I got this book from the library today:
https://www.amazon.com/Colloquial-Arabic-Levantine-Leslie-McLoughlin/dp/0415448573
My purpose is, of course, to learn some Arabic, and since I’m currently residing at a place with six people from Syria, I chose to start with the Levantine dialect rather than the standard version.
However, I was unpleasantly surprised to find out that absolutely no Arabic script is used throughout the book, and there is only a six-page appendix at the end called “Arabic Script for Beginners,” which does not even show all three or four varieties of a given letter, but only one of them. All the example sentences are given in Latin letters, which is, in my opinion, so damn stupid!
So my question is, to all of you who speak a given Arabic dialect, when you write it, you still use the Arabic script, don’t you? Or is it that local dialect speech is never written, and you use the official, pan-Arabic language when you write? Or do you write the pan-Arabic word, but read the local one? How exactly does it work?
One of the first things I need to do, I think, is to learn to read and write the alphabet. And after I do that, I would like to rewrite all the examples given throughout the book in the Arabic script, so that when I read through them I can memorise not only the sounds but also the letters. Do you think that’s the right way to go?
I’m a complete beginner in Arabic – so far I’ve got no knowledge at all