Let's Speak Arabic

For business or pleasure you need Let's Speak Arabic for useful vocabulary and phrases. The book is organized to make Arabic learning easy and accessible. Let's Speak Arabic focuses exclusively on the most common, everyday situations you will encounter in Arabic-speaking countries. It is just what you need to communicate successfully in basic Arabic.
This book has been prepared to serve dual purpose to help the regular students of Arabic courses to be able to speak Arabic through specially designed courses basing their eyes on the Arabic script and to enable the self-learners for specific and temporal purpose of visiting an Arabic speaking area for short or long periods of work. For this category of self-learners we have used Roman script with specially designed equivalents or let us say near equivalents for some very typical only Arabic sounds. Therefore, it becomes very necessary here to talk about and explain Arabic sounds which, when written, are called letters.
As we have known. Arabic alphabet consists of twenty-eight letters. All of these twenty eight letters are consonant letters; however three of them function as “elongate vowels”. These three letters are “Alif”, “Waw” and “Ya”. How and where these are used as elongate vowels, shall be explained at appropriate place.
We said, generally accepted there are twenty-eight consonant letters in the Arabic alphabet. However, for our convenience we can consider them to be thirty letters including “Ta marboota” i.e. round “Ta” and the “Hamza” which are otherwise passed on as another form of normal stretched “Ta” and “Alif” respectively. In fact, there is no harm in considering them as 29th and 30th letters.
More so because they play crucial and independent role in the formation of Arabic words-Ta marboota is always used as terminal letter indicating that the nouns ending thus are generally feminine gender nouns while “Hamza” is severally used only as consonant as against Alif which is used as elongate vowel also.