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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| KSAKSA Groupie Australia Joined 5145 days ago 65 posts - 99 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Arabic (Gulf) | Message 65 of 78 11 November 2011 at 11:06am | IP Logged | ||
Insh'allah you will go one day - Oman is a beautiful country and the people are incredibly friendly. Highly recommend a trip there. 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 66 of 78 14 November 2011 at 5:31am | IP Logged | ||
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Another week has gone by and I must admit I did not get as much Arabic done as I wanted to this week! I did
reach Unit 10 in both Teach Yourself Arabic and Teach Yourself Gulf Arabic but did not get to spend as much time on them as I usually do. Both books addressed the "what do you do" question. ماذه تعمل \ ماذه تاكل \ ماذه تلعب etc... so I am definitely feeling at ease with this. I also played around with the DLI Arabic phone conversations at: http://phone.dliflc.edu/default_arabic.asp It is a lot of fun because you can play around with the different dialects: Egyptian Iraqi or Levantine . I was shocked to find that I could understand Iraqi the best followed far behind by Egyptian. I couldn't understand Levantine at all!! Good thing I'm not planning on going to Syria anytime soon. 4 weeks left to go 4 units left in the TY books - I am determined to get through them!! Edited by liddytime on 14 November 2011 at 5:36am 3 persons have 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 67 of 78 18 November 2011 at 9:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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This week: Poetry in Arabic
In class we attempted to trudge through a poem from من أروع كتبه نزار قباني Nizaar Qabbani Understanding it was difficult enough ( words like destiny, promise and sympathy don't tend to pop up much in daily conversation) . For whatever reason, just READING the darn thing is incredibly difficult; even with the vowel marks added! Clearly I have found something that I need to work on. I think it is mainly that the words are unfamiliar and as someone said on one of these forums " you need to know how to speak Arabic before you can learn how to read it!!" I think I will also try to re-visit the DLI phone conversations again this week. They are a lot of fun even though I don't understand very much! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Emiliana Diglot Groupie Germany Joined 5114 days ago 81 posts - 98 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Arabic (classical) | Message 68 of 78 18 November 2011 at 11:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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I also had Arabic class today and again I learned some VERY helpful stuff. Or stuff that I should have learnt way back in the past. Stuff that is not even covered by my textbook but which was just shortly explained by the teacher. I can't believe it. Maybe you also missed these helpful facts about Arabic so here it goes:
Obviously, there are patterns how some of the Arabic words have been created. As I said these patterns can't be applied to ALL words but to quite a lot of them and knowing the patterns helps a lot with remembering vocab or to understand new vocab in context. As you probably all know already most Arabic words have 3 root consonants. E.g. the word خبز (bread). If you put a م in front of the word you get a place that is somehow related to the "root word": in this case مخبز (bakery). If you take the "root word" again and add an alif after the second consonant you get a person that is related to the root meaning. In this case: خباز (baker). Some other examples: درس/ مدرس/ دراس lesson/school/teacher سمك/سماك &nb sp; fish/fisherman You will find a lot more yourself. There also seem to be some rules that explain some of the broken plurals. I already got crazy by the tons of broken plurals but there seem to be also some kind of patterns that allow you to kind of categorize the nouns in "plural groups" (like verb declension in French- e.g. verbs that end with -er, -ar, -ir etc). Really I dont understand why nobody told me that before. And also I just got a very little insight today in this topic. If somebody of you knows more about this stuff, please let everyone know! My teacher said that these things are explained in the (English) text book al-kitaab. So whoever owns this book should be able to find out more about this. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| napoleon Tetraglot Senior Member India Joined 5016 days ago 543 posts - 874 votes Speaks: Bengali*, English, Hindi, Urdu Studies: French, Arabic (Written) | Message 69 of 78 19 November 2011 at 12:38pm | IP Logged | ||
Thank you for an excellent and most informative post. Although I wasn't aware of the existence of such rules, I had managed to infer something quite similar on my own. For example, jamal means beautiful. Adding an alif in the beginning makes it ajmal meaning most beautiful. Similarly, noor means light whereas anwar means most luminous. Kabir means big while akbar means great and so on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5320 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 70 of 78 19 November 2011 at 5:35pm | IP Logged | ||
Any halfway decent intermediate Arabic textbook explains Arahic word formation in great detail. Since you're in Germany, I'd recommend getting "Lehrbuch des modernen Arabisch" by Krahl, Reuschel, Schulz & Jumaili from your library as a reference grammar. It's really not suitable for self-study, but you might find it useful as a reference grammar. (It's also available in English as "Standard Arabic: An Elementary-Intermediate Course", but there are better Arabic grammars in English.) I also re-uploaded the very simple Arabic-English dictionary that I created from an Open Source POS tagger in March. It's available in two versions: 1. Mobipocket recommended for Windows users and owners of older Smartphones and PDAs 2. StarDict recommended for Smartphone and Android tablet users Windows users should install the Mobipocket Reader and activate the global lookup feature (Tools > Settings > Lookup > Enable Lookup in all Windows applications). You could then use the Mobipocket ebook reader software as a popup dictionary, which will literally work in all Windows apps. And since the dictionary already contains some of the more frequent noun and verb inflections as search entries you would get the entry for kitab/kuttab even if you highlightedكتابه، كتابها، الكتاب، للكتاب، الكتاب instead of كتاب and pressed the lookup shortcut key. 2 persons have 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 71 of 78 19 November 2011 at 8:32pm | IP Logged | ||
This is one of the more frustrating things about Arabic. The easy endings are "aat" for most feminine nouns and "uun" for most masculine human nouns. From here it gets a bit complicated. Plural nouns are "broken" similar to man - men / woman - women in English. Sadly, there are 13 or so patterns which are used to form the plural nouns. There is no sure-fire / reliable way to predict which form the noun will take so it comes down to memorizing the correct plural forms to go along with the singular noun forms. After a while your ear starts to get used to the sounds of the plurals and you can usually figure out something pretty close if you didn't know the proper form. I asked my instructor how kids learn the plurals and she said; the same way we do, by hearing them and memorizing them! 2 persons have 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 72 of 78 29 November 2011 at 12:32am | IP Logged | ||
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So I thought I'd look back and take a look at what I have accomplished in the last 9 or so weeks.
I estimate I have picked up an additional 400 - 500 words of vocabulary putting me up around 1000 words in total. My comprehension has gone from - pretty much nothing (!) to being able to get the main gist of conversations and news stories. I feel much more fluid in conversation although there are still frequent pauses and word-grasping in my speech. My writing has improved considerably as well as my reading. There is no way I would have been able to read Arabic poetry 8 weeks ago! I have learned a ton about the Gulf and, in particular, Oman!! I really hope to go there someday! This tends to be the crazy-busy time for work and as a result, I may need to take a small break from Arabic until things get a little more sane. But I am really looking forward to next semester's language conversation circles and learning more Arabic!! 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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