|
 |
Team L live from Cairo! (T-TAC-10 ) | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Woodpecker Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5815 days ago 351 posts - 590 votes  Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian) Studies: Arabic (classical) | Message 1 of 16 10 May 2009 at 4:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
This is an old log that I didn't use much. I have converted it into a TAC log for 2010. See page two for the start of the TAC. Edited by Woodpecker on 09 January 2010 at 1:00pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Woodpecker Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5815 days ago 351 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian) Studies: Arabic (classical) | Message 2 of 16 04 October 2009 at 6:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Haha, I totally haven't posted here in three months. However, I'm feeling the need to keep a log of my study progress, and this seems like as good a place as any to do so. I make no promise that I won't forget and disappear for another three, though.
I am in Egypt now, and I have been for a month. My summer studies were somewhat less comprehensive than I wold have hoped, but I still got enough ECA in me that I'm comfortable getting around Cairo on my own and buying stuff, which was the main goal. I never really started work on my MSA resources, something I'm now regretting and making up for. My first month here has been thoroughly unsatisfactory. I arrived in the middle of Ramadan and spent the first two weeks in a haze of culture shock, intestinal distress, and hunger. I finally recovered enough to enjoy 3eid al-fitr, only to discover the next day that my "permanent" host family couldn't continue to host me because the father had to go work in Saudi Arabia for three months. So I found myself moved across Cairo to stay with a family that had kindly agreed to board and feed me until my sponsoring disOrganization finds me a permanent placement. Supposedly, they should have one for me by the end of this week. Anyway, the point of all this whining is that, even though I've been here a month, my Arabic has not gotten very far yet. I started classes at the end of Ramadan, and I have them three times a week for three hours. They are also quite frustrating. By sheer luck, I'm the only student in my class. However, so far, my teacher has insisted on going over the alphabet (which I knew pretty well in June) very, very, very slowly. I will admit, this has dramatically improved my pronunciation. Other than that, most of the learning methodology being applied seems to consist of memorizing random bits of MSA vocabulary, such as: elephant - فيل police office - ضابط and molar - (hell if I know) However, the class situation also looks to improve soon. As soon as we finish our first, horribly dull level (which we should do some time this week), my teacher has agreed to switch almost entirely over to teaching conversational ECA. I'm very happy about this. I have plenty of resources for self-study of MSA, and I've been using them heavily. In contrast, finding anything really useful, or even usable, for ECA has proven to be a huge hassle. I have finally collected some stuff, and hopefully I'll find the time to look through it and formulate a plan soon. As things currently stand: I'm shadowing my way through the Linguaphone complete course. I think it's going well. Each lesson is split into three sections, and I'm adding one per day, and shadowing it according to the plan below. Lesson and section numbers are for example purposes, obviously. L3D1: Reading aloud x2 L3D2: Shadowing with native text x2 L3D3: Thumbs Arabic x2 L4D1: Thumbs English x2 L4D2: Shadowing with English text x2 L4D3: Close listening x2 and blind shadowing x4 Carry out whole process twice a day Once a day, I am also doing: L2D1, L2D2, L2D3: Grammatical study for thirty minutes L1D3 scriptorium x 2 L1D2 scriptorium x1 L1D1 close listening x1 and reading aloud x1 Since I don't actually own the Linguaphone textbook with the Arabic in it, only the transliteration book, I also have to make my own parallel texts, which takes 30 to 45 minutes a day. All in all, I'm spending about three hours a day on Linguaphone and like I said, I think it's helping. Right now, most of my other time is taken up either by class and the 90 minute commute there and back (which, insha'allah, will end this week) and by absolutely insane amounts of Anki in an effort to learn the random mass of MSA vocab from class. I plan to set up a more serious daily regimen once I get the rest of my life here in order. Edited by Woodpecker on 09 January 2010 at 12:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Paskwc Pentaglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5681 days ago 450 posts - 624 votes Speaks: Hindi, Urdu*, Arabic (Levantine), French, English Studies: Persian, Spanish | Message 3 of 16 04 October 2009 at 7:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Congratulations on being accepted to Yale.
Anyways, I wouldn't be too frustrated if your progress is slow at first; Arabic can be daunting even for those who speak languages closely related to it. By the way, how long is your program? Best of luck. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7380 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 16 04 October 2009 at 7:28pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Sam, this sounds quite fascinating, studying Arabic in Egyptian on an NSA grant!
If you could send us a couple snapshots of your daily life as a student in Egypt I'd be very interested and I think it could inspire quite a few learners to go after the more exotic and difficult languages! If you have a digital camera and are willing to go, we could do something like Keith's account of studying in China, in a forum room for instance. I'll gladly throw in a free upgrade to PRO if we can do it! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Woodpecker Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5815 days ago 351 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian) Studies: Arabic (classical) | Message 5 of 16 04 October 2009 at 9:02pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Thank you, Paskwc. Actually, today, for the first time, I realized how difficult most people find Arabic. I was talking to my teacher about what my ECA classes will involve, and I mentioned that I was really frustrated that I had trouble communicating in sit-down restaurants. He said, "You are frustrated because you've been here a month and you can't talk to waiters?" Then he laughed at me and said, "Slowly, slowly. Arabic take time." A little discouraging (I can't imagine it will actually take me all that long to learn how to cope in restaurants once I finally get to ECA), but it did help me to understand why we are going relatively slowly. Arabic has a lot of hurdles to get over at the start.
My program runs until the end of next June. And by the way, that's an impressive and fascinating list of languages you've got there yourself. As a native Urdu speaker, did you find Persian as closely related as it's rumored to be? And what about the overlap in vocabulary between Arabic and Persian? Did you find it as helpful and extensive as claimed? Thank you for reading! Mr. Administrator, I'd be happy to do something like that for nothing, so if you throw in a PRO membership, I have no choice. Plus, my mother has been bugging me for more pictures anyway. I've browsed through the China example, and I'll go over it more closely tomorrow. Can you give me a few more detail of what you'd like to see? I must admit, I certainly can't claim to be a success story yet. However, I hope to get there, and my program is rather fascinating. Not quite run by the NSA (as far as I know), but it is definitely an innovative bit of foreign policy. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7380 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 16 04 October 2009 at 9:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Cool! What we need are a kind of hour by hour photo account of your day as a student of Arabic in Egypt. The accommodation (as good or as spartan as it is!), what you eat in the morning, the street, the transport to the school, the language school building, the class, the other students, the teachers, the books, what you eat for lunch, the activities or any other cool or memorable thing you have seen (see Keith's account of his study in China as an example). Just email me the high-res pictures with some comments and I'll find a way to publish them in a nice way. This ought to be really inspiring for us language learners who spend our learning at home with books and tapes! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Paskwc Pentaglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5681 days ago 450 posts - 624 votes Speaks: Hindi, Urdu*, Arabic (Levantine), French, English Studies: Persian, Spanish | Message 7 of 16 04 October 2009 at 10:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
While I can't speak for the quality of your program, I wouldn't be surprised if you finish with an upper immediate level =).
Thanks. I'm not sure how to answer your question. The languages are without doubt closely related and in some ways intelligible. However, at the same time it's important to keep in mind that the evolution of modern Urdu has been non-linear and draws upon many sources (English, Arabic, Persian, Prakrit, etc.). So yes, in short, Persian and Urdu are closely related but not to such a degree that discounts the influence of other languages.
Once again, the answer is complicated. As I understand it, modern Arabic and modern Persian seemed to be have been closest prior to the emergence of the Ottoman Empire. Under the Ottomans the use of Arabic as a central administrative language was abandoned in favour of Turkish, thus giving way for the rise of various Arabic dialects. That said, it becomes difficult to compare Persian and Arabic vocabularies. While there are undoubtedly strong links between almost all the dialects of Arabic and Persian, some links are stronger than others. For example, Iraqi Arabic is a lot closer to Persian than Moroccan Arabic. In your particular case, claims of extensive bonds between Arabic and Persian do not apply very well to Egyptian Arabic. Furthermore, as Egyptian Arabic is the leading form of Arabic, it's likely that Arabic will continue to evolve away from Persian. I hope this makes sense =). Edited by Paskwc on 04 October 2009 at 11:16pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Iolanthe Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5645 days ago 410 posts - 482 votes Speaks: English*, DutchC1 Studies: Turkish, French | Message 8 of 16 04 October 2009 at 10:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
What a great opportunity! I'll be following your log and I'm hoping you do the picture blog thing because I think it will be really interesting to see. What's your experience of living in a host (or two as it's turned out) family's house in terms of communication? I presume they don't speak English.
1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
