Some Progress on Reading Arabic

About two weeks ago, I bought a book, Your First 100 Words in Arabic, that would help me learn to write and understand the arabic script. It's not a bad book and it takes a practical approach. The carry cards in the back are worth the $12 or so for the book. But I just was struggling a bit with the first few letters because I couldn't keep straight some of the letters that are similarly shaped but differently diacritically marked. Like the letters 'sheen' and 'seen'. Just couldn't keep them straight. Then, I was returning from Qatar on Qatar Airways and I watched the in-flight map for a bit before landing as it switched from showing place names and shipwrecks in English to Arabic. Invaluable! Since most of the place names were cities around Washington DC, I could easily start putting together the sounds with the letters and figuring out the right sounds for the letters that were most confusing. From that 20 - 30 minutes of staring at the screen and sounding them out, I picked up the usage of about 12 - 14 letters (maybe 6 root letters but I'm counting the medial and ending variants as well). It wasn't too long before I was able to figure out a couple of letter sounds I wasn't sure of like the final 'n' sound. The word Washington in Arabic is now imprinted on my mind. Also, the shipwrecks were similarly phonetisized so that I was able to pick up most of the sounds of Titanic as well and worked out the 'taa' and the 'thaa'. As an aside, does it make sense for an airline to mark out where transportation had gone horribly wrong in the vicinity of the passengers?

Also, I watched a fair number of movies on the way back. I should point out first that I was able to have dinner with a couple of Lebanese people (Thanks, Tamara and Kamal) who live and work in Qatar and the UAE. Listening very careully to them ordering for me in Arabic, I figured out that 'wa' is the Arabic word for 'and'. Excellent word to know. I usually concentrate on pronouns and prepositions first in a language because they are easy demarcations in speech that are easy to use to figure out what came before and after in a sentence. So, now armed with 'wa', I watched the movies on the way back home. Every movie had Arabic subtitles. Every one of them. It was kind of wierd listening to a movie in Cantonese and seeing Arabic subtitles. Anyway, the word 'and' pops up a lot in langauge and it's often used by itself as a prompt for someone to continue. 'Your sister's been shot.' 'And?' That means that 'and' will show up in subtitles separate and distinct. A great help to anyone learning the language. So, that's how I figured out the Arabic letter 'waaw'. 'Waaw' is a single letter that is used to write 'and' much like in Spanish 'and' is 'y'.

So, all in all, a pretty good day for my Arabic. Now, I just need to get some focus on the rest of the alphabet so I can start using the Arabic dictionary I bought while I was in Beirut last November.