Combining Arabic with ceramics – a teacher’s story
Learning Arabic can be tough, especially with its tricky alphabet. Reginald Hefner, an Arabic teacher at York College, found a fun way to motivate his students by combining Arabic learning with ceramics and having them create personalized mugs. A hands-on approach that kept students engaged and excited.
SATTS: The Arabic transliteration system used by the military
In the days before the Internet, a decent system for transliterating Arabic was developed using Morse code. In this guest article, Reginald Hefner explains how this system, known as SATTS, works and when it was developed.
Arabic as a springboard to learning Hebrew
How hard is it to learn another Semitic language? If you know Arabic and want to learn Hebrew, you can do it relatively quickly. Our guest writer Reginald Hefner shares his experiences and tricks.
A Fortnight in the Life of a Hyperpolyglot
How do you manage to maintain and speak multiple languages? Reginald (Reggie) Hefner speaks more than ten languages. For Arabic for Nerds, he wrote down his daily language revision routine and shared his routines and tips.
How a US Military Arabic Course went global
In the 20th century, Arabic language material was scarce. During the Vietnam War, Reginald Hefner, had access to a language lab of the US military - and later discovered, how the Military's Arabic material was used by publishers around the world. He shares some reminiscences and anecdotes in this guest article.
Are the Arabic verb forms XI to XV (11-15) really so rare?
There are ten verb forms in Arabic. That is what most people learn - even at universities. But that is not the end of the story, as we will learn in this article.
