Salaam Sayyidi
What are your suggestions to a beginner who wants to learn and master Arabic(in English), especially solely for the purpose of understanding the Quran?
Salaam Sayyidi
What are your suggestions to a beginner who wants to learn and master Arabic(in English), especially solely for the purpose of understanding the Quran?
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Salaam Shakir
I tell you what I did to learn the limited Arabic I know.
First most important issue to bear in mind is not to involve with any Arab when comes to learn Arabic. Just say Salaam to them and wish them well and leave them as you found them, unharmed and at distance, Arabic schools overseas in Arab countries should be avoided.
Second issue is time: you need quite a few years of almost full-time self-study, engrossed in number of Arabic texts from ancient Arab, pre and post Islam. This is a life-altering proposal and not for faint at heart, so to say.
Grab any book or website to learn the letters, focus on being able to discern the letters from each other, where Hamza appear, Tanwin (Nunation) and Tashkil the A E O sounds of the letters. Do not rush to grammar, just make sure you could parrot-like read the words and sound them.
Third,Read and copy the words from Qur’an verses, and do that regularly so you get used to the language.
Then you need these books to start:
1. Arabic-English Dictionary by Hans Wehr (there are others but I use this one)
2. A Dictionary of Arabic Grammatical Nomenclature by Sheikh El-Dahdah, this is series of books ISBN: 01D110496, this gives you a powerful and almost complete list of grammatical buzzwords of ancient Arab grammarians. I did not find an equivalent for this, but it is a good study.
3. http://www.altafsir.com/, it has all the different sects Tafsir in original language, and in has a grammar section which is useful.
4. http://www.muhaddith.org/, use this for Hadith, and check their dictionaries
5. http://alwaraq.com/, use this site to search a large collection of Arabic books in language, philosophy, dictionaries and related literature.
There are many other similar sites, but I found these perfect for the learner of the Arabic language.
How to learn:
A. Choose a verse from Qur’an, wise to choose Al-Fatiha or Al-Ikhlas.
B. Compile all the Tafsir and Hadith for verse 1. This is a daunting tiring task as you shall see 🙂
C. Decompose each verse into nouns, pronouns, articles and prepositions and verbs.
D. See which pronoun refers to which word/noun in the verse. This is an important task to master.
E. See which tense the verbs are in
F. See which attached pronoun the verbs are attached to
G. Then try to translate the verse into raw English, by juxtaposing and then re-arranging the words in English. This might take you 1-2 years to feel at ease with. So it is not a quick study.
Once you are able to decompose the verses, then you need to study their ending-sounds known as ‘Irab:
i. A Dictionary of Grammatical Analysis of the Holy Qur’an by Tantaqi ISBN: 01D120251
ii. There are many versions of the Irab all with wonderful new meanings for the verses, requires many many books to search through, but for the beginners item i suffices.
D
For irab please use this complete compilation:
http://quransmessage.com/articles/syntactic%20analysis%20FM2.htm
Salaam Sayyidi
I can not express how much I appreciate your help.
May Allah increase you in Darajat and grant you more of His Proximity.
May HU let us learn more and more from you.
I shall start this particular journey quite soon Insha Allah.