Oh you get me wrong. As this thread is named Prachtic Arabic Reading [color=#F33E0B]Modern Standard Arabic[/color]. I posted some rules that are for MSA and NOT for Darija. As the PCM is to learn Darija, you will not find those rules in it. Don’t get confused there are a lot of differences between MSA and Darija. There are no spelling rules for Darija, just write like you speak it. But MSA is a standard so, there you can make spelling mistakes.
Ok, my bad. I didn’t notice this thread was specific to MSA. I just saw darija exercises. :roll:
[quote=MalikRumi]Maarten,
Is this your site? I tried it and all it did was transliterate my English into Arabic characters. No Arab speaking person who didn’t know English would understand what I wrote. Am I missing the point of this site?[/quote]
No it isn’t. I think the tool can help you to improve your arabic reading skills. I use it to check if an arabic word is pronounced/written the way I think it is by typing in the latin characters and checking the transliterated result. The tool does not nothing more.
Suf7a - means “page”, like book page. A webpage is usually a ???.
“S f 7” and “S 7 f” are both legitimate radicals conveying the same basic meaning, which is “page”, and has permutations in all sorts of words dealing with journalism/writing. …But be careful all you who (kind of like me) have difficulty differentiating between velarized Sad and non-velarized sin; Describing a person as “safi7” is not something you want to do lightly; it is a slur upon their morality. …And just to make the porridge a little thicker, there is another word which means, “fool; person impervious to accepting wisdom and guidance” which is very close to being a homonym in my native English ear. It is “sufaha”, and it is a broken plural (a technical term meaning ‘broken in the middle, like oxen’ which differentiates that class of plurals from the other main one, which is ‘sound’ plurals, which are formed without ‘breaking’ their essential letter order and simply suffixing ‘een’ ‘uun’ or ‘aat’ to the word), where was I? Oh yeah, I was saying that “safih” means “fool”.
Oh, and to give you all a bit more information, the word, ‘waraqah’ means page, too. It also means, ‘leaf’. This paired meaning is interesting in that it represents a pairing that we also have in English. You can buy ‘loose leaf paper’, and the ‘leaves’ fall from the tree in ‘Fall’ (which. coming from a verb which means ‘to fall’ is the literal meaning of the word, ‘khareef’, the Arabic word for the season ‘Fall’.)
Okay now, guys, raise your hands if you are irritated with my OCD…Just kidding; I don’t really want to know for sure how irritating I am.
And back to the exercise at hand… what was the word? Was it actually aSSuf7a = the page? SM, we need your assistance! Nuwwara, where are you with your Fus7a words?
Suf7a - means “page”, like book page. A webpage is usually a ???.[/quote]
It’s pronuced Saf7a (with article aS-Saf7a). It can mean also mean area and surface.
Oh ah, things have happened here that I hadn’t noticed! Thanks guys, and especially, thank you Ummaryam for your explanation. That’s what I call a detailed answer :hap:
Those were some very interesting discussions going on here.
As a reminder: this is a MSA (Modern Standard Arabic), and not Darija one. Among all exercises, this one is for those of you who learn Fus7a. Please bear that in mind for you not to be confused with the vocabulary we study here.
So here we go:
Read and translate this MSA/fus7a word:
[large]???[/large]
JAMIL
adjective that means a nice-cute person.
great, and it’s not only for people, but things too: attaqso jamil - the weather is nice
??? ???
i love it 
end of the week ie. the weeeeeeeeeeekend, it’s my best friend