On November 6th we went to this bookstore. It's a small shop with a window. You tell the man what you want, and he gives it to you through the window. Kind of like a walk up bookstore.
The bookstore sells the textbooks used in the Moroccan school system (they are standardized throughout the country). There are probably other books in the bookstore, I just didn't recognize them (because 1. the titles were written in Arabic and 2. I didn't have my contacts in).
I bought some things to help me learn to write in Arabic.
This is a basic Arabic alphabet book. It takes each Arabic character and shows pictures of words that begin with that character. There are dotted examples of the character to trace.
Written Arabic is kind of like cursive English: there are different ways to write each letter depending on what it connects to. For each character I have to learn the beginning, middle, and end character, in addition to the character as it looks when it stands alone. Yikes!
This is the second book I bought.
It is similar to the first one without all of the pictures. Brahim calls it my Grade B book (the first book he calls my Kindergarten book).
I'm hoping to be able to learn the letters well enough that I can start sounding out words by myself. Right now written Arabic only looks like swirls and curlies to me. That can be problematic in a number of situations, trying to decide which bathroom to use among them.
Wish me luck as I try to eradicate my Arabic illiteracy! :)
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