat on the back to how that process can happen. Because you know the grammar of the sentence. First of all, you know that this is a Joomla Ismailia and that the Joomla is Mia has two parts the Motorola on the cover and that the end it ends with own it has to end with own for reasons we talked about before. And you know the vocab word. So you know that this is have a MEK tebboune had MSG don't have the call lemon and it can't be anything else. It can't be a lemon. It can't be a kala mean, it can't be Calama because you know the grammar and you know the vocab. So this is just your,
your little taste of what's to come. Once you learn more about the grammar and more about the vocab, you'll be able to do that with all sentences. This is just the very very beginning. So does anybody have any questions about anything before we conclude?
Stop. I'm not gonna lie earlier when you said Hava bathe on it. It was amazing, but I almost thought the answer was gonna
The man
yeah salah. Mashallah, technically right? Yeah, it could be that's better than what I thought I thought
you say how the beta Malik might be the house of the king or something like that.
But yes, it could be beta lock
they've tried to make it look very Aladdin like I guess to show that it's a messy
yes question after
this read means why we have to put it in there. The 10 When the knee yes the end.
Good. So
why do we have to say it? Or why is it written or why is it what it is?
All about? Okay. So we write it and say it because right now it's going to help us learn right? What it really is are they are kind of like secret symbols explaining
grammatical cases. Okay. So for example, let's see if I can
back here, where am I out here my screen?
So for example,
if we have Bama, Fatiha customer casserole, okay, x where x equals any letter, okay? These mean things within grammar. Okay. They mean for example, subject.
Objects.
They could say, preposition, or being part of a prepositional phrase. We haven't quite gotten into it yet. I'm asking you just to take me on good faith that when it comes to a Joomla Ismir.
Both parts the move to the cover are?
Oh, with ADAMA, we haven't seen why yet because we've been using have the habit as a special word where we don't see. It's always have it's never had to have it doesn't change. But we have seen it when it comes to the second part of the cover message you doing? That baboon, right. So the Hubba, the predicate of a nominal sentence, a Jimena Izmir is always in this grammatical case. Okay, that's one of the ways that we can recognize that part of speech. But we've just walked up to that door, we haven't walked through it yet. It's going to become I'll explain more once we get into
probably definite and indefinite nouns, and what's the difference between but that's it's good to be thinking along those lines, basically. And this is why some mistakes in the Quran are very serious because the difference between Allah Who and Allah is the difference between an object and a subject. Right? So we changed the meaning entirely. If I say Holika Allahu SML ATSI what Allah that means that Allah created the heavens and the earth. If I change that little, little Hanukkah, and I say Hanukkah, Lucha a summer or two, while our boo, Islam for Allah, you know a lot that I just said that the heavens and the earth created a lot.
Same words, everything's the same. But these little things different because they indicate parts of speech. They indicate grammatical case, who's doing the object, who's doing the verb who's receiving the verb, and so on and so forth. But we will. We'll get into that more and more as the lessons go by.
Okay, does that make sense?
Yes, thank you. Yep, of course. Okay, if there's nothing else, then we will talk inshallah for today. We'll have the de la Sol summer Sula. Thank you, everybody, and I'll see you next time.