I wrote about how I started to read books and blogs on the internet in Japanese in my previous post.
One day, I came across the blog of a Japanese muslim revert. It was a blog about reading and books. It has a lot of book reviews that helped me find new book to read in Japanese. But the stream of book reviews abruptly ended, and the blogger wrote an announcement. Something that went like this:
I have decided to stop reading books written by men and will start reading only one book, The Book written by their Creator.
Don’t you find it fascinating? The booklover blogger will from now on read only one book, The Holly Qur’an, which is in Arabic. It sounded like an interesting (yet full of struggles) journey, reading only one book that you will enjoy for your whole lifetime!
Learning Your Next Language: in What Language?
So I decided to try learning Arabic too. As a muslim, I learned how to read The Holly Qur’an when I was little, may be at 5 or 6 years old. I read The Holly Qur’an everyday. But, it never occured to me to learn about the language, since I always look up its translation for knowing the meaning. I have translations of The Holly Qur’an in Bahasa Indonesia, Japanese, and English.
It feels natural to learn a foreign language in your mother tongue, right? But, since I am living in Japan, that time it was hard to find free (and good) Arabic text book in Bahasa Indonesia. I found free learning materials for Arabic mostly in English. In the end I decided to use the mostly available Arabic learning materials on the Internet: Madina Arabic Series of Dr. V. AbdurRahiim.
I started teaching myself Arabic as my new language in English. I happily skipped the first part on how to read and write the Arabic Alphabet and headed straight to the grammar. The Madina Series has three volumes written in Arabic, and each is supplemented with the English textbook (called the English Key), along with the exercises’ answer key. If you go look on some Arabic Learning blogs, you will find them sharing their list of vocabularies or even short but consice summaries of the book. They were all very useful.
Two ways of learning Arabic: The West way and The East way
But my learning progress was slow, and soon came to a halt. The exercises were boring, and as I proceeded on, I kept making mistakes on the parts that I have already studied. Even when I thought the textbook was easy to understand, I kept on forgetting what I learned.
I somehow sensed that I needed to study about the Verbs first. My search led me to this book: Arabic Verbs and Essentials of Grammar. After some time, I once again came to halt. This time, I found learning the Arabic Verb Conjugation was impossible! I once again looking around for available Arabic class nearby. But I couldn’t find one fitting my preference, so I simply quit learning Arabic.
Luckily, after giving up learning Arabic for quite awhile, I could go back to my Arabic study. In 2018, my husband had the chance to work in Indonesia for one year. This gave me the chance to enroll to an Arabic class, two hours a week, going on for six months when we stayed there. The class was conducted in Bahasa Indonesia.
It was at the Arabic class that I learned there are two ways of learning Arabic. The first one is what I called The West way, it is the way they teach Arabic in modern (western style) schools. This is the way I had been studying Arabic all this time.The second one, the East way, is the way Arabic is taught at traditional schools for muslims. This is the way that Arabic class taught me Arabic.
The way (or ways?) to learn Arabic
The basic difference of both ways was how the grammar terms were introduced. The West way uses grammar terms in English, which I could hardly relate since I didn’t have the idea of their meaning. The East way uses the grammar term in Arabic. For example, the terms of mood (or cases) that don’t show any relations with sentence structure at all in English, suddenly made sense when we use their respective Arabic terms.
This is possible because Arabic uses root system in forming words, so once we can identify the root, we may guess the meaning of different but related words in Arabic. This is why the term Rafa’ and Marfu’ (the root is r-f-‘a) to recognize the fa’il of the fi’il (the root is f-`a-l) simply explain themselves. While their respective terms in English: Accussative, Subject, and Verb are simply linguistic terms independent on their own.
Having said that, I didn’t mean that the East way is better than the West way. Knowing both terms in Arabic and in English will save so much time understanding grammar books. This is important. Why? Because some books, especially those in English have better lesson arrangement than those in Arabic or Bahasa Indonesia, at least on the books I have been using. For example, the grouping of verbs for conjugation is simpler in the West way. If you need some elaboration, you can go look on them in the East way. So, when you know the terms in both languages, you can get the best of both ways!
In the end, I used grammar books in English, Bahasa Indonesia, and Arabic. And by the time I went back to Japan in 2019, my Arabic study embarked on a new endeavor!
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