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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| souley Senior Member Joined 7241 days ago 178 posts - 177 votes  Speaks: Swedish* Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 1 of 49 31 January 2005 at 3:12pm | IP Logged |
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I have been studying a language for about 6 months now, by myself and quite intensively, off and on.
Any who. I often listen to web-radio broadcastings i my target language, and the thing about it is, I understand the words, most of them, but I cant make out the sentence directly, if you understand. To give you an example, when they speak I catch up the words, then have to make out the sentence, like: He...going....to...the...library. I have 5 words here, then it takes me like 10 seconds to match them together...oooohhhh He is going to the library. So how do I make myself quicker in understanding the sentences when listening to my target language? And another thing that really bothers me is when I learn new words, I dont react when I hear them being said, even though I know them, weird :S. Any feedback thoughts advice etc would be appreciated. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7376 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 49 31 January 2005 at 3:40pm | IP Logged |
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Hello Souley, welcome to the forum.
Understanding orally is important but once you progressed there you should move to other areas of the language such as speaking. This requires a different approach. First I would recommend you get some decent tapes. If you tell us what language you are studying I'm we'll be able to recommend some. Then, you would probably gain by learning by heart a few typical dialogs. Of course you will never be able to learn by heart all the phrases you can possibly want to say. But if you are confident with a limited number of useful phrases, they will get you started. You can then make permutations and build from there. Good work! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| souley Senior Member Joined 7241 days ago 178 posts - 177 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 3 of 49 31 January 2005 at 3:55pm | IP Logged |
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Thank you for your answer. I am learning Fusha, fusha is the cleanest and purest form of Arabic, the language that the Quran is written in. Its not very spoken today, except in some religious parts of Saudi Arabia and Yemen. So all arabic tapes i've found are of dialectial form, unfortunately. But what they speak in Radio broadcasts and so on are actually very close to Fusha (commonly known as Classical Arabic or Standard Arabic), thankfully.
I will hopefully go on to Urdu after this. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7376 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 49 31 January 2005 at 4:04pm | IP Logged |
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Interesting language indeed!
Is it used for conversation anywhere in the world? Is it the Arabic you must know to read newspapers? I imagine if it exists mostly in books, you should go about it like for a dead language. People who study latin or ancient greek speak highly of bilingual books, with the latin text on the left page and a word-by-word commented translation on the right. I recall a famous french anthropologist saying that if you read carefully 100 pages of such a book you can then read on any text in that language. This website need a review of the Arabic language & dialects - your input is welcome. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| souley Senior Member Joined 7241 days ago 178 posts - 177 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 5 of 49 31 January 2005 at 4:42pm | IP Logged |
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Classical Arabic is used for conversation in parts of Yemen and Saudi, mostly around elders, and Islamic scholars. And most Arabic children study it in school, the first couple of years, so most Arabs know some of it, but they speak their new and refined slang version, like all languages.
It is like someone would say to you: "If thou be rich, thee goest to the store." You would most likely understand, but it is so different from the English we speak today. Thats the connection between Arabic Fusha and Modern. And I would very much like to find a bilingual book of which you speak, I have found similar exercises, but they are very short, It would be nice to have an entire book like that. I would love to write a review about Arabic! However I am not very familiar with the dialects just yet, but I can surely write about Arabic as a whole, how difficult it is, what you need to focus on, etc etc. Just let me know which information needs to be included and I would be very happy to do it. I have read that the best way to learn something is to teach someone else what you already know, it sticks better that way, or so i've heard. خير ان شاءالله = Everything will be Good and well God willingly. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| victor Tetraglot Moderator United States Joined 7318 days ago 1098 posts - 1056 votes 6 sounds Speaks: Cantonese*, English, FrenchC1, Mandarin Studies: Spanish Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 49 01 February 2005 at 5:55pm | IP Logged |
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I find myself in a similar situation with French. With broadcasts that talk much slower, you will find that you understand a lot more because you have that split second to think about what was being said.
You just need to find a channel/station/program in which the host speaks at a speed which you think is possible for you to understand. Focus on it and soon enough you will be begin to understand a lot more. Here in Ontario, we have around 5 French TV channels, where TV5, a Europe-based channel talks at a faster speed while the Télévision Franco-ontarienne speaks at a much slower speed in currents events program. I'm interested to know: how did you become interested to learn Arabic? And why the form of Fusha? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| souley Senior Member Joined 7241 days ago 178 posts - 177 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 7 of 49 02 February 2005 at 3:33pm | IP Logged |
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Well actually I am a non-arab Muslim, so thats what drew me to the language at first, to be able to understand the scriptures of the Quran and gain knowledge about my religion.
But when I started I didnt know learning grammar would be so fun (yes, grammar and fun in the same sentence =)), so hopefully I will move on to another language once Ive gained enough knowledge to comprehend and talk arabic. I will definately try to find a slower talking broadcast, however, I dont believe there is any, when it comes to arabic :p Definately fast talkers. But its probably true what you said, that when they talk slow you have that split moment to comprehend what was being said, but to be honest, I think this works to our disadvantage, because then we get used to needing that moment to catch up in our heads what they just said. I listened to a brilliant tape called 'Secrets to Learning a Foreign Language', and in it the author talks about the importance of understanding a language directly, and not needing to make it up in your head. And I definately notice that in my target language there are a few very common words, like 'in' 'he' 'me' etc. And these words I never have to think about, I dont even have to pay attention, I understand these words automatically.So hopefully I will have this quick understanding of more and more words as time goes on, and eventually I wont have to think about the words being said at all. Edited by souley on 02 February 2005 at 3:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7256 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 8 of 49 06 February 2005 at 7:17am | IP Logged |
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For speakers of European languages, Arabic is objectively very difficult to learn, so if after six months of study you are able to get the gist of web broadcasts, albeit with a 10 second time lag, you do not have anything to worry about – on the contrary, you are making excellent progress! All you can do is give it more time and practice. Make recordings of the broadcasts and listen to them several times. Try to get the transcripts as well (easily available from Deutsche Welle). However, if you are studying the language for religious purposes, why not learn straight from the Koran? I do not have the links handy, but I know that there are many sites that have all the Suras available as MP3 type files, both chanted and read, together with transcripts, transliteration, and translation. What better source could there be? If you don’t already have it, the best book for getting straight at what you aspire is probably Wheeler M. Thackston’s Koranic Arabic.
Bilingual books in Arabic are, alas, both rare and hard to come by. I do have two by Al-Ghazali, The Niche of Lights and The Incoherence of the Philosophers. These were the only two volumes of the Islamic Translation Series, published by Brigham Young University Press, that had come out several years ago, though more may have been published since then. I also have a collection of poetry, Love, Death & Exile, by Abdul Wahab Al-Bayati, published by Georgetown University Press. If you can read French, you can also try to find the three volumes in the série bilingue : Arabe des Langues pour tous : Nouvelles arabes du Proche-Orient, Nouvelles arabes du Maghreb, et Les Mille et Une Nuits – trois contes. If you can read German, you can try to find Suleman Taufiqs Im Schatten der Gasse (Edition Orient). I fear, however, that all of these are now out of print. In the past both Amazoncom.fr and Amazoncom.de have listed numerous other bilingual Arabic books, but whenever I tried to order them, they all proved to be unavailable. To my knowledge, “fusha” (“pure,” “high,” “formal,” “elegant,” “rhetorical,” etc.) applies to modern standard literary Arabic just as well as it does to classical Koranic Arabic for they are one and the same language. The most wonderfully beautiful thing about the language is its perfect diachronic continuity: if you can read today’s newspaper, you can read the pre-Islamic poets, and if you can read the pre-Islamic poets, then you can read today’s newspaper and everything in between, allowing for differences in vocabulary, of course. Indeed, the only difference teachers draw between Koranic Arabic on the one hand and Modern Standard on the other is for didactic purposes because the vocabulary needed for the former is so much more circumscribed than that needed for the latter. While the vocabulary of the Koran is, of course, 100% Arabic, that of Modern Standard does contain a very small percentage (perhaps 5% at very most, probably far less) of foreign loan words (mainly Persian, Greek, and contemporary “international”), and this is the only sense in which the former could be considered ‘purer” than the latter. The grammar of the language has never changed at all. Koranic texts are always written with all vowels and diacritical marks, while most other texts are left plain and depend on the reader’s knowledge of the language to supply them. Also, when reading the Koran it is customary to pronounce every single sound clearly, while in reading or speaking Modern Standard certain things (such as the nominative, accusative, and genitive case endings) may be elided (particularly on the adjectives following a noun, where they are more likely to be heard). Apart from this, however, there is absolutely no difference in pronunciation, intonation, or anything else. So, I have never before heard the argument that you seem to be implying, namely that “classical” is “purer” than “modern,” which may in a certain sense even be considered “dialectical.” Is this in fact what you are saying? If so, please say more, for I am intrigued. The dialectical situation of Arabic as I understand it is this. Although there is only one written language, and although the language used for broadcasting and for all formal and official occasions is unified and standardized, and even although the language used in schools for education is everywhere the same, Arabic speakers simply do not speak this language in their everyday lives. Rather, they speak their local, regional, geographic dialectical variation of it with a great sense of pride and self-identity. Every city has its distinctive features, but the dialects are generally placed into four large geographic groupings (for which you can buy separate learning modules if you so desire): Gulf, Levantine, Egyptian, and North African. Gulf, although different from classical/modern standard, is certainly closest to it and thus “purest”; the others reflect not only the normal linguistic changes effected by time and distance, but also the interference and influence of the original indigenous tongues of the regions (Syriac in Levantine, Coptic in Egyptian, and Berber in North African). Egyptian is numerically the largest dialect, and also probably the most widely understood thanks to the diffusion of Egyptian films. I have heard it claimed that the differences between these dialects are as great as the differences between French and Italian or between English and German, but I simply don’t believe this. I think the difference is more along the lines of that between Spanish and Portuguese or between Swedish and Danish, if that. In other words, while it is claimed that there is no way an Iraqi peasant could communicate with a Moroccan peasant, I don’t believe such people ever really get the chance to meet, and if you were to lock the two of them in a room together for a couple of days, they could probably figure out how to communicate with each other. Still, my Lebanese acquaintances all tell me that when they meet someone from, say, Tunisia, they communicate in French or English, although they freely admit that they “should” communicate in formal Arabic. The likening of formal Arabic to a kind of Shakespearian English is an analogy that I myself would have offered until recently, but now I feel that it isn’t really apt. Beyond this, it is sometimes claimed that formal Arabic is “useless” for purposes of daily communication, but this is nonsense. I moved to Lebanon last September for the sole and specific purpose of being able to concentrate on my formal Arabic studies at an advanced level. Until now, I have utterly resisted acquiring any Lebanese dialectical speech patterns, and I will continue to do so until when and if I ever “master” the literary language. In our age of broadcasting, I think it fair to say that 100% of Arabic speakers understand “fusha,” and they have no problem whatsoever with a foreigner speaking it to communicate with them, although they will most likely reply in their local dialect. Arabic dialects, like all dialects, diverge from the standard language both phonetically and lexically, but in my experience, context generally makes clear what is meant, and if it doesn’t, repetition and good-will can solve the matter. Although I have concentrated only on the formal language, I would say that I understand upwards of 80% of what is being said around me in the local dialect, and more if I try. Lebanese has what I call a rule of “initial sound advancement” over standard Arabic, i.e., initial “a” becomes “b,” initial “l” becomes “m,” etc. So, when I ask someone something and he replies “ma barif” instead of “la arif,” it is still perfectly clear that he means “I don’t know.” That’s not terribly hard, is it? It seems to me more along the lines of "Ah dunno" than an incomprehensibly different dialect or language. An intriguing question is, what percentage of Arabs could actually speak the formal language if they wanted to? I ask this question of my students and colleagues all the time. The answer is: all those who received their high-school education in Arabic and who have used it from time to time since then. My informal Lebanese poll suggests that this is about 25% of the population, and I think this may be representative, for although Lebanon has far and away the best educational system in the region, more people are educated via French and English than via Arabic. In other countries, the percentage of educated people who can speak “fusha” is probably higher, but the overall number of educated people is certainly lower. Most of my acquaintances maintain that they cannot speak the formal language at all. I’m not sure that this is true because if they watch television or listen to the radio, they are exposed to it on a daily basis. More likely is the scenario of others who say that they could do so, but it would be awkward and fatiguing if they had to keep it up for any length of time. Only about 1 in 4 say that they could do so if they wished to do so, and these people are generally quite happy to speak it with me. When I ask them why they do not speak it with each other, they simply say that they just don’t. When I ask them if they do not feel that in some sense they “should” do so (for the sake of the purity of the language, for the sake of Arabic unity, etc.), they all ruefully admit that yes they should in fact do so. When I ask them again why they don’t do so, they all say that person addressed would find it strange. When I ask if they have ever tried to do so, the response is always, “no.” When I press the point and insist on knowing what would happen if they did try, the response is invariably that the other person, rather than replying, would say: “Why are you speaking Mexican to me?” Explanation: Mexican dramas and soap-operas are extremely popular throughout the Arab world, and they are dubbed into the formal language while Arabic dramas etc. are produced in the dialect of the country where they are made. So, this is the only time when Arabs hear this speech variant being used in the context of everyday life. As a result, “Mexican” has become a vernacular synonym for “fusha.” Indeed, when I address strangers in the formal language, they usually just deal with the fact that I am obviously a foreigner, but if they do comment on the variety of speech that I use, it is just as common for them to say ‘oh, you speak Mexican,” as it is for them to say, “oh, you speak fusha.” So it turns out that, contrary to what we thought or had any reason to believe, the language that we are really studying is . . . “Mexican”! 8 persons have voted this message useful |
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