5.7 Renting a vehicle
5.8 Hitchhiking
6.1 General
6.2 Customs
6.3 Luggage
6.4 Questions to passengers
6.5 Tickets
6.6 Information
6.7 Airports
6.8 Trains
6.9 Taxis
7.1 General
7.2 Hotels/B&Bs/apartments/holiday rentals
7.3 Complaints
7.4 Departure
7.5 Camping Camping equipment
8.1 Banks
8.2 Settling the bill
8.3 Business terms
9.1 Mail
9.2 Telephone
9.2 Internet/email
10.1 Shopping conversations
10.2 Food
10.3 Clothing and shoes
10.4 Cameras
10.5 At the hairdresser
11.1 Places of interest
11.2 Going out
11.3 Booking tickets
12.1 Sporting questions
12.2 By the waterfront
13.1 Calling a doctor
13.2 What’s wrong?
13.3 The consultation
13.4 Medications and prescriptions
13.5 At the dentist
14.1 Asking for help
14.2 Lost items
14.3 Accidents
14.4 Theft
14.5 Missing person
14.6 The police
15.1 Government
15.2 Political trends
15.3 Arab Spring
15.4 Arab–Israeli conflict
16 Religion
Introduction
• Welcome to the Tuttle Essential Language series, covering all of the most popular world languages. These books are basic guides in communicating in the language. They’re concise, accessible and easy to understand, and you’ll find them indispensable on your trip abroad to get you where you want to go, pay the right prices and do everything you’ve been planning to do.
This guide is divided into 17 themed sections and starts with a pronunciation table which explains the phonetic pronunciation to all the words and sentences you’ll need to know, and a basic grammar guide which will help you construct basic sentences in Arabic. At the end of this book is an extensive English–Arabic word list.
Throughout the book you’ll come across boxes with a beside them. These are designed to help you if you can’t understand what your listener is saying to you. Hand the book over to them and encourage them to point to the appropriate answer to the question you are asking.
Other boxes in the book—this time without the symbol—give alphabetical listings of themed words with their English translations beside them.
For extra clarity, we have put all phonetic pronunciations of the foreign language terms in italic.
This book covers all subjects you are likely to come across during the course of a visit, from reserving a room for the night to ordering food and drink at a restaurant and what to do if your car breaks down or you lose your traveler’s checks and money. With over 2,000 commonly used words and essential sentences at your fingertips you can rest assured that you will be able to get by in all situations, so let Essential Arabic become your passport to learning to speak with confidence!
Pronunciation guide
The imitated pronunciation should be read as if it were English, bearing in mind that the emphatic consonants indicate more a vowel volume than a separate sound.
Vowels: there are three basic short vowels in Arabic and three long ones. These are:
Stressing of words
Arabic words do not have a stressed syllable in the manner that English words do. However, individual consonants can exhibit stress by means of a shadda (gemination)—this is represented by a duplicated consonant. For example, in the word kassara “to break,” the duplicated s indicates consonantal stress as in the English name Cassandra.
Basic grammar
There are two genders in Arabic, masculine (m.) and feminine (f.). This applies to verbs, nouns and adjectives.
Verbs
There are two different types of verb in Arabic, depending on their tense/mood: perfective (action complete) and imperfective (action incomplete). Verbs are marked for person, number and gender.
In Arabic first, second and third persons are marked differently in the verb form, e.g. anna adresu ‘I study,’anta tadresu ‘you study,’huwas yadresu ‘he studies.’
Verbs