ضع الماء على النار

In short

Why it looks that way

An Arab does not "put the kettle": he puts the water on the fire — literally "put the water on the fire". Daʿ is "put", from the familiar wadaʿa — to put

A word with a story stays in memory longer than one learned as a “spelling — translation” pair: memory holds on to meaning, not to a string.

In a live sentence

A single word almost never appears alone in conversation. A sentence shows where it fits and what stands next to it.

• ضع الماء على النار من فضلك

  даʿ аль-мааʾ ʿаля ан-наар мин фадлик

  Put the kettle on, please

How not to forget this word

Reading a word and remembering it are different jobs. A day later, little survives of a single reading — and that is not bad memory, that is how memory works.

• This has been tested on foreign words too. The difference shows up most when you test yourself a few days later rather than straight away.checked many times
  Kim & Webb, 2022, Language Learning 72(2) · 48 experiments, 3,411 participants, 98 comparisons.
• Recalling beats re-reading. Covering the translation and trying to remember it does more than reading it ten more times.checked many times
  Adesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · 188 experiments, 272 comparisons. g = 0.61; against plain re-reading 0.51, against passive review 0.93.
• An answer you worked out yourself sticks better than one handed to you.checked many times
  Bertsch et al., 2007, Memory & Cognition 35(2) · 86 studies, 445 comparisons, d = 0.40.

Next

• محلة — quarter (of a city)read “махалля”
• حديقة صغيرة — small parkread “хадиикат сагиира”
• برج — towerread “бурдж”
• الضاحية — suburbread “ад-даахийа”
• All Arabic wordsIndex by topic
• Why a word list doesn't sticka note