ARAB 1287 - Arabic for Hebrew Speakers

Summer. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Forbidden Overlap: due to an overlap in content, students will only receive credit for one course in the following group: ARAB 1200, ARAB 1201, ARAB 1202, ARAB 1287, ASRC 1201, ASRC 1202.
M. Younes.

This course is designed for students who are proficient in Hebrew and would like to cover the equivalent of one academic year of Arabic in half the time, that is, in one semester. Hebrew and Arabic, being members of the Semitic language family, share much of their grammatical structures and vocabulary. Arabic grammatical structures that are completely foreign to the speaker of an Indo-European language, like English, are almost identical in the two languages. These include verb conjugations, noun possession, the construct state, root and pattern morphology, and many more. In terms of vocabulary, hundreds of basic words of the type that a first-year language student would learn, like the numbers, days of the week, names of the parts of the body, words referring to family members, and natural phenomena can easily be related from one language to the other. This is a language, not a comparative linguistics, course. Emphasis is on real communication and on developing proficiency in the language by using it in meaningful contexts rather than on the study of grammar.