This Al Jazeera news clip, from a month ago, has the headline:
الجيش التركي يعلن إنه بدأ عملية عسكرية برية في شمالي العراق

There are some key words here to help understand the news clip, including:

With these words, the headline translates as “Turkey announces the army is beginning military ground operations in northern Iraq”

Nisba nouns are “relative adjectives” that are modified from nouns, for example from a place name to describe a person from the place. These adjectives often indicate affiliation, origin, or other relation to the noun (e.g., a place).

فرنسا (faranca) or France -> فرنسي (francee) or French.

لبنان (lubnan) - Lebanon -> لتناني (lubnani) - Lebanese

كندا (kanada) - Canada -> كندي (kanadi) - Canadian

Nisba can also be used to form nouns, such as professions, and other words such as مدني (medani) - civilian, which is modified from مدينة - medina or “city”.

A nisba is usually formed by adding a ي to the end of a noun. If a noun ends in a ta’ marbuta (ة) or alif (ا), it is usually dropped and the ي added. As with other adjectives, nisba adjectives need to agree with nouns they modified. For nisbas that go with feminine nouns, the nisba needs to be in the feminine form, by adding the ta’ marbuta.

For example, وزارة الخارجية (wizara al-kharijia) - foreign ministry

وزارة الداخلية (wizara al-dakhalia) - interior ministry

Other nisba examples include:

The word for “get, attain, occur” is حَصَلَ (hasala).

Examples of how this word can be used:

* I received a degree from Harvard University in 2004. - حصلتُ شهادة من جامعة هارفارد في سنة 2004

* He got the most number of votes in the election. - حصل معظم الاصوات الانتخابات

Conjugated in the perfect (”past”) tense:

This video is of an Al Jazeera program, nearly an hour-long, where they interview Syrian Prosecutor-General Ghada Murad. She was the first woman to enter the judiciary in Syria and is now in the position, equivalent of “Attorney General” in Syria. She is involved in “investigating” the killing of former Lebanese premier Rafik Harari and is expected to cooperate with the United Nations on their investigation.

I was able to pick out numerous words in the program that I understand and get the gist of it. Some key words here include:

محام (muhaamin) - lawyer

ولدت (waladat) - she was born

نساء (nisaa’) - woman (singular)

رجل (rajul) - man (singular); رجال (rijal) - men (plural)

مدرسة (madrassa) - school

جامعة (jami’ya) - university

كلية (kulia) - college

الجقوق (al haquq) - law

This video has a lot of good content to work with, so I will likely come back to it again later. It helps just to listen to it and see what you can understand and figure out from the context.

As in English, questions in Arabic are indicated with use of rising intonation.  Here are some question words in Arabic:

مَل (hal) - do (as in “do you?” or “is it?”), used for yes/no questions

ما؟ (maa) - what?

ماذاذ؟ (matha) - what? (used with verbs, such as “what are you doing?”)

مِن؟ (min) - who?

أينَ؟ (ayna) - where?

كَيفَ؟ (kayfa) - how?

متى (meta) - when?

لماذا؟ (limatha) - why?

كم؟ (kam) - How many?

Examples

مِن هُوَ؟ - Who is he?

مِن أينَ أنتَ؟ - Where are you from?

كَيفَ حالك؟ - How are you?

كَيفَ الحال؟ - How are things?

ما هذا؟ - What is that?

مل يوحد؟ - Is there …? or “are there …?”

Here are some words to help understand this news clip, which is about banks and money in the Gulf area:

To become proficient for reading newspapers and magazines, one needs to learn 3000-4000 words, and more for reading fiction or general conversation. (source: The Art and Science of Learning Languages - by Amorey Gethin) Many of the key words to learn are verbs, which are used repeatedly. In the last post, verbs were introduced along with the concept of conjugating them. It would help to learn one (or more) new verbs each day.

I already know some verbs, including these below, and will be posting new verbs regularly.

As is customary in Arabic, these verbs are given in the 3rd person, masculine past tense, which is how the verbs are listed in the dictionary.

Most verbs in Arabic are built around a trilateral root, consisting of three consonants. For example, the word دَخَلَ (dakhala) which means “to enter”. The root of the word is د + خ + ل . The consonants will remain the same, no matter what tense the verb is in. As in Spanish, verbs in Arabic are conjugated (change form, depending on pronoun). In the “present” tense, it works like this, with use of a prefix (ت - “ta” , ي - ya, or ن - na) along with modifying the vowel pattern. The root consonants remain the same. The following example is in the “past” or perfect tense, with a suffix attached to the root.
He entered - دَخَلَ (dakhala)
She entered - دَخَلَتْ (dakhalat)
You (m. sing.) entered - دَخَلَتَ (dakhalata)
You (f. sing.) entered - دَخَلَتِ (dakhalati)
I entered - دَخَلَتُ (dakhalatu)
They (dual m. - 3rd person) - دَخَلا (dakhala)
They (dual f. - 3rd person) - دَخَلَتَا (dakhalata)
You (dual 2nd person) entered - دَخَلْتُمَا (dakhaltuma)
They (m. pl) entered - دَخَلُوا (dakhalua)
They (f. pl) entered - دَخَلْنَ (dakhalna)
You (m. pl) entered - دَخَلْتُمْ (dakhaltum)
You (f. pl) entered - دَخَلْتُنَّ (dakhaltunna)
We entered - دَخَلْنَا (dakhalna)

Arabic does not have an exact equivalent of the “present” and “past” tense, as used in English. Instead, it has the “perfect” and “imperfect” tenses. Perfect tense is used to describe actions that have been completed, such as “he ate” but not “he was eating” which is imperfect (incomplete action in the past or present). The above example is the perfect tense, describing completed actions in the past. The above is also in the “active” voice (”he entered”), rather than “passive” which would be “he had entered”.

When looking up words in the dictionary, verbs are given in the male singular third person (”He”), in the perfect tense. For example, you would find “to enter” listed as دَخَلَ (dakhala).

مقتل 100 شخص في تحطم طائرة ركاب تايلاندي
This Al Jazeera news clip is from September 2007, about a plane crash in Phuket in Thailand.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20800512/
مقتل (maqtal) - murder, death
شخص (shakhs) - person
حطم (hattama) - to wreck, smash, shatter, demolish
ركب (rakiba) - to ride, travel
طائرة (ta’ira) - airplane

تفاقم الازمة الدبلوماسية بين لندن وموسكو - BBC News (January 2, 2008)
The rest of the first paragraph is:
ازدادت شدة التوتر في العلاقة الدبلوماسية بين موسكو ولندن عندما قام الروس بتحرك قضائي اضطر المجلس الثقافي البريطاني إلى اغلاق احد مكاتبه في سان بطرسبرج، ثاني المدن الروسية الكبرى.
تحرك - move, instigate, set in motion, rouse, …
قضائي (qada’i) - judicial, judiciary
اضطر - to force
مجلس - commission, council, board, court
ثقافى (thaqafi) - cultural, educational
أغلاق (i’ghlaq) - closing, shutting, locking, barring …
مكاتبه (makatiba) - office
ثاني (thani) - second
مدن (mudun) - cities (pl)
كبرى (kubra) - largest, greatest
Altogether, it translates as: “Tensions have intensified in the relations between Moscow and London, as the Russian judiciary moved to force the British cultural council to shut down its office in St. Petersburg, the second largest city in Russia.”