1.6 Reading Aloud Without Stopping — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read a fully marked Arabic sentence you have never seen before, aloud, at one pass and without stopping. Take the five decisions of this volume in the right order and fast enough to keep going. Use the vowel marks as instructions rather than as decoration, and say what each mark tells you to do with your mouth. Keep a sentence moving: no pause in the middle of a word, no restart when you make a mistake, one breath per phrase. Hear when your own reading has gone flat, and know which of the five decisions you dropped. Prerequisites : 1.5 and the rule for the definite article Five lessons have each given you one thing to get right. This one asks you to get all five right at the same time, in real time, out loud. That is a different skill, and it is the skill the rest of the course will be built on, because everything from the grammar volume onwards assumes that you can put a marked sentence into your mouth without stalling. The reason it is worth a whole lesson is that the five decisions interfere with each other. A learner who has drilled the throat sounds will make them beautifully in isolation and drop every one of them the moment there is also a stress rule to apply. A learner who has the stress rule cold will get it right and simultaneously murmur every unstressed vowel, which undoes the work of the first lesson. Reading aloud is where the pieces either become a habit or stay a list. One thing to say plainly before starting. This course prints words in their pause form, that is, without the short case endings that classical grammar puts at the end of a noun. Those endings belong to the grammar volume, and you will add them later. Nothing in this lesson depends on them. How it sounds The five decisions Every word you meet asks you the same five questions, and you have already learned the answer to each of them. The order matters, because some answers depend on others. Is the article in front of it? If so, decide before anything else whether the l is said, because the answer changes the first syllable and therefore the shape of the word. This is 1.5. Where are the long vowels? Find them on the page, since they are written as letters and cannot hide, and give each one two beats. Then give every short vowel one beat and its full colour. This is 1.1. Which syllable takes the stress? Count the syllables from the end, check the last for superheaviness and the next to last for weight, and place the stress. This is 1.4, and it depends on the answer to the question before it. Are there sounds from the throat? Find them and commit to them. This is 1.2, and it is the decision most often abandoned under pressure. Are there emphatics? If so, darken the vowels beside them. This is 1.3, and because the darkening spreads, one emphatic changes the colour of most of the word. That looks like a great deal of work for one word, and at first it is. Within a few weeks the first, second and fifth become automatic and you will only be consciously deciding about the third and fourth. Within a few months none of them is conscious. The way to get there is to do it slowly and correctly rather than quickly and approximately, because a fast approximate reading trains the wrong habits at exactly the speed you will later want to use. One sentence taken apart Take the sentence meaning that today is Saturday, which appears in the first table below. It has three words and every one of them asks a question. The first word carries the article, and its first letter is a moon letter, so the l is said. The word itself has a long vowel written with waw. So the first word is the article plus a heavy syllable plus a closed one, the stress falls on the syllable after the article by step two of the stress rule, and no throat sounds or emphatics are involved. The second word is two light syllables, so the stress goes on the first, and both vowels keep their colour: this is the word an English speaker is most likely to reduce to a murmur, and it must not be. The third word carries the article again, and this time the first letter is a sun letter. So the l disappears, the following consonant doubles, and the word begins with a short a and then a held s. The vowel of the article is bright here, because nothing in the word is emphatic. Stress falls on the first syllable of the noun, which is closed and therefore heavy. Read out like that, the sentence took a minute to analyse and takes a second and a half to say. The point of the analysis is that you should be able to do it silently, in advance, until you no longer need to. What without stopping means Three concrete things, none of them about individual sounds. Never break a word. A pause in the middle of a word is worse than a wrong vowel, because it destroys the shape the listener is using to recognise the word. If you are not sure of a vowel, guess and keep going. Do not restart. The commonest beginner's habit is to go back to the beginning of the sentence after every mistake. It feels careful and it is the opposite: it means you never practise the second half of anything, and it trains you to stall. Read to the end, then read the whole sentence again. Breathe by phrase. Arabic groups words closely, and a short sentence is normally one breath. Take the breath before you start, not in the middle. If a sentence is too long for one breath, break it where the sense breaks, which in the sentences below is at the word for and. With the vowels supplied Six sentences, each given twice. The left column is what an ordinary Arabic page gives you: consonants and long vowels, no marks. The middle column is the same sentence with the vowel marks supplied, which is what this course prints for you until the end of the second period. Read the middle column aloud first, then cover it and read the left one. As printed With the vowels supplied English هي بنت. [1] هِيَ بِنْت. She is a girl. ذلك فندق. [2] ذَلِكَ فُنْدُق. That is a hotel. اليوم هو السبت [3] الْيَوْم هُوَ السَّب