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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 7125 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes  Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 1 of 6 14 September 2010 at 9:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've been interested in learning Arabic for ages, and have made numerous aborted
attempts at self-study which have left me with the ability to read the alphabet and... well, not much else, really. Now is my chance, though. I'm moving to Palestine in a week and I'm promising myself that I WILL learn Arabic if it kills me. I don't want to go into it already feeling discouraged, though, and that's pretty much where I am now. Obviously I plan to focus on Palestinian/Levantine Arabic, which brings me to the first of my concerns. I've spent hours looking up the differences between Levantine Arabic and MSA (or other spoken dialects) and can't find much of substance at all. I gather that spoken dialects are generally simpler in grammatical terms, but how different are they, really? What percentage of vocabulary is shared (I'm specifically interested in Levantine Arabic, but anything you can tell me would be great). Am I wasting my time if I intensively self-study an MSA course for the next week before I leave? ...which segues into my second question. I'm a really visual learner when it comes to languages, and it helps enormously to be able to see how something is written, even if it doesn't match up 100% with pronunciation. Pimsleur's Eastern Arabic is the only Levantine course I can find. I like Pimsleur as a backup, but it lacks that (for me) crucial visual element. Anything else you can recommend? Maybe there are Pimsleur transcripts available online somewhere? I think my ideal learning method would be a 10000-sentences approach. Do any of you know somewhere online where I could find good resource for this, ideally with audio and English translations (I don't quite dare to hope for grammar explanations as well)? Children's stories would work, or something along those lines. Finally, I think I just need someone to tell me that Arabic IS learnable and I'll get over the initial hump which is making this all seem ridiculously daunting in a way that no other language I've ever tackled has been. Please...? Thanks in advance! Sierra Edit: Oh, and something else. Unrelated, but no reason to make a whole post for it. I was just watching Paradise Now and caught two words I recognized from Turkish (with help of the subtitles). Am I right in thinking that "hayvan" (animal) and "karar" (karar vermek in Turkish) "to make a decision" are the same in Arabic? This is the one bright spot of hope in my Arabic study- I think I may be getting a lot of freebies from my imperfect but more or less functional Turkish. Edited by Sierra on 14 September 2010 at 9:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ANK47 Triglot Senior Member United States thearabicstudent.blo Joined 7098 days ago 188 posts - 259 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (classical) | Message 2 of 6 14 September 2010 at 10:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Arabic is learnable and you'll get over the initial hump.
As far as resources are concerned, the way I learned Levantine dialect was to first spend 1.5 years learning MSA and then watch a lot of Lebanese and Syrian TV shows. For someone starting out with zero knowledge of Arabic you can't really take that approach unless you want to spend many years before you can understand the language. On my blog I have Levantine Arabic lessons, but they are really geared toward someone who learned MSA and then wants to continue on and learn Levantine. GLOSS now has Levantine lessons as well. I'd start with the level 1 lessons. I just went there to sample one of them and it was basic stuff like giving directions. It doesn't spell everything out for you though so you'll have to be content with not knowing every single word and grammar structure at first. Doing as many of those those lessons as you can before you go to Palestine would definitely not be a waste of time. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5321 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 3 of 6 14 September 2010 at 10:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
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There are a couple of threads about colloquial Arabic in general and Levantine in particular:
Colloquial Arabic Levantine Arabic resources Spoken Levantine Arabic
There's at least one other audio course that teaches mainly Jordanian Arabic: Just Listen 'N Learn Arabic by Nadira Auty, Brian Hill, Rachel Harris, and Clive Holes It features many authentic dialogs at normal (i.e. very fast) speeds.
The Arabic equivalents that these Turkish loan words are based on are: حيوان and قرر 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| wilzy Newbie United States Joined 5184 days ago 15 posts - 24 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Turkish | Message 4 of 6 16 September 2010 at 10:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If you know some Turkish, the following might be helpful.
The University of Riyadh has prepared a series of books for learning MSA. It is called Modern Arapca. I have only ever seen it in Turkey - I don't know if it is available in other countries. In Turkey, it is published by Cantas Yayinevi. It is easy to get in Istanbul. Very few shops carry the series, but if you go to just about any book seller in Taksim or along the road that winds down from the Blue Mosque to Sirkeci, they will be able to get it for you, usually in one day. The course costs about 200 USD. It consists of six soft-cover books (about 800 pages total)and thirteen cassettes. The six books contain about 120-140 dialogues/monologues/short historical passages (in the last book, some texts are 3-4 pages). All of them are on the cassettes. There are also comprehension questions and grammar exercises after each dialogue/monologue/passage. PROS - The series begins slowly, with lots of review and practice. In the first two books, all short vowels have been written in. The tapes are at a good speed, with generally good sound, and recorded by a Saudi newscaster with a pleasant enough voice. There are lots of picture cues that can be used to jog your memory if you are trying to regurgitate/summarize/paraphase a text. By the time you finish, you should have quite a good vocabulary, be able to talk about many daily activities, and should be able to read pretty easily up to about an 8th or 9th grade level - about the level of something like Reader's Digest. CONS - All the texts,including the dialogues, are recorded by just one person. About 25% of lessons are about Islam, Islamic history, and Islamic holidays. This is actually a good thing as it will help you understand the culture, but I imagine some people would be put off. The whole feel is a bit dated (it was first published in the early 80s by the looks of it), but the series is still effective. There is one more problem - the key to exercises and the translation of texts (which are in a separate, seventh book) are in Turkish. However, if you have problems with the Turkish, perhaps you can persuade a speaker of Arabic with good English to translate whatever you can't figure out from the Turkish. You shouldn't need much help with the grammar - most of the grammar in the series is pretty easy to pick up from the context, but a good grammar reference would be useful in case you want charts to study or more detailed explanations. Good luck. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| apparition Octoglot Senior Member United States Joined 6651 days ago 600 posts - 667 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), French, Arabic (Iraqi), Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Pashto | Message 5 of 6 18 September 2010 at 10:02am | IP Logged | |||||
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If you're going to the P.A. in just one week, forget MSA altogether for now. Find a
Palestinian person/site on the internet that can give you survival phrases and then, when you get to where you're going, just keep building on those day after day. MSA can come later, if you want it. I'm curious as to why (more like 'how') you're moving to a place where you don't speak much of the language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| wilzy Newbie United States Joined 5184 days ago 15 posts - 24 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Turkish | Message 6 of 6 23 September 2010 at 12:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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For anyone interested, the Turkish-Arabic course "Modern Arapca" can be found at www.arapcadagitim.com. It is available at quite a few other websites also, if you want to google it.
A few corrections: The publisher is Cantas Yayinlari. The course is about 1100 pages. The recordings are available on CD or cassette. Presently the cost is about 120 USD + shipping. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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