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- "عائِلَتي تَمام اَلْحَمْدُ لِ…
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It is much better to say بخير then to say تمام. Teaching people a mess of dialectics and modern standard arabic is not going to help them. Either you learn a dialect Arabic from Morocco, Syria or Egypt, or you'll be studying MSA, because intertwingling the two only causes people to not understand you, (which is the problem of the dialects).
Personally, I think that learning dialects along with MSA is the best choice because, unless they don't intend to communicate verbally and only want to read newspapers, that is what most people are going to need. I know that from personal experience.
Haha, I got picked up on my English: I wrote my family are OK, praise be to God. This should be accepted. Family is a collective noun and can be singular or plural, like team/ police/ class/ management etc
1371
Yeah. I got caught by this too. I think "family is" is more common in the US, as I get picked up for "family are" whenever I use it in an Arabic exercise. But "family are" is definitely more common in my part of the UK.
How are your family is accepted in one question in this lesson but others insist on 'how is'!
Just happened to me. I suppose I'm gradually learning the weird language, that is strangely like English, that duolingo speaks.
And I said "good". Got rejected. OK sounds to me much to American, and I'm British. They should advertise this as "Arabic for US English speakers", if they were honest.
You'd think so, wouldn't you. Ok dates back to the 19th century and was a comical misspelling of all correct. There's no exact Arabic translation for it and yet the geniuses who programmed the course don't listen to the lowly opinion of a Jordanian native speaker.
My answer got marked down for saying "praise God" rather than "praise be to God". The two of them mean exactly the same in English. This is simply nonsensical.
Duolingo wouldn't accept "my family are fine" instead of "my family is OK". The former is what I would naturally say, in English. I keep on forgetting that duolingo will only accept a strange idiolect of English that it has invented all by itself.
