While not usually taught in courses, possibly the most underrated skill an ASL student can learn is how to read hand-written Arabic. You will almost certainly be called upon to do this at some point if you aspire to a career in journalism, translation, consulting, Foreign Service, academic research etc.

In fact, this is more important than learning how to write Arabic itself. It is hard to envision many situations where a non-native would be called upon to write a document in Arabic. Whereas I can list dozens of  work scenarios where the skill of being able to read hand-written Arabic would come in handy.

Here is The Bad News:

99.9% of the time,  the documents you will encounter will look nothing like this:

Continue reading “3 tips for learning the important skill of reading hand written Arabic” →