FAQs

Why have no lessons been released for over a year and why have there been so many delays in releasing content?

MadinahArabic.com was set up as a voluntary project. In the earlier phases we never quite realised how successful this project would be. By the grace of Allaah (God) it has been hugely popular and we decided that we need to do a number of things:

• Develop a system that would allow us to convert lessons more quickly into webpages. To give you a small idea, to create a single lesson we need to:
  • Create the structure of the lesson based on the topic we are seeking to cover.
  • Create the Arabic sentences / examples and grammatical terms to be used throughout the lesson.
  • Create the English explanation of every grammatical term and rule being covered and translation of all the Arabic examples being covered.
  • Create the hyperlinks for lesson parts and add find suitable images for examples – often upto 50 images per lesson.
  • Record the sounds for all the lessons and attach these sounds to the correct example / sentences.
  As you can see from the points above, this has been a huge effort. We decided that over the past 2 years we would first develop a system that would allow us to automate many of the steps above using a specially developed technique. We were also blessed in the last year as we had new members joining our team who were linguistically excellent in Arabic and English as well as a technical expert who allowed us to improve our methods.
  
• To summarise, we now have approximately 50 more lessons that we have completed and are in the process of editing, we have an estimated 20 to 30 more lessons that we aim to complete in the next 6 months. Our target is to release at least one lesson a week In-Shaa’-Allaah (God-Willing) although we will attempt to do more than this.
• Whilst it often seems that we are not doing anything to update the site, please rest assured that we are doing a lot. We often don’t answer queries because we are trying to focus on delivering something for the users of the site. We are confident that you will start seeing the fruits of these efforts in the coming months In-Shaa’-Allaah (God-Willing). In fact, you may already have noticed these efforts in the new release which has included 4 new lessons (not many but we have more to come In-Shaa’-Allaah (God-Willing). We have also developed a vocabulary application, questions application, enhanced in-lesson question types (keyboard question type, multiple choice question type, choose question type etc).

Are the lessons available in printable format?

Yes, if you click on the Printable E-book button on the menu bar , this will take you to a page where you can download PDF files of individual lessons or all the lessons on the website as a single PDF. All you need is Adobe Reader which is a free software to read PDF documents.

Can I download the website?

Yes, we have made the website available as a download. To do this, please click on the Downloadable Website link. You have the option of downloading the website with or without the sounds. The reason for this is that the website including the sounds is very large and takes a while to download so some users may prefer to download the website without the sounds as they are not expecting to listen to the sounds. We have also introduced the ability to download the files using a torrent client for faster downloading. This will become faster as more and more users download the torrent.