Teaching Word Roots and the Broken Plural -- Dr. Antar Solhy Abdallah, PhD.
Most learners of Arabic experience difficulties with the broken plural. Some even ironically ask "when will you fix it?!". These students do not have difficulty in forming the sound male or female plural, simply because the suffixes added to the end of the singular forms are quite straightforward. With the broken plural, the real problem arises as there is no fixed suffix to be added or even a general rule to refer to when trying to form the plural of most Arabic words. The broken plural may cover more than 50% of the plurals in Modern Standard Arabic and dialects, Sound Masculine Plurals and Sound Feminine Plurals are the other 50%. In fact even native speakers of Arabic are sometimes not sure about some words in the plural and have to resort to a dictionary where the given plural might not be met with much affinity. In this article we will look at some strategies that can help in teaching the broken plural.
The complete article is a downloadable document in Word format and PDF format.
