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Arabic and missing short vowels

 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages Post Reply
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stelingo
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United Kingdom
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 Message 9 of 18
14 December 2011 at 1:30am | IP Logged 
Renaçido wrote:
SRC wrote:
Can this **possibly** be true??

If written Arabic allows ambiguity between grammatical functions as different as regular past tense, passive tense, and nouns, then how incredibly long does it take to build up even the most rudimentary reading skills?
I'm not sure why you feel so troubled about ambiguity in the writing system, especially as a speaker of English.

Some points that are worth making about this:


All valid points Renaçido, except you seem to have overlooked the fact that SRC isn't a native speaker of Arabic wishing to become literate in the language. It's quite understandable that someone might feel daunted by a new alphabet in which short vowels are generally omitted. The inconsistencies of  English spelling for a native English speaker are not comparable in difficulty with those for a student about to embark on learning Arabic.
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SRC
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United States
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 Message 10 of 18
14 December 2011 at 8:19pm | IP Logged 
stelingo wrote:
Renaçido wrote:
SRC wrote:
Can this **possibly** be true??

If written Arabic allows ambiguity between grammatical functions as different as regular past tense, passive tense, and nouns, then how incredibly long does it take to build up even the most rudimentary reading skills?
I'm not sure why you feel so troubled about ambiguity in the writing system, especially as a speaker of English.

Some points that are worth making about this:


All valid points Renaçido, except you seem to have overlooked the fact that SRC isn't a native speaker of Arabic wishing to become literate in the language. It's quite understandable that someone might feel daunted by a new alphabet in which short vowels are generally omitted. The inconsistencies of  English spelling for a native English speaker are not comparable in difficulty with those for a student about to embark on learning Arabic.


That's largely what I'm saying - even though English spelling is rife with inconsistencies, at least there's something there to jog your memory. But, if I'm understanding this, in Arabic you'll be relying on other words in the sentence to provide context as to the word's function, and knowing the function helps you further decode how the word would be pronounced. This linkage of function and pronunciation is rather rare in English, with a handful of exceptions such as "wait a minute, there's a minute amount left over," as an earlier poster pointed out
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Voodie
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Russian Federation
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 Message 11 of 18
15 December 2011 at 12:23am | IP Logged 
As someone has already mentioned, the ability to read Arabic depends greatly on how well you know the grammar. After 2,5 years of studying Arabic I can read newspaper articles and understand up to 90% of the words if the topic is familiar to me. Even if I don't know the word I often pronounce it correctly just because I know the grammar.

Although sometimes it's tricky. For example, the 1st, the 2nd and the 4th forms of most verbs look the same in Present/Future. And even though it's clear that y-Q-B-L is a verb, it can still mean "he meets", "he kisses" and "he approaches" and sound differently.

There is one more problem which seems much more complicated to me at this stage, and this is the syntax. If I understand 9 words out of 10 in an English or a German text, I will either grasp the general meaning of the sentence or even guess the word relying on the context. But with Arabic I can understand all the words but one, but without it the sentence is just falling apart, cause it governs several other words, each of which has several meanings and so on...
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Fortwenster
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United States
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Speaks: English*, FrenchC1
Studies: Arabic (Written)

 
 Message 12 of 18
17 December 2011 at 5:54pm | IP Logged 
Yes, I;m worried about that too. Plus, broken plurals, the verb forms, etc. seem like they'll be daunting.
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SmilingStraw
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United States
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Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Arabic (Written)

 
 Message 13 of 18
19 December 2011 at 10:33pm | IP Logged 
Broken plurals seem like a pain, but so far I've only used basic materials, so I ahaven't encountered too many problems.
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Voodie
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Russian Federation
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Studies: Arabic (Written), Greek

 
 Message 14 of 18
20 December 2011 at 2:35pm | IP Logged 
Plurals look scary, but in fact, it's not a big deal. Of course you have to learn them in the beginning, but soon you start finding parallels between the form (and the meaning as well!) in the singular and in the plural. For example:
kabiir - kibaar (big)
Saghiir - Sighaar (small)

I don't know the rule, but I assume that adjectives of this type (CaCiiC) denoting physical characteristics have a (CiCaaC)-type plural. Other examples (qaSiir - qiSaar (short); Tawiil - Tiwaal (long)) only prove this.

But when the adjectives of this type refer to a mental characteristic or a person, they usually have either СuCaCaa' or aCiCCa' plural. For instance:
khabiir - khubaraa' (specialist)
Tabiib - aTibba' (doctor)

To be honest, I doubt that a non-Arab can develop this kind of intuition to immediately guess the correct form of any new word. But when you get used to it, you usually can shorten the list of possible plurals to 1-3, depending on the word. A native speaker will probably correct you, but you will be understood, anyway.

Edited by Voodie on 20 December 2011 at 2:43pm

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Renaçido
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Canada
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 Message 15 of 18
25 December 2011 at 3:12am | IP Logged 
stelingo wrote:
All valid points Renaçido, except you seem to have overlooked the fact that SRC isn't a native speaker of Arabic wishing to become literate in the language. It's quite understandable that someone might feel daunted by a new alphabet in which short vowels are generally omitted. The inconsistencies of  English spelling for a native English speaker are not comparable in difficulty with those for a student about to embark on learning Arabic.
Well, I think it's quite daunting to study ANY language with a non-transparent orthography (even if it's the same alphabet you're used to using), I take that as a given. However, when SRC said "Can this **possibly** be true??", I felt compelled to explain how such a language could handle this. And of course, most written Arabic is handled by native Arabic speakers.

As for the questions he asked later ("how incredibly long does it take to build up even the most rudimentary reading skills?" "[D]oes the student still struggle with reading a restaurant menu after 4 years of college-level study (assuming the menu is in MSA)?"), I think it varies a lot from the specific circumstances of each student. (Plus I don't think college-level study is that great anyway, following my own experience with college Spanish students (which accounted their different learning paths).) I don't think I could reply this well, but if you wanted to learn to read restaurant menus in Arabic in particular, you would do well learning a lot culinary vocabulary.

(I still have problems reading English-language menus after 10+ years studying it, but that's mostly a cultural thing I think. In fact, I'm going to some Thai restaurant in about an hour and a half from writing this post. I'm looking at the menu which I have right next to the laptop, and I've no idea what this "Cashew Nut" thing.)

Anyhow, how students cope with unknown words in an Arabic text is pretty similar to how natives do it in rough terms.
SRC wrote:
That's largely what I'm saying - even though English spelling is rife with inconsistencies, at least there's something there to jog your memory. But, if I'm understanding this, in Arabic you'll be relying on other words in the sentence to provide context as to the word's function, and knowing the function helps you further decode how the word would be pronounced.
Well, yup. It's probably less difficult than you think, and... you just have to deal with it if you want to learn Arabic. I don't like sounding mean, but... the language isn't going to change its writing system for you because you as a student consider it too hard to use, so you just learn... Same goes with the issues of conjugating verbs, forming plurals, curious syntactical constructions (Arabic lit. "he did X and he doing Y" = English "he did X WHILE he was doing Y")...
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Camundonguinho
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Brazil
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 Message 16 of 18
25 December 2011 at 7:23pm | IP Logged 
Ths s wrd. W cld wrt Nglsh n ths wy.

This is weird. We could write English in this way.
But, you have to master spoken English 1st in order to write it like this.

Edited by Camundonguinho on 25 December 2011 at 7:24pm



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