danbri’s foaf stories

The Arabeyes project has a lot of interesting work going on to improve Arabic support in Unix/Linux environments. Their Wordlist project is an attempt to produce a GPL’d English/Arabic dictionary. It seems to be off to a good start as a list of translated words, but I wonder if it could do with more structure, perhaps using something like the Wordnet approach?

Elsewhere in the Web, I found a paper describing a A Prototype English-Arabic Dictionary Based on WordNet (pdf), which might be worth investigating.

Faiza’s Arabic Class. Only a couple lessons so far, but fun and friendly. Nearby: A Family in Baghdad and their Pictures of Baghdad (”before, during and after the war”).

I’ve been looking around for online Arabic tutorials. The best I’ve found so far is a helpful-looking online Arabic tutorial which includes numerous ‘realaudio’ sound clips. This seems much better than learning from CD or MP3, as you have much more control over the audio, and can repeat words and phrases over and again if needed.

The ukindia tutorial concentrates on the alphabet. ‘Let’s learn some arabic‘ has a few basic words and phrases, in a single page.

This is interesting: #arabic, a web site to accompany an IRC chat channel used for learning Arabic. I also found a longish list of links to other online learning resources.

Other sites: introduction to the Arabic alphabet; also another overview using realaudio.

I’ve just installed WordPress a new tool to manage this site, and potentially others (including installations for FOAF and W3C work). While I’m a big fan of Movable Type, I do like the idea of working with opensource software that I can contribute to. From what I’ve seen of WordPress, it has a lot to offer, and should be easy to extend.