Al Hoang

Yale University has samples of Arabic
and Persian Calligraphy in their Near East Collection. Pictures of
some of those samples are also available online for the curious who
want to see what Arabic Calligraphy looks like. I’ve always found
Arabic Calligraphy very beautiful even though I can’t understand anything
in Arabic at all. If you’re curious go
Check it out
yourself

Thanks to a new blog on Arabic culture called
Politics, Language and Cultures of
the Arab World for pointing out this link.

Been looking around for a good EnglishVietnamese electronic dictionary.
One feature I really want is pronunciation. I have found that the
pronunciation is one of the trickier things to pick up correctly on
one’s own so a dictionary that can speak a new word would be quite valuable.
The current contender I am looking at is the GD-305V
however I think
I’d like to test out a real model to make sure it can actually pronounce
Vietnamese words before I pick this up since the last time I tried a couple
it only pronounced English. After some bugging of the poor shopkeeper
I was informed that the set of electronic dictionaries he had were mainly
aimed at Vietnamese learning English hence no need for the Vietnamese
pronunciations. D’oh.