About Arabic

Two weeks before I leave Japan (in mid-February) I'm desperate to get access to some resources especially Arabic. The 1984 pdf document has too poor resolution.

So in the meantime I'll read about the language. I found out:

Arabic is a Semetic language within the Afro-asiatic group, and so there's a close relationship between it and Hebrew! It has over 200 million speakers. It is spoken in over 20 countries. It has its own script, although there is one historical dialect - Maltese - that uses the Latin alphabet.

I read that Arabic has such features as a masculine plural, an internal passive, a definite article, and broken plurals, and I'll have to deal with them in due course, I suppose.

Its grammar is algebraic, and almost too perfect. Some linguists feel that it may even be artificially contrived. Its word roots consist of consonant markers e.g. KTB. There are 10 commonly-used forms of the verb, plus 5 uncommon forms.

Dictionaries list words under their roots, but older dictionaries list them according to the letter a word ends with. And finally, Arabic poems traditionally have only the one rhyming pattern.