International Arabic language day (18th December).

The 18th of December is

International Arabic language day

As declared by a UN General Assembly resolution passed on December 18, 1973.

There are six official languages of the United Nations, Arabic is fourth amongst these six.

Arabic is celebrated on the same day each year, through the organisation of stalls, poetry and literary recitals, competitions, lectures, and workshops for those wishing to discover or deepen their knowledge of this ancient, widely-spoken and popular language.

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=33819

Arabic ebooks الكتاب العربي الالكتروني

أدب عربي, إسلام, تاريخ عربيhttp://www.arabicebook.com/

Arabic language books for children

Childrens Arabic language books Araboh.com

World Top Ten Countries With Most Arabic Language Speakers

Egypt	65,080,000
Algeria	26,280,000
Saudi Arabia	20,920,000
Morocco	18,730,000
Iraq	17,490,000
Yemen	17,400,000
Sudan	17,320,000
Syria	14,680,000
Tunisia	6,710,000
Libya	4,910,000

world-top-ten/countries-with-most-arabic-language-speakers

Learn to write Arabic - the Abjad letter system.

http://www.abjad.com/more_about.html

Science & the Arabic connection.

http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/hsts412/doel/arabic.htm

http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Indexes/Arabs.html

Chinese News in Arabic.

CCTV Arabic (China) logo & news

USTREAM-Japanese Students Learn Arabic

Ustream ©

Participants teach Arabic to Japanese students

Arabic Lesson 1 (Tajweed-Makhraj)

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2526152

http://uae-japan.blogspot.com/

قناة العالم الاخباریة | Alalam News Channel

تشرين ـ الصفحة الرئيسية : دمشق ـ سورية

تشرين ـ الصفحة الرئيسية :

www.alquds.co.uk Newspaper online.

www.alquds.co.uk

مكتوب Yahoo! Maktoob.

مكتوب Yahoo!

MSN Arabic News/Articles.

MSN Arabia رياضه، أخبار، مرآة، أفلام، موسيقى، جمال، سيارات، اقتصاد و المزيد على

Russia Today News -Arabic.

روسيا اليوم - وزارة الدفاع الليبية تتهم المتظاهرين بانهم تلقوا تدريبات في الخارج

Arabic Wikipedia (Qatr).

قطر - ويكيبيديا، الموسوعة الحرة

QFI Partner Schools Celebrate Arabic Language and Culture

Arabic Tutor - Explained Part 1

Communicative Language Teaching

Communicative Language Teaching Activity Part 1

How to Learn & Teach a Foreign Language : Teaching a Monolingual Speaker...

Map of Arabic Dialects.

http://thegulfblog.com/2010/04/16/map-of-arabic-dialects/

Funny Vid.

Arabic Clips.

http://clipat.maktoob.com/

http://www.ikbis.com/shots/279233

Yamli Translate

http://www.yamli.com/translate/

Fire Safety at home (English-Arabic pdf).

http://www.direct.gov.uk/prod_consum_dg/groups/dg_digitalassets/@dg/@en/documents/digitalasset/dg_073990.pdf

A scientific enquiry>

Whose dark ages?

If there is much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture and civilisation owe to the Islamic world. It is a failure which stems, I think, from the strait-jacket of history which we have inherited.

HRH Prince Charles in a speech at Oxford University, 27 October 1993

In 410 CE, Alaric, the Germanic king of the Visigoths, swept into Rome and sacked the great city in a three-day rampage. Sixty-six years later, Romulus Augustus, the last Roman emperor of the West, was deposed, and the regalia of empire was rudely despatched to Constantinople. With that, the lights went out on civilisation, and the Western world was plunged into an age of darkness – a night in which there was no scholarship, literacy or even civilised life. Only 1,000 years later did the world finally rediscover classical learning and bring the world’s night of darkness to an end with the bright new dawn of the Renaissance. Or so the story goes.

This is the myth of the Dark Ages, the idea that history and progress pretty much stopped for a millennium after the fall of Rome. The trouble is that the myth is just that, a myth. But it has been a myth so potent that it has thoroughly distorted our understanding of how civilisations emerge and how science and learning progress. Advances in our understanding of the natural world happen when scientists absorb the latest knowledge in fields such as physics or biology, and then modify or improve it. They work rather like runners in a relay race, passing the baton of learning from one scientist to the next. Modern science, regarded as a hallmark of modern Western civilisation, achieved its place through the passing of many successive batons, which were handed to the scientists of Europe from those of the world’s non- Western cultures. These included those who lived in the cultures of Islam over a period of some 800 years from the 8th to the 16th centuries.

The fact that we know little of this is what Michael Hamilton Morgan of the New Foundation for Peace speaks of as ‘lost history’. The historian Jack Goody goes further and calls it ‘the theft of history’. It is as if the memory of an entire civilisation and its contribution to the sum of knowledge has been virtually wiped from human consciousness. Not simply in the West but in the Islamic world too, the achievements of Islamic scientists were, until recently, largely forgotten or at least neglected, except by a few diligent specialists such as Harvard University’s Abelhamid Sabra, David King, Jamil Ragep and George Saliba.
In mainstream science education in Britain – until very recently – the history of scientific progress has tended to leapfrog from the classical era of Euclid, Aristotle and Archimedes straight to the birth of the Age of Science in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, with only a cursory mention, if any, of the great swathe of Islamic science in between. In some versions of history, the ‘dark age’ only really ends, and the progress of science only really begins, with the famous conflict in the early 17th century in which Galileo confronts the Catholic Church with the assertion that the earth moves around the sun. As the world eventually acknowledges that Galileo is right, this is presented as the world-changing triumph of the light of reason over superstition. Thereafter, from the 17th century onwards, Western Europe’s scientists are set free to unlock the world’s secrets – William Harvey discovers blood circulation, Isaac Newton launches the study of physics, Robert Boyle pioneers the study of chemistry, Michael Faraday, electricity, and so on. And so we move forward into the Age of Reason and the dramatic progress of modern science.

Filling the gap
In reality, though, scientific inquiry did not simply stop with the fall of Rome, only to get going again in the 17th century. In fact, as this book will show, recent research is beginning to reveal just how thoroughly the 800-year gap was filled by a wealth of scientific exploration in medieval Islam, and how it fed directly into the first stirrings of Western science.

The Cairo-based physician ibn al-Nafis, for example, discovered pulmonary circulation, the circulation of blood through the lungs, in the 13th century. Andalusian engineer Abbas ibn-Firnas worked out theories of flight, and is believed to have carried out a successful practical experiment six centuries before Leonardo drew his famous ornithopters. And in Kufa in Iraq, Jabir ibn- Hayyan (translated by Latin scholars as Geber) was among those laying the foundations of chemistry around 900 years before Boyle.

Moreover, some researchers are now showing that some of the great pioneers of modern science were building directly on the work of scientists from Islamic times. George Saliba of Columbia University, for instance, demonstrates in his book Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance how the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus drew on the work of Islamic astronomers for the groundwork to his breakthrough claim in 1514 that the earth moved round the sun.

Historians of mathematics have also shown how algebra, a branch of maths that allows scientists to work out unknown quantities, was developed in 9th-century Baghdad by Musa al-Khwarizmi, building on work that he had discovered from mathematicians in India. Historians think that al-Khwarizmi would have had access to manuscripts through Islam’s first encounter with India, which happened a century earlier. Modern science depends, too, on the solutions to complex quadratic equations devised by the poet and scientist Omar Khayyam. And much of our understanding of optics and light is built on the pioneering work of Hassan ibn al-Haitham (translated in Latin as Alhazen) in 11thcenturyCairo.

Arabic Pod101 on your phone

http://www.arabicpod101.com/iphone/

Gengo Flashcards Arabic and Gengo Flashcards Arabic Lite

Improve your Arabic with Gengo Flashcards! This amazing application will introduce multiple senses into your learning process. Featuring vivid photos, useful vocabulary lists, and audio taken from a real Arabic speaker, Gengo Flashcards will help you learn Arabic faster than ever before. It works by allowing you to look at a picture of the word, hear it pronounced, and see it written all at the same time. Once multiple senses are involved, your ability to memorize vocabulary will become faster than ever.

Gengo Flashcards comes with 250 practical vocabulary words. But that's not all. You can also add your own cards. iPhone users can use their camera and microphone to create their own flashcards in about thirty seconds. By adding your own cards, you can increase your vocabulary as much as you want! Study Arabic at home, on the train, at school, at the gym, wherever you want with Gengo Flashcards.

Also, try out the Free Gengo Flashcard Lite version, with 20 colorful picture flashcards and audio to get your learning started right away!

itunes/iphone Al Mawrid Dictionary app

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/al-mawrid-al-qareeb-arabic/id333208981?mt=8

Competitions boost Arabic development

http://www.oryxinflightmagazine.com/business/which-mobile-platform-a-handset-is-best-for-your-type-of-business.html

One reason for Nokia’s popularity in the Middle East is its strong support for Arabic-language software development. For example, Nokia’s S60 development kits in Arabic and Urdu allow software authors to test localised language ap-plications on their PCs.

Nokia also launched a competition for Arabic-language developers, Bil3arabi, partly to eliminate threats from regional iPhone applications; the prize for the winning software is US$100,000, with top placement in Nokia’s Ovi applications store.

Other manufacturers are also working to persuade developers to support regional languages. BlackBerry, for exam-ple, has promoted Arabic-language software, while other specific applications exist, such as  Al-Morafiq, an English-to-Arabic dictionary for various mobile devices, including BlackBerry. However, other platforms, including Android, still have only partial Arabic support. That will prevent adoption in the region until full Arabic user interfaces and applications are available.

Native Arabic Support for Google Android.

http://www.khaled.us/native-arabic-support-for-google-android.html

STC was the first company to introduce an Android based cellphone in the region. The phone was the HTC Magic however native Arabic support is only available for Android OS 1.5 while the latest OS version for the Magic is 1.6 (HTC are working on2.1 update to be released this year). Arabic support is not available in 1.6, 2.0 and 2.1.

I should contrast this to the iPhone: iPhone OS 3.0 added support for many languages including Arabic. You do not need to download additional software to add Arabic to the iPhone and you don't need to change anything if all you needed is to read Arabic. Apple did that in less than 2 years and all of their iPhones support Arabic by now. As for Android you should be able to add Arabic by visiting a site such as XDA Developers.

Which brings us to the ArDroid website that specializes in helping the Arabic speaking community use Google Android phones. They started a feature request to have better Arabic language support:

I bought an Android phone and I said since you already made the locale adding the Arabic language will be easy and fast , but now I have the phone for 5 months and no Arabic support still , we have two available Android phones in my country and two are coming in a few months , I had an iPhone but I sold it to buy an Android phone , so I think I'm wrong in selling the iPhone , anyway please Google add the Arabic support and Prove Me Wrong .

Support this by voting for this issue to be resolved which you can do by simply clicking the star on the left (you might need a Google Account for that).

I should remind Google that Nokia is a major market-share holder in Saudi Arabia, BlackBerry comes in second place. So they are the major competition for Android phones here, not the iPhone.

Awaiting Arabic for Android/Google Operating Systems?

http://blog.afriza.co.cc/archives/23

Every-time Google announced a new version of its Android Operating System, I have always find out if it supports Arabic. And now, there are very good signs that native full Arabic supports are coming to Android 3.0 Honeycomb!

Reply;

As I know, honeycomb is an android version for large screen devices (like iPad ), but I am not sure if this version gonna be available for phone devices.

Arabic Games

http://www.digitaldialects.com/Arabic.htm

Arabic Writing Practice

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2Dab4agZDQ

Explore Qatar

Qatari Arabic

The Arabic spoken in the country is also known by other names like Qatari, Gulf Arabic and Khaliji. This language can be classified into Central, South, Semitic, Afro-Asiatic and Arabic. The dialects of this language are South Qatari Arabic and North Qatari Arabic. The Farsi western language is also known by the name of Persian language. It has been furthermore classified into Iranian, Western, Persian, South Western, Indo-European and Indo- Iranian. Apart from Qatar, the Gulf spoken Arabic language is also widely used in countries like Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait and UAE.

The Standard Arabic language is vastly popular in Saudi Arabia. The other names of this language are Al Fus-Ha, Al Arabiya and High Arabic. This language is also one of the most spoken ones at Qatar. This language is also highly used in other countries surrounding Qatar.