MasterMelhem Newbie Australia Joined 3993 days ago 20 posts - 21 votes
| Message 1 of 7 25 January 2014 at 12:12pm | IP Logged |
I recently received this book for about $16 on Amazon. This book by Maroun Kassab aims to provide you with
a classification system of most of the verbs in the Lebanese language. Is this book alright to start my studies
with in this language?
I am under a lot of pressure to learn this language due to family reasons. Thanks in advance
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Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6063 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical)
| Message 2 of 7 25 January 2014 at 2:44pm | IP Logged |
Cheers, mate. I guess you're a step ahead on your quest to learn this heritage language of yours. Or not.
I'm usually quite careful, but I'll go out on a limb here and tell you outright that what you're thinking of doing is a bad idea. Not in the sense that you'll learn something wrong, but rather in the sense that you'll be wasting a lot of time: after all, verbs are "just" a piece of grammar and, if I recall your problem, you want to talk to your cousins and such, right? You don't want to go around at a family reunion going "me eat", "me drink", "me study", or whatever.
When I searched for this book you mentioned, I saw this other one called Spoken Lebanese, by Maksoud N. Feghali. It doesn't seem hard (it doesn't even use Arabic script), but it can help you with your predicament. Providing you have the means and the will to buy it, of course. I think this is the kind of approach you should go for, with this or another book.
Caveat: This advice has been tailored to suit your specific situation. It has little or nothing to do with proper language acquisition. If you follow a path of this kind YOU WILL NOT be learning the Arabic language in a correct way.
Good luck to you, anyway.
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MasterMelhem Newbie Australia Joined 3993 days ago 20 posts - 21 votes
| Message 3 of 7 25 January 2014 at 11:39pm | IP Logged |
Thanks Luso for caring about my problem when you can be doing better things. I do have 'Spoken Lebanese'
as well and think it is an excellent book. I will now focus on this book for now.
Once again, I really appreciate your help
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YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4256 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish
| Message 4 of 7 26 January 2014 at 12:08am | IP Logged |
It might not be enough content to justify getting the whole course, but just to make you aware of it, the course Ultimate Arabic: Beginner-Intermediate from Living Language focuses on teaching MSA for the first half, then has a bunch of lessons of various "dialects" for the second half, and it has 5 lessons and 1 audio CD dedicated to Lebanese.
I don't personally study Arabic, so I can't really provide much information about how useful it is.
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MasterMelhem Newbie Australia Joined 3993 days ago 20 posts - 21 votes
| Message 5 of 7 28 January 2014 at 1:29am | IP Logged |
Thank-You YnEoS for your advice. It really means a lot if you don't have much of a clue
about the language. I have used the Spoken Lebanese book to form flash cards on Anki. How
many cards do you recommend me doing a day? What limits should I put?
I have also obtained the movie 'Madame Bambino,' which is a Lebanese movie based on Mrs.
Doubtfire. Would you know if there are any subtitles for this movie? Would you also know
if there are any other movies solely in Lebanese WITH subtitles
Once again, thanks for your help
Edited by MasterMelhem on 28 January 2014 at 6:42am
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KSAKSA Groupie Australia Joined 5147 days ago 65 posts - 99 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Arabic (Gulf)
| Message 6 of 7 31 January 2014 at 11:01am | IP Logged |
Good luck MM, share links if you find subtitled content as it is hard to find in Oz (even though there are loads of Arabs here).
My local library has a tonne of movies, tv shows etc...but no, they aren't all subittled.
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jamesatouri Newbie Australia Joined 3953 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Studies: Arabic (Levantine)*
| Message 7 of 7 03 February 2014 at 6:50pm | IP Logged |
Master,
I got this book as well by the way. Even though I do not advise you to start learning
using this book, it will be a great resource once you get hold of the essentials of the
spoken language. I think Mr. Kassab did a brilliant job, and lately I find myself
coming back to this book again and again. I advise you though to start by learning the
basics, like the sounds of the language as well as how these sounds behave, because the
spoken arabic language is so different from the MSA, and has so much different rules.
Verbs are important, but before you learn the verbs, you should learn how the sentence
is structured.
I myself are learning Spoken Syrian, and almost all the verbs in this book apply to my
situation. I do not know how much they apply to other spoken dialects though.
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