Pronunciation of Classical Arabic

[Mikel95]

Hi everyone! I'm Mikel, from Spain, and I'm new here. I'm very interested in the Arabic World, specially in their ancient story. I am an eager reader too and I love languages, so I would like to read classical Arabic literature in its original form. I learned from internet that most of it is written in Classical Arabic, a sofisticated version some of some scattered ancient dialects, a language developed between the 8th and 9th centuries, and that is the precursor of the Modern Standard Arabic. I don't have time to take lessons with a teacher, so I'm only going to be able to  study for myself when I find time. I have looked for guide books on the internet and some of them are very nice, but the problem is that the explanations that they give concerning pronunciation are very technical and I can't understand them.  I just want to find some basic explanations for the moment, not extremely poor ones, but neither too complex. I want to get that information , to know how it sounded more o less and be able to study it with more confort, and to try to recreate it in my mind. If anyone knows about some place where I can find those explanations without phonetic thechicalities, that is,  in a more practical way, or even would want to bother to  write them down here, at least the most important ones I would be more than obliged.

One more thing. I know that Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic are very similar and I came across with a very interesting grammar book written by J A Haywood and  H H M Nahmad that claims to be useful for both MSA and CA. Anyone who has used it can tell me if it works for the two of the versions? Because, even if it isn't my priority, learnig MSA would be also interesting for me.

Thank you very much!  

[Omar Lemaachi]

Hi Mikel,

 

Your interest in learning this language is beautiful, although you have to be aware that it's not such an easy language, but it's not at all impossible to learn it
And I think that among the best methods to learn a language is to listen too much to audios or podcasts or other

If you like novels and stories I can choose a few and you save them in audio format

good luck

[arabicwithhamid]

As a native, I find modern MSA and CA very interrelated. The difference is that CA is far complex as many words are not used today. I really like your enthusiasm regarding CA, which is really difficult for most learners, and throughout my teaching experience of MSA on YouTube, I find that MSA is of ultimate interest for most of the Arabic-language seekers. Many learn MSA to understand the Quraan despite being in CA, which is possible because learning MSA, gives you almost 70% of the understanding of the Quraan text. 

If you want to dig into CA, it is far more difficult I guess, but not impossible. I remember some good books about this but need to make sure. I will come back if found any - sheers