Guides to teaching Arabic
Written for people who teach Arabic to learners who did not grow up with it. Each one takes a single problem — the script, the plurals, what to correct in a piece of writing — and answers it properly. No tool required to read any of them.
How Arabic broken plurals actually work
Why most Arabic nouns do not take a plural ending at all, the eight or so patterns that cover nearly everything a learner meets, and why teaching the rules first is the wrong way round.
The order to teach the Arabic alphabet in
Alphabetical order is a filing system, not a teaching sequence. What to teach first so that learners can read a real word in week one, and what to leave until they can.
Why Arabic letters join, and how to teach it in one lesson
The four forms of every letter are not four things to memorise. There is one shape and two rules, and the six letters that break them are the reason words appear to have gaps in the middle.
Tashkīl: how much to leave on, and when to take it off
Real Arabic is written without vowels. Full vowelling forever produces learners who cannot read anything published; removing it too early produces guessing. A staged plan for getting from one to the other.
Marking Arabic writing: what to correct and what to let go
Correcting every error in a piece of Arabic takes an hour and makes the pupil worse. An error hierarchy for Arabic specifically, and how to give one target that actually gets acted on.
Building Arabic vocabulary that survives the holidays
Why the topic list is the wrong unit, what the root system gives you that no European language does, and what to record alongside a word so that knowing it is worth something.
Pitching an Arabic reading text at the right level
What actually makes an Arabic text hard, the unknown-word percentages worth aiming at, and how to bring a real text down a level without turning it into Arabic nobody writes.
Arabic case endings: what they are for and when to teach them
Iʿrāb is invisible in most writing and dropped in most speech, which makes it easy to teach at the wrong time. Where the cases are actually audible, what they buy a reader, and why insisting on them early costs fluency.