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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Jappy58 Bilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member United States Joined 4638 days ago 200 posts - 413 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, Guarani*, Arabic (Levantine), Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (Maghribi), Arabic (Written), French, English, Persian, Quechua, Portuguese Studies: Modern Hebrew | Message 9 of 9 16 September 2012 at 6:26pm | IP Logged |
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This has not happened to me often with Arabic. In most chatrooms or other online mediums, I've seen users employ the Arabic script, and for the most part, this is actually influenced by their dialects. If a Moroccan is one of the members, for example, he'll likely use MSA structure but lace it with Moroccan colloquial words or expressions. The same applies to Egyptians, Omanis, and Syrians. However, many times the users do use their dialect's grammatical peculiarities instead, especially if they feel more comfortable with it. Officially, dialects are rarely written, but in the realms of chatrooms, comics, and jokes, it is fairly common to find them in this form. In chatrooms there is rarely a "watering down" of one's own dialect.
Why does this not prove difficult to me? Well, for the most part, dialects share an enormous amount of vocabulary with each other and with MSA, so even when I was transitioning from MSA to dialect, I could understand a solid amount of the text. Furthermore, most dialects follow the same grammatical patterns and simplifications from MSA, so learning a particular aspect of Egyptian that deviated from MSA would help me with Omani and even Moroccan. Contrast this, however, with the spoken forms of the dialects. While most Arabic dialects are mutually intelligible, it still requires some exposure to be aware of the little differences. When I was beginning Moroccan Arabic, I could understand over 90% of the Moroccan used in chatrooms - even with the particular features of Moroccan grammar, syntax, and loan words. However, if a Moroccan were to speak full speed, I would understand possibly less than 25%, depending on the topic and how intently I listened. It's similar to how I could understand plenty of written Portuguese as a native Spanish speaker, but not nearly as much when it came to spoken Portuguese. In my experience, it is definitely phonology that sets Moroccan and Algerian apart from the Mashriqi dialects - otherwise, they're very similar. When it came to listening to other Mashriqi dialects (after Egyptian), I could understand most of Sudanese, Hijazi, and some Levantine dialects, but there were still some phonological aspects that had to be aware of first. I remember when I first heard Bahraini Arabic. There were some features I was unaware of, but when I saw it transcribed in Arabic script, the initial difficulty evaporated. Despite this, I have had difficulties before, especially since Arabic, as some other languages, is extremely synonym rich, and there are also some obscure loan words that you may not find in any dictionary. Still, seeing Arabic transcribed actually made everything much easier. On the other hand, I find "Arabizi" (Arabic written with Latin characters) irritating. Not only is it not in the Arabic script, but there is no universal way to "write" it. I have not had as much experience with written colloquial Persian, but it did prove difficult the times that I did encounter it on the web. EDIT: In general, learning some colloquial Persian vocabulary has been more difficult than learning some colloquial Arabic vocabulary in chatrooms. It is largely due to the fact that Persian doesn't (or at least didn't when I was studying it) have as much of a presence in some areas as Arabic did or does. Edited by Jappy58 on 16 September 2012 at 6:29pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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