Arabic Flashcards and Word Lists
Here are some PDFs which can be used to make the paper flashcards I’ve used to study Arabic at Berkeley City College.
Vocabulary from our textbook Wightwick & Gaafar “Mastering Arabic 1”:
Units covered in BCC Arabic 1A:
Units covered in BCC Arabic 1B, remaining MA 1 chapters…:
… and the second textbook:
Vocabulary from Sahlawayhi 1 Story 4 (BCC Arabic 1B):
Miscellaneous:
Vocabulary lists from Berkeley Adult School:
The glossary includes all of the Mastering Arabic 1 words. It may be useful for review and also for reference, since the glossary in the Mastering Arabic book is only in the English to Arabic direction, and doesn’t list chapter numbers.
Etymologies in the word list notes are mostly copied from each word’s entry in Wiktionary, which are in turn copied from various dictionaries. Most of the words don’t have notes; I added them for words that I thought were especially interesting or confusing. The notes are a work in progress and I am happy to make corrections or additions.
Alphabet with positions: List with pronunciations sourced from quizlet.com. I added hamza.
BCC workbook words: These are from Dr. Gaye’s handwriting practice workbook.
Mastering Arabic words: These are words from the chapter vocabulary sections of Mastering Arabic 1. Most of my chapter word lists were initially copied from user-contributed Quizlet decks, or from the memrise.com flashcards provided by the publisher. I’ve studied with them and corrected errors as I found them, but some errors may remain. Unlike the words on memrise.com, these have vowel diacritics. I’ve also attempted to include any extra words appearing in the chapter dialogs, the workbook exercises, or the publisher’s online videos, as well as to clarify other vocabulary phrases (e.g. badminton, lit. “feather ball” - I added “feather” and “ball” so you can learn these words separately).
Annotations: The publishers seem to have been very conservative in their inclusion of vocabulary on memrise.com, which lacks over half of the words in the textbook. In case you are planning to use both paper cards and the website, the words which are in Memrise are marked with a “*” after the unit number on the front. Words that are not in the textbook vocabulary sections are marked with a “+”.
Pronouns: The pronouns come from Wikipedia and include some extra endings, and numbers (i.e. dual), which we don’t study in class. Please read about them first. Note the Mastering Arabic cards already include pronouns and endings as they are introduced by the textbook.
Berkeley Adult School words: These are some words from Mr. Omer’s Arabic class at the Berkeley Adult School. The “body parts” list is a work in progress, I tried to include the plurals from Wiktionary but most entries have multiple plurals corresponding to different usages. For example “dog with three heads” vs “heads of state” would use different forms of the plural noun “heads” in Arabic. The problem is that I don’t know which is which, so the cards just list all possibilities.
A few cards have transliterations provided. These are formatted so that the transliteration is on the left, and the Arabic is on the right. This is supposed to make it easy to cover the transliteration with your thumb in case you don’t want to see it.
Some general comments on printing and studying with flashcards.
Here’s a form which looks up words on Wiktionary using the full text search feature, which is often preferable for Arabic:
Also try Michelle Fullwood’s excellent Fuzzy Arabic Dictionary, you can type in Latin transliteration, or a mix of Latin and Arabic, and it gives you the Arabic script and a short definition.
Please let me know if you find any errors, either through Dr. Walton-Price or by submitting an issue on the project page. Suggestions are also welcome through the same channels.
Last updated: 11 March 2019