Arabic Language Study Resources (2024)

Contents

• Madeenah University Arabic Course
• Hidayatun Nahw summarized in english
• Online arabic dictionaries
• Smartphone access to the arabic dictionaries
• Arabic Verb Chart
• Arabic Fonts
• Online Arabic Bookshops

Madeenah University Arabic Course

Here are the full books of the syllabus. They have been slightly altered to displayas one large page for easy browsing and printing. Please see below for the originalsource documents used.

If you want to download all the documents as I've prepared them here including the originalsource documents then download this zip file.

The original material used to compile the books above is available online at these places:

• At Medinah University itself: Syllabus at Islamic University
  (This website seems slow and sometimes down so I have a backup here)
• As a flash application download from Fatwa Online: link

Hidayatun Nahw summarized in english

Coming soon insha Allah: A online flowchart in english of arabic grammarbased on the book Hidayatun Nahw.

Access the beta version: here

Online arabic dictionaries

I've made available on this website some dictionaries in several easy to use methods,regular web access or through a specially designed layout for your smartphone, which willbe made available for online download so you can browse offline from your SD card!

The following dictionaries are available as pdf downloads elsewhere on the internet (copies will be posted hereas well inshallah), but I've made them available on this website offering the following advantages:

• A lightweight interface with quick load times
• Easy chapter index buttons allowing one to reach any page of the book with 2 clicks (soon 1 click only)
• OCR: The pages have all been scanned for their contents allowing a limited form of word lookup onceI've installed a suitable search engine

• Hans Wehr's A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic
• Lanes Lexicon: An Arabic-English Lexicon
• Al Mawrid Arabic Dictionary

For your smartphone: Online arabic dictionaries

Click here to access the smartphone information page

Arabic Verb Chart

This document is a useful chart for the different types of verbs as classified by Hans Wehr.It only shows the first 10 forms as 11-14 are only rarely used in advanced poetry.

• Download the Arabic verb chart in OpenOffice.org (odt) Format
• Download the Arabic verb chart in MicroSoft Word (doc) Format
• Download the Arabic verb chart in PDF Format

Arabic Fonts

The procedure to get Internet Explorer/Firefox/Opera to render the arabic fonts properly in a clean Windows installation appears to be:

• Go to Start - Settings - Control Panel - Regional Options
• Tick the box 'Arabic' at 'Language settings for the system' and click OK
• It will now need the Windows Installation disk to install the arabic fonts.
• Reboot to enable the fonts

In Linux (Kubuntu Fiesty Fawn), there seem to be 2 options:

• Konqueror seems to be the only one capable of displaying readable arabic text without any extra font installations. The fonts doesn't look very nice though.
• You can manually copy the Windows 2000 Arabic fonts in "C:\Windows\Fonts" from a windows installation to the linux fonts directory such as /usr/share/fonts/truetype/win2k-arabic-fonts/. Here is a list of the files you would need to copy:

   andlso.ttf artrbdo.ttf artro.ttf simpbdo.ttf simpfxo.ttf simpo.ttf tradbdo.ttf trado.ttf 

  After they have been copied, both Konqueror and Firefox seem to be able to display the arabic text the same as Internet Explorer.

Online Arabic Bookshops

Here is a small table of links to Arabic Bookshops on the internet. I've given my subjective rating of theirinventory size and quality in the English and Arabic sections, the more stars out of 5, the better.