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Ivo wrote:

السلام عليكم, great lesson once again!
I have a question; my native language is dutch and I have great difficulty pronouncing ق, I know how it should sound but I just can't do it. الَقدم when I say it sounds more like ك or كغ.
Any tips how to practice this?

شكرا

Salam Lvo;

Welcome in Arabicpod and thanks for the question.
You are not the only one who pronounce it like this, try to stop the air in the bottom of the throat, a little bit before the 'k'.
By the way,, your question came in the right time,, because these days, we are working on a software called A.p.g. that helps in pronouncing the Arabic letters with illustrations,, keep your clicks on the website and very soon you'll find the software published for everyone.

Salamat
Ehab

thanx for the awesome lessons guyz :D ehab and mohammed; you guyz r so funny lol :D it makes the lessons really worth listening too! funny and informative :D thanxxxxxx and ur guest always rocks too :D luv what u guyz r doing here honestly thanx :D i mean shokran :D
ma3salama
Zahra

Just some "brain sports" for me tonight, guys Why there is no article in كرة سلة versus inكرة القدم?

7'alaa9, inshallah we will do one soon

That's a very good question, na7la. If you look at the first sentence in the podcast about chess you'll notice another interesting phenomenon. There's an article before the word for "chess", but there's no article before the words for "football" and "basketball". One would expect the words for "chess", "football" and "basketball" to be treated the same way since they are all governed by the same verb ("play"). The rules for the use of the article seem to be extremely complicated.

Hi from New Zealand. I started using your website earlier this year. It is wonderful - thanks so much for doing this!

I have 2 questions re this lesson:

1 - ع is a consonant, isn't it? But I don't hear any consonant in تلعب, where the ع is. Is the sound here any differen from a vowel sound?

2) كرة سلة and كرة القدم
In both phrases I heard a "t" sound after ة . Is that because they're possessive phrases and كرة ends with ة

Hi Fiona, glad to know you are enjoying Arabicpod.
To go through your questions:
1- True, ع is a consonant. You probably should listen to ع and compare it to letter أ. Best is to go to our Activities page, currently there are 18 activities under ArabicPod tab, one of them is Arabic Pronunciation Guide APG, click on the letters there and listen to them carefully to recognise the different. When your ear gets used to the difference between those letters it will be easier for you to distinguish letter ع in تلعب.
2- Yes, when a word ends with the taa marbootah (ة) and is linked to another word you pronounce the (ة) as (t). When you don't link it (i.e you stop) then it is pronounced as (h). So you would say (Kurat qadam) and (Kurah). Hope that is clear enough.