Learning Arabic through roots?

Question

I am currently trying to learn Arabic but think that instead of learning vocabulary piece by piece, it would be better to learn the root consonants for nouns, adjectives and verbs and rules for vowels to change their gender, tense, voice etc.Is there any source that can be suggested where I could comprehensively learn this? Either free online or as a popular paid book....

Answer 1

I would say it would not be wise to learn only roots and then try to derive all words from them via some kind of formula. The reason for this is that while there are certain patterns that are commonly used with nouns, and certain patterns for verbs, etc., not all of the ones that could theoretically exist are actually used with every root. For example, let's say that you learn the root for writing, which is ktb. If you want to figure out how to make it into the noun "book", which comes from this root, you would have to look through all the possible patterns for nouns, which would include (substituting the letters X, Y, and Z for the root consonants) XaYZ, XaYaZ, XiYZ, XuYZ, XiYaZ, etc., and just guess which one would be used. But the fact is, only one of these patterns will give you the word for book: XiYaZ, which, when combined with the root ktb, gives you the word "kitab". Because you can't predict which noun pattern will be added to the root to create the noun you want, it would be much better just to learn vocabulary the normal way. Better that than trying to learn some formula which will just create a bunch of words that don't exist.

Answer 2

The benefit of the Arabic language that it is based on the root system. It is like a MAGIC!!

The best source is the dictionary.

But make sure that this dictionary is introducing the words starting from their roots and not by the Alphabetic order.

We have 2 types of dictionaries.

Good luck!

Oustath George