guide is divided into 17 themed sections and starts with a pronunciation table which explains the phonetic pronunciation to all the words and sentences you’ll need to know, and a basic grammar guide which will help you construct basic sentences in Arabic. At the end of this book is an extensive English–Arabic word list.
Throughout the book you’ll come across boxes with a beside them. These are designed to help you if you can’t understand what your listener is saying to you. Hand the book over to them and encourage them to point to the appropriate answer to the question you are asking.
Other boxes in the book—this time without the symbol—give alphabetical listings of themed words with their English translations beside them.
For extra clarity, we have put all phonetic pronunciations of the foreign language terms in italic.
This book covers all subjects you are likely to come across during the course of a visit, from reserving a room for the night to ordering food and drink at a restaurant and what to do if your car breaks down or you lose your traveler’s checks and money. With over 2,000 commonly used words and essential sentences at your fingertips you can rest assured that you will be able to get by in all situations, so let Essential Arabic become your passport to learning to speak with confidence!
Pronunciation guide
The imitated pronunciation should be read as if it were English, bearing in mind that the emphatic consonants indicate more a vowel volume than a separate sound.
Vowels: there are three basic short vowels in Arabic and three long ones. These are:
Stressing of words
Arabic words do not have a stressed syllable in the manner that English words do. However, individual consonants can exhibit stress by means of a shadda (gemination)—this is represented by a duplicated consonant. For example, in the word kassara “to break,” the duplicated s indicates consonantal stress as in the English name Cassandra.
Basic grammar
There are two genders in Arabic, masculine (m.) and feminine (f.). This applies to verbs, nouns and adjectives.
Verbs
There are two different types of verb in Arabic, depending on their tense/mood: perfective (action complete) and imperfective (action incomplete). Verbs are marked for person, number and gender.
In Arabic first, second and third persons are marked differently in the verb form, e.g. anna adresu ‘I study,’anta tadresu ‘you study,’huwas yadresu ‘he studies.’
Verbs inherently exhibit gender marking in both perfective (past) and imperfective (present) forms. In the perfective form masculine gender is unmarked, whereas feminine gender is shown by a final t sound, e.g. ’al-waladu ’akala ‘the boy ate’ compared with ’al-bintu ’akalat ‘the girl ate’. In the imperfective form gender is shown by means of prefixes using the t and y sounds to indicate respectively masculine and feminine genders, e.g. ’al-waladu ya’kulu ‘the boy eats/is eating’ compared with ’albintu ta’kulu ‘the girl eats/is eating.’
Nouns
There are two types of noun in Arabic. One is known as regular, where the feminine form can be derived from the masculine form, for example:
| Masculine | Feminine | |
| ‘Student’ | taalib | taalibat |
| ‘Teacher’ | mudarris | mudarrisat |
| ‘Driver’ | saa’iq | saa’iqat |
The other class of nouns is irregular, where the masculine and feminine forms do not share the same root and cannot be derived from one another. These should be learned gradually as individual items of vocabulary. Examples of this type of noun are walad ‘boy,’bint ‘girl’; imra’at ‘woman’, rajul ‘man.’
Note that even non-human nouns are obligatorily marked for gender, e.g. daar (f.) ‘house,’madiinat (f.) ‘city,’balad (m.) ‘country,’qalam (m.) ‘pen.’
Arabic differentiates between singular, dual and plural numbers, although the dual form is not used frequently. The dual and the regular plural can be derived from the singular form as shown below:
| Root | Singular | Dual | Plural | |
| ‘Player’ | l-’-b | laa’ib | laa’ibaan | laa’ibuun |
| ‘Teacher’ | d-r-s | mudarris | mudarrisaan | mudarrisuun |
| ‘Spectator’ | f-r-j | mutafarrij | mutafarrijaan | mutafarrijuun |
The above examples relate to the masculine gender only. Feminine derived nouns take the suffix – at in the singular form and replace the masculine plural suffix – uun with the feminine plural suffix – aat; for example mudarrisat ‘female teacher’ becomes mudarrisaat ‘female teachers.’ The feminine dual form is similar to the masculine form withthe exception of the feminine marker – at being inserted before the dual suffix, e.g. mudarrisataan ‘two female teachers.’
Definiteness in Arabic is marked in general by means of the article al- attached at the beginning of the noun, e.g. walad ‘a boy,’al-walad ‘the boy.’ However, with a number of consonants, known as the solar consonants, a sound harmony rule means that the final sound of the article is assimilated to the first consonant of the noun, e.g. sayyaarat ‘a car,’as-sayyaarat ‘the car.’ The consonants to which this applies are d, dh, d, t, t, th, s, sh, s, z, z, n, l and r.
‘Case’ refers to the grammatical function assigned to the noun. In Arabic there are three essential case markings—nominative (when the noun is the subject of the sentence), accusative (when the noun is the object of the sentence) and genitive (when the noun is the object of a preposition). Case marking is shown differently depending on the definite or indefinite status of the noun, as shown below for the noun walad ‘boy’:
| Nominative | Accusative | Genitive | |
| Definite | al-waladu | al-walada | al-waladi |
| Indefinite | waladun | waladan | waladin |
