"كوبا"

Translation: Cuba

[Aaron750111]

The text for the arabic needs to be made larger. It's 10pt font and arabic is very intricate so the text definitely needs to be larger when teaching the alphabet, so that the differences among the letters can be seen.

[benton.1]

Until they do, I'm increasing the size by using "ctrl +" to enlarge it and "ctrl 0" to go back to the normal size.

[Ghosssty]

Is it just me or does it sound a lot like "Tuuba"? I hear a lip smack or something at the beginning that makes the k sound like a t.

[Ilyas25909]

yes he is like "Tuuba"

[WayneWestl1]

I'm hearing KUUba, which is of course how it's actually pronounced (not que-ba!)

[marioferpa]

There's a "ba" syllable in arabic, right? But here they seem to spell the name. Why?

[AhmadLaM]

If you mean "َب" with the " َ " diacritic, then yes it can be used in some cases to represent "ba" sound, but the length of the "a" sound the diacritic produces is too short for "Cuba", so we use a proper vowel instead, In this case "با"

[_FiX_]

in proper nouns (like place names) adapted from other languages, the Arabic script tends to place a vowel letter where there is an equivalent vowel letter in English, regardless of the Arabic pronunciation.

This is confusing in a situation where these are the first words learnt in Arabic, granted, and imo the course should not put proper nouns as the first Arabic words as they are not indigenous to Arabic pronunciation and many do not have a standardly accepted pronunciation pattern.

[dalibosch]

Why isn't ا long aa - what determines if it's going to be a or aa ?

[benton.1]

"aa" is not used when the words are spelled in English, it is only used in "transliteration" so that we know how the Arabic words sound.

[Ratul217471]

What do you mean vy "transliteration"?

[WayneWestl1]

When you take a word from one language and spell it out phonetically in another language. Does that make sense?