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| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4889 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 73 of 78 29 November 2011 at 9:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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Bon matins habaabi!
I'm back from my diversion, and ready to tackle French and Arabic again. I don't quite know how I'll mix it up, but it will be some combination of Assimil French, FSI French, and FSI written Arabic. My travelling buddy was Egyptian, and I played some of my Arabic mp3's for him. His take:
The FSI recordings sounded Saudi to him. Arabic Podcast 101 also sounded Saudi. The Saudis have the 'worst' accent (note: Myself, I like the guys' voices on the Podcast!) The Lebanese have the nicest Arabic accent. Maghrebi is difficult for everyone to understand. Eqyptian has a lot of non-Arabic vocabulary He can 'get by' in Turkey by using simplified Arabic I'm also starting to suspect that these Arabic courses make things more difficult than they need to be! Basic, conversational Arabic doesn't seem that hard when he explains it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4889 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 74 of 78 11 December 2011 at 5:31am | IP Logged | ||
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One week on, and I'm throwing in the towel on the FSI course. It's not bad per se, but
there's not enough explanation given to understand the sentences for it to work as a home course. I spent a lot of this past week reviewing my notes, typing up the grammar points from lessons 1-10, and making a new vocab list. I thought I was ready for Lesson 11. And I can't even make out the first four sentences. I know every noun and verb, I can hear the tenses and cases, but I can't make sense of the sentences as a unit. This isn't the first time. I've been stuck a lot in this course, and you lose momentum when you try for days to untangle one or two sentences. I'm sure it would be fine if I had an instructor; I don't think these are hard constructs; they just need more explanation. Take this: كان موظف هنا قبل ساعة The best I can do is: Here was an employee, he returned, hour. And the next sentence is the same, but employee and hour are plurals. I'm moving back to Assimil. And each time I return I appreciate it more and more. The exaggerated accents are still rough, but in its favor:
Edited by kanewai on 11 December 2011 at 5:32am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6229 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 75 of 78 11 December 2011 at 5:36am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm with you. FSI is so sterile. At least Assimil has some personality. I have speeded up some of the dialogues with
Audacity and it makes them a little more tolerable! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4889 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 76 of 78 14 December 2011 at 7:28am | IP Logged | ||
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What Fresh Dialect is This?
I finished Assimil L'Arabe lessons 8-21, and I'm enjoying the pace. It's just fast enough to be challenging, but not so fast that I get overwhelmed. It's a good thing that I know some of the concepts already, because the French explanations are beyond me. They help to remind me of the concepts at hand, but no more. I'll need to use more outside resources pretty soon. The limitations of Assimil are also coming more into focus. The normal L/R and shadowing just don't work. The accents are too exaggerated for good shadowing, and the grammatical structures are too different for parallel reading of the text. The Arabic they use also feels different. In fact, the Arabic in every course I've tried feels a bit different, though I can't put my finger on why. Assimil teaches l'arabe moderne unifié. Anyone know what this correlates too? It seems different than the Modern Written Arabic that FSI teaches, and the Modern Standard Arabic that I tried to learn in school. But perhaps it's the same, and Assimil simply starts with less formal language than the others started with. Here's the dialogue from Lesson 20, for example ... السلام عليك يا زيد! وعليك السلام يا زينب! هل وجع طدقك من العاصمة؟ نعم, وجدا له فها سيارة جديدة *Since that's probably too small to read, here's Assimil's transliteration (I've substituted Arabish text where Assimil uses irritating symbols): As-salàmou 3alayka, yà Zayd! Wa3alayki as-salàmou, yà Zaynab! Hal raja3a 9adìqouka mina al-3a9imàti? Na3am, raja3nà minhà ma3ahou. Houwa wajada lahou fihà sayyàratan jadìdatan. Bonjour Zaid! Bonjour Zaynab! Est-ce que ton ami est revenu de la capitale? Oui, nous en sommes revenus avec lui. Il y a trouvé une nouvelle voiture. Is this MSA? Or a dialect? I am sure that I learned asalaam aleikum in school, for example. Why must every book be different? It almost makes you appreciate the tyrannical standards of the French! * Does anyone know the html codes for making text larger? Edited by kanewai on 14 December 2011 at 8:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| strikingstar Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5173 days ago 292 posts - 444 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Cantonese, Swahili Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written) | Message 77 of 78 14 December 2011 at 8:42am | IP Logged | ||
as-salaamu 3laykum is used for addressing a group with at least 1 male member. as-salaamu 3layka is used for addressing 1 male individual. In this case Zayd. as-salaamu 3layki is used for addressing 1 female individual. In this case Zaynab. Actually, it would be translated as And peace upon you, Zaynab. The "waw" is always attached to the following word as grammatical protocol. Kum, Ka, Ki are pronoun suffixes. They are used for nouns, verbs and prepositions. y - me ka- you (m) ki - you (f) hu - him haa - her naa- us kum - y'all (m) kunna - y'all (f) hum - them (m, plural) hunna - them (f, plural) kumaa - you (dual) humaa - them (dual) For e.g. He visited us = زارنا My car = سيارتي I'm going with him = إذهب معه Note: The word 3la becomes 3lay when a pronoun has been affixed to it. To/Upon me is pronounced 3layya and not 3layyi. Edited by strikingstar on 15 December 2011 at 8:13am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Monox D. I-Fly Senior Member Indonesia monoxdifly.iopc.us Joined 5135 days ago 762 posts - 664 votes Speaks: Indonesian* | Message 78 of 78 12 August 2016 at 5:54pm | IP Logged | ||
The best I can do is: "An employee was here before an hour". Doesn't قبل mean "before"? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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