"This building is new and spacious, praise be to God."
Translation:هٰذِهِ الْبِناية جَديدة وَواسِعة اَلْحَمْدُ لِله.
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As a total newcomer to Arabic, I just want to express how dispiriting I am finding this stage of learning. I’m encountering this lesson as part of a “strengthening” exercise, not actually as a new lesson in the tree. Interspersed with meaningless but legible deciphering of “new letter combinations” writ large, come sentences with these words like “spacious”, “building”, “praise be to god” and I am utterly failing to recognise them as yet, struggling to decipher the tiny script. If I am asked to distinguish between different possible translations, I’m doing it on balance of probabilities: e.g. Some word begins with the large comma and apparently it means spacious. “And” consists mostly of a large comma, too. Two large commas feature at the front of words in two answer options, so it is 50/50 which one comes back as “correct”... Whether my answer is correct or incorrect it feels utterly alienating! Then it will be back to some more boring & meaningless old H/h, S/s, T/t, 2/3/a, distinctions again...
Please excuse the moaning: I am sure it is not easy to bridge the gap between contextless “script-deciphering” and “use of vocabulary in context sentences”, but I hope in future editions/versions of the Arabic tree, you can find some intermediate font sizes, more graduated systematic introduction of vocabulary & help build some relationship between learner/script/grammar/meaning/contexts... I am very sure it is not an easy feat, but a picture of a large dog in a tiny cramped building/house/room/kennel/rocket/car, and a tiny dog in a spacious building, etc (and some humorous dialogue about it), might relieve the tedium.
1169
I feel your anxiety. I found that by studying the alphabet on other sites(you tube) it made this much easier
- 1246
Feel your pain here. 750+ days in and progress is reeeeeallly slow. Wish I learnt this as a kid when the brain was a real sponge. But onwards we go!
In previous exercises when there was "this table" the table was without the definite article. Whymis there a definite article in front of the building?
- 1747
Because in Arabic, "this/that/these/those X" is always expressed as "this/etc. the X." If you see "This X" in Arabic, this actually translates to English "This is a/an X."
- 1747
Both work. Even better to my Egyptian ears is مبنى ('mabnaa'). Aside from binaaya(-tun), they're masculine.
