3rd Letter: tae'

MaRHabaen to the 3rd dreamscape.  Can you find the 5 symbols in the Suura?

1) The toadstool (a stool) tells us that this is the 3rd letter of the Arabic alphabet.


2) The shape of the fat toad's smile and his two round bulging eyes sticking out on top give us the shape of the letter tae'.


3) The fact that we see a toad drinking tea makes it clear that the sound of this letter is "t."  The animals and central characters in these dreamscapes will always be telling us the sound of the letters.  We don't have to "read it in the tea leaves."  The sound of the letter is front and center to the image, so to speak.


4)  The light colors tell us this is a Light consonant.


5)  The warm sun motivating the toad to cool off with ice tea reminds us this is a Solar letter.  If we see an "L" before the "t" in Arabic the "L" is silent and the "t" is doubled.


AS A WORD


tae' makes only one word by adding a vowel:


te (teh) means "by" only used in "by God" for swearing.


Imagine the toad drops his tea and starts swearing at it.

2nd Letter: bae'

MaRHabaen (welcome) to the 2nd dreamscape.  Can you find the 5 symbols in the Suura (picture)?

1) The bunny tells us that this is the second letter of the Arabic alphabet.


2) The shape of the bunny's head popping up out of a hole in the ground gives us the shape of the letter bae' which looks like a circle with two ears sticking up over it.  To further emphasis this in the dreamscape, we imagine this bunny being a Hindu Brahman bunny with a big red dot on his forehead from participating in a recent religious ceremony.  The dot and the ears again reflect the shape of the letter for bae'.


3) The sound of the letter is simply "b" like the first letter in Brahman and bunny.


4) Are there any solid black figures in this story?  No.  Therefor, bae' is a Light consonant.


5) Brahman bunny is stargazing at night because traditional intellectual classes in society loved astronomy.  Therefor, bae' is a Lunar letter.


AS A WORD


bae' makes three words by only adding vowels.


I.  bi (pronounced with an "i" like in ski) is a preposition which means:
     -- in, at, on (place and time);
     -- with (indicating connection, association)


Imagine Brahman bunny is especially interested in the stars for astrological reasons.  He's single and he's hoping to discern from the stars in what season, and at what time of day, and on what continent he will find his bride with whom he will be connected with in the association of marriage.


II.  baebae (pronounced beh-bu) is a noun meaning:
     -- papa, father, daddy
     -- catholic pope, or orthodox patriarch


Imagine Brahman bunny is trying to convince in father to let in travel in search of a bride based on his star chart calculations.


II.  baeb 
     -- door, gate
     -- opening, entrance, passage, way in, entryway, doorway, gateway, inlet
     -- section, chapter
     -- category, class, grade, group, range; type, sort, kind, variety
     -- matter, affair, concern, business; subject, topic; question, issue; field, sphere, domain, realm


Imagine that after Brahman bunny finishes his star chart calculations he closes the door to the hole, and scurries back down into the den to show his father what he surmised from the stars.

1st Letter: 'elif

Welcome to the 1st dreamscape.  Can you find the 5 symbols in the picture?

1) The tree tells us it's the first letter of the alphabet.

2) The shape of the palm tree with only two palm fronds left on top gives us the shape of the letter 'elif with the hamza on top.  This is a dynamic picture, meaning it incorporates a narrative of change.  Imagine the elephant eating all of the palm fronds off the top of the trunk of the tree to make the 'elif stand alone sometimes without the hamza.  This always happens to the 'elif when it is in a syllable with another consonant.  When 'elif is alone without the hamza (represented with a straight apostrophe '), then the 'elif acts as a long vowel.  Otherwise, the hamza is the glottal stop we use rarely in U.S. English in words "Latin."  The funny pronunciation of the "t" in middle of "Latin" is a glottal stop.  That's the hamza.  It does lots of funny things in Arabic, but mostly it just hangs out on top of long vowels (a, w, & y) that don't have another consonant to make a syllable with.  The rule in Arabic is that no vowel can be spoken without a consonant in the same syllable, so hamza fills that role when no other consonant steps up to the plate.  Think of it as the back up consonant. 

3) The sound of 'elif is "e" like the first sound in elephant.  The "lif" part of the name is like the "lif" in the word "lift."  

4) The elephant in not solid black and there are no solid black characters in this image, so by default we assume that this letter is Light.  Therefore vowels that follow the 'elif-hamza pair will take the light pronunciation.

5)  Imagine this scene is in a zoo.  The elephant is sneakily ripping up this palm tree at night for a midnight snack because the zoo keeper wouldn't let him rip up the landscaping during the day.  Since this is a night time moon letter it doesn't reflect itself onto preceding "L" sounds.  Preceding "L" sounds are therefor pronounced simply as "L."

AS A WORD

'elif and hamza are also a word all by themselves.  They are used as a particle at the beginning of yes/no and either/or questions.  We would use an 'elif-hamza to ask the question, "Do you like to eat palm fronds Mr. Elephant?"  We would also use and 'elif-hamza to ask, "Would you like coffee or water to drink with your palm fronds, Mr. Elephant?"  It's somewhat like using the word "hey," in front of a question in English.  "Hey, do you like palm fronds?"  However, in Arabic prefacing questions with this particle is more like saying "don't you?" at the end in English because it denotes that the question is rhetorical--meaning the person asking the question is implying that they know the answer.  They are simply asking for confirmation.  So it's like saying "You like palm fronds Mr. Elephant, don't you?"  Or, "Don't you want coffee or water with your palm fronds Mr. Elephant?"  Just remember it always goes in the beginning of a question in Arabic like "hey...".  It means "don't you," but it doesn't flip around from the beginning to the end of different kinds of questions like in English.  To remember all of this, I imagine myself in this daydream picture running up to the elephant and shouting, "Hey, don't you want coffee or water to wash all those palm fronds down Mr. Elephant?!?"  "Follow me then!" I shout, and then I run down the field while the elephant chases me swinging the tree trunk. 

The 5 things to learn about each Arabic consonant

In the pictures you will see for each letter, you need in internalize the symbolize for 5 features of each letter in the alphabet.  First, you already know we are pegging these letters to an image representing a number that places the letter in the proper sequence of the alphabet.  Second and Third, we obviously need to learn the shape and sound of the letters since they are not like letters in the Roman alphabet.  The core shape of the letter will be present in the memory picture, but then we will also need to learn to cut off about half of each letter letter to place it inside of words in connected (cursive-like) writing.  The sounds we learn at first will also sometimes be close approximations of the real sound since many of these sounds don't exist in English.  This different will be explained in the posts dedicated to each letter.

Finally, the fourth and fifth things we need to know about each letter is whether the letter is (4th) Dark or Light and (5th) whether it is a Sun or Moon Letter.  On the one hand, the Darkness of a letter effects the pronunciation of neighboring vowel sounds making them deeper (i.e. more open mouthed) like saw instead of say.  On the other hand, the Solar aspect of a Sun letter makes a preceding "L" sound change into a clone of the Sun letter, so that the "L" is in effect silent and the Sun letter is doubled.  Moon letters don't have any effect on preceding "L."  Because the "G" in algebra (an Arabic word) is a Moon letter, we pronounce the "L."  If it had been a Sun letter we would have called algebra, "aggebra."

Pay close attention to how all five of these features are symbolically represented for our sensory imaginations in the dreamscapes for each letter.  Then test yourself on all five features of each letter by memory.

Sky

A Quick note on Transliteration Before Introducing the Alphabet

As I introduce letters and later words in Arabic, I will often transliterate them--i.e. write out how they sound using the Roman Alphabet.  However, there are a number of difficulties to overcome in this process.  First of all, 10 of the 28 consonants in Arabic don't exist in English.  They are called Emphatic or Dark consonants, that are similar to sounds we have in English but throatier and different.  I will use the term Dark because it is more visual.  When transcribing these consonants I will use a Capitalized Consonant or a pair of Consonants where the first one is capitalized and the second one is not.  This will not create confusion because there is no capitalization in Arabic, so we can use that function for this other purpose.  As for using two consonants together to represent one sound, this will only be done by using a lowercase "h" as the second consonant, which we already are familiar with in English as we do the same in English for the th, sh, and ch sounds.  In Arabic we will need to loose the ch in this set and replace it with Kh, dh, Dh, and Rh.  These will be explained on the posts dedicated to those letters.

As for vowels, they follow very strict rules in Modern Standard Arabic, unlike in English, so I will use a strict formula to denote both how a word is spelled and how it is pronounced simultaneously.  Do not memorize these now.  I will give you a dreamscape guide after the alphabet.  But just to give you a preview, the formula that I am using (where "x" denotes any consonant) is as follows:

combinations of the short and long "a(e)" vowels in Arabic
(X)a or (X)aa(x) = aw as in awesome, on, audio -> only after the 10 Capitalized "Dark" Consonant Sounds
Terminal (...x)a = u, as in under, umbrellas
(x)a(x)-(x)... = @ as in afternoon, at, Applebee's
(x)ae or (x)ae(x) = long a, as in ate, aged, eggs
(x)e = short e, as in elephant.

combinations of the short and long "u(oo)" vowels in Arabic

(X)u, (x)u, (X)uu(x), or (x)uu(x) all = u as in blue, glue, etc.

(X)u(x)-(x) = oo as in look, cook, book

combinations of the short and long "i(ee)" vowels in Arabic

(x)i or (x)ii(x) = ee as in ski, skiing, feet

(X)i or (x)i(x) = i as in it, hit, igloo

After learning the 29th, 30th, and 31st short vowels we are adding to the alphabet we will be reading to memorize these rules in a meaningful way.  

Sky

Memory Pegs for the 31 letters of the Arabic Alphabet

It is important to know the Arabic Alphabet in order, not only as a string of notes in a song like the a-b-c song in English, but also great precision a individual points on a number line, so that with relative easy we can look words up rapidly in a dictionary.  I know many Arabic students who have been studying Arabic for 6 months full time, and many of them still don't know every letter in the Alphabet in order with easy.  That is not a solid foundation for advancing our Mastery of the language.  We must start strong to advance steady.  Therefor, let us be like wise builders, building our house on knowledge on rock solid mastery rather than on the shifting sands.  In order to do this we will need to start by turning the number line from 1 though 31 -- a list we already know -- into icons for our dream scape so that we can then anchor our images of the Arabic Alphabet to those icons.  Learn this list of 31 images I am giving you in this post before moving on.  Some of them will be easier than others, but they all work the same way.  There is a logical associative connection between all of the icons and the number to which we are associating those icons.  All of the icons are concrete nouns.  You can touch them, taste them, see them and often hear them.  Activate your sensory imagination as you go through the list.  Visualize the icons.  Play with them in your mind.  Manipulate them.  And then ask yourself a few times why they belong to the number they represent.  Then you will own them.  Here's the list:

1 = Tree.  Why?  Because the shape--the trunk of a tree looks like the shape of the number one more than any other number.

2 = Bunny.  Why?  Because of the first letter, and the multiple pairs of two--B is the 2nd letter in English; a Bunny has 2 buck teeth sticking out of his face, two big ears, two little front paws, and two big back feet.  Everything about a Bunny evokes the number 2 more than any other number.

3 = Stool.  Why?  Because stools--most of them anyway--have three legs.  That's what makes them different from chairs.

4 = Throne.  Why?  Because a throne is a fancy chair with four legs.

5 = Ocean.  Why?  Because there are only 5 oceans in the world: The Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian, The Arctic, and the Southern Ocean.  There is no bigger set of 5 on earth.

6 = Pistol.  Why?  Because it has six chambers (traditionally) and hold six bullets.  Also, if you get killed by one you'll likely be buried 6 feet under the ground.  

7 = Dice.  Why?  Because it's the most common roll for a pair of dice because many numbers combine between 1 and 6 to make 7 (1+6, 2+5, 3+4), and opposite sides of a dice add up to 7.  Opposite a 1 is a 6, and so on and so forth.

8 = Ice Cream Cone (two scoops).  Why?  Because if you have two scoops of ice cream on an ice cream cone it looks like the shape of the number 8.

9 = Cat.  Why?  Because superstition states that cats have 9 lives, or because of the story of the cat of 9 tails.

10 = Bowling Ball.  Why?  Because it usually weighs 10 lbs. and it knocks over ten pins.

11 = Goal Post.  Why?  Because two straight poles sticking up out of the ground side-by-side look like the number 11.

12 = Eggs.  Why?  Because a dozen come in a pack.

13 = American Flag.  Why?  Because it has 13 stripes (7 red and 6 white) representing the 13 original states.

14 = Gold.  Why?  Because 14-karate gold is one of the most common alloys.  Gold is measured on a 24 karate scale, each karate representing how many parts out of 24 are made of pure gold.  24 karate gold means that it is pure gold.  This is usually undesirable because it is so soft.  You can bite into 24 karate gold and leave a bite mark on it.  Therefor gold is usually alloyed with other metals for strength so that 18 parts of gold are mixed with 6 parts of another metal to produce 18 karate gold, or 14 parts of gold are mixed with 10 parts of another metal to make 14 karate gold.  In the United States, 14 karate gold is the most popular because of it's strength and durability.  

15 = Pay Check.  Why?  Most Americans get a refund of part of their paycheck on April 15th every year--tax day. Also, most Americans get paid on the 15th and the 30th of every month.

16 = Tarantula.  Why?  Because spiders are cannibalistic, and the biggest spider, the Tarantula mostly eats other 8-legged arachnids.  Therefor a Tarantula at meal time is a mess of 16 legs--8 to eat and 8 to eat with. 

17 = Airplane.  Why?  Because in the U.S., you have to be at least 17 years old to get your pilot's license or to join the Air Force.

18 = Voting Booth.  Why?  Because in the U.S., and some other English speaking countries, you have to be at least 18 years old to vote.

19 = Miniature Gold Club.  Why?  Because miniature gold usually has 19 holes (the last hole being a bonus round.)

20 = Eye Glasses.  Why?  Because if you have 20/20 vision you don't need glasses, and if you have less then 20/20 vision, glasses are supposed to correct your vision to 20/20.

21 = A Deck of Cards.  Why?  Because you have to be at least 21 to gamble in the U.S., you have to get a close as possible to 21 points in a game of Black Jack to win.

22 = A Ballerina.  Why?  Because she wears a tutu dress with sounds like 2, 2 or 22.

23 = A White Lamb.  Why?  Because the "w" in white reminds us it is the 23 letter of the English alphabet because of its two points down and 3 points up, and because the famous 23rd Psalm says "the Lord is my shepherd."

24 = A Watch (on military time).  Why?  Because there are 24 hours in the day.

25 = A Quarter  Why?  Because it's 25 cents.

26 = A Can of Alphabet Soup.  Why?  Because there are 26 letters in the English alphabet.

27 = A Euro coin.  Why?  Because there are 27 member states in the European Union.

28 = Saturn (or February Snow).  Why.  Because Saturn is on a 28 year cycle in relation to the earth, meaning that 28 years after you are born, Saturn is exactly the same distance from earth as it was on the day you were born.  Since this is a little known fact, to reinforce this idea, also think of the 28 days in February, one of the snowiest months in the year, and think of snow.  Then note that both snow and Saturn are very cold.  Or think of a Saturn car covered in Snow in February.

29 = Full Moon.  Why?  Because every 29 (and a half) days the moon is full again.  The lunar cycle is 29.5 days.

30 = Puckered Lips.  Why?  Because in the 30 days of June there are lots of proms and weddings, leading to lots of kissing, as in "you may now kiss the bride."  June is the most popular month for weddings.  Go with this.  We need this association for the rounded lips "oo" sound that is at the 30th place in the Arabic Alphabet.

31 = Jack-o-lantern.  Why?  Because Halloween is October 31st, and what better icon is there for Halloween than a smiling carved pumpkin?  (Note, if you were not thinking of a smiling Jack-o-lantern at first, throw that first pumpkin out of your mind and crave a new one in your imagination on your kitchen floor with a big smile.  The big smile is important for pronouncing the last letter of the alphabet.)

Test yourself on these 31 images until you know them well.  If you miss a few, google images for them, and look at the pictures and imagine yourself touching or smelling or tasting something in the picture as well as seeing it.  If you don't remember something right away, that means your sensory modalities were not engaged enough in the thought process.  If that still doesn't implant all of these images firmly in your mind, day dream with it in the dream scape some more and have something emotionally provocative take place in your day dream with the image while including yourself in the narrative.  That's how neural science works.  Do it.  And don't change any of the images.  You can't change Oceans in number 5 with a Glove for example.  They both work as icons for the number 5, that is true, but the icons that were chosen work specifically for the letters we will dream through in the next lesson.

Sky

Learning Arabic through a Dreamscape

Pierre Herigone, a brilliant French Mathematician from the 1600s, discovered that he could memorize strings of abstract numbers like the number for pie (3.1415927...) much more quickly and easily if he could translate what he needed to learn into pictures.  By first associating numbers to consonants, and then by combining those consonants into words that evoked pictures, Pierre was able to remember the numbers in pie as a meteor tail that was pink (3=m, 1=t, 4=r, etc.).  Centuries later, in the early 1980s, Steve Jobs discovered that if he could teach Apple computers to "think like people" instead of trying to teach people to learn computer-speak in DOS code that computers would become much easier to use and more popular.  Hence the invention of desktop icons.  Our minds are immensely powerful tools--with them we can learn and comprehend massive amounts of complex information rapidly--but only if we use them the way they were designed.  Our minds need sensory environments to interact with--tastes, smells, tactile sensations, sounds, and most importantly of all, pictures.  Therefor when we are trying to learn abstract codes, we need to infuse those codes with imaginative and sensory rich associations if we want to master those codes more effortlessly and effectively.  This is especially true of learning foreign languages.

For this reason, I invite those of you who are learning Arabic as native English speakers to enter into an imaginary mental dream scape with me were everything we hear and picture will be rich in symbolic meaning in order to make the abstract code of the Arabic language sensible to our sensory based intellects.  Wouldn't it be nice if you could just upload Arabic into your brain like uploading a file into your computer rather than struggling away at it for weeks and months on end, still not even fully mastering the alphabet?  What if you can?  At first you'll have to get used to using the systems we can use to accelerate our ability to remember things--just like you'd have to install and get use to using new software on a computer first before you could actually upload and utilize files that run on that software--but it's totally worth it.  With these systems it is truly possible to learn the whole Arabic Alphabet in a day or two.  And then we can move on to learning complex grammar structures and lots of vocabulary.  Give it a try and tell me how it goes for you.  If you need "patches" to run the program faster in your neural network, we can generate those patches for you.  The key though is just to get started.  Let the fun begin!

Bon voyage into the Dream scape!  I'll see you there.

Sky