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What makes Arabic difficult?

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53 messages over 7 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 
ellasevia
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 Message 49 of 53
30 November 2009 at 2:04am | IP Logged 
global_gizzy wrote:
Third point: This, I disagree with totally. How can you say that you can glance at a French newspaper and understand the gist of it without ever having to study French a DAY in your life? You cant really do that with English and ANY other language, I dont even know if you could do it with Arabic and something like Amharic...Maybe Italians/Spaniards can do this with one anothers languages, but I cant think of any language off the top of my head that one, as an anglophone, could do.


Perhaps Dutch? I find it this way from some experience, but I do study German.
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Volte
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 Message 50 of 53
30 November 2009 at 2:36am | IP Logged 
global_gizzy wrote:

Third point: This, I disagree with totally. How can you say that you can glance at a French newspaper and understand the gist of it without ever having to study French a DAY in your life? You cant really do that with English and ANY other language, I dont even know if you could do it with Arabic and something like Amharic...Maybe Italians/Spaniards can do this with one anothers languages, but I cant think of any language off the top of my head that one, as an anglophone, could do.

You might THINK you understand the gist of the article but if you just take the time to factor in false cognates, vocab, conjugated verb forms etc you wont have a clue! I think your point about understanding the gist was really far-fetched but well-intended.

Dont be fooled into thinking that English is as close to other languagese with Latin roots as as French/Spanish/Italian are. I only learned that recently!!!


English isn't as close to any other language as French/Spanish/Italian are to each other, but you can certainly understand the gist of a French newspaper article with no previous study of French - not every French article, and not flawlessly, but sometimes.

Here's the top article on Le Monde. The title is "Les Suisses votent massivement l'interdiction des minarets".

As an English speaker, you'll hopefully recognize "Suisse" as "Swiss", "massivement" as similar to "massive(ly)", and "minarets" are "minarets". It's not a huge stretch to try thinking that "votent" may be related to votes, and "inderdiction" has a clear cognate in the English "interdict" - while this isn't an everyday word, I wouldn't call it rare. This leaves 'Les' unknown, but a quick glance through a few articles should make it clear that it's an extremely frequent word, and considering its placement, an English speaker isn't that hard-pressed to guess that it's an article.

Conjugation is almost a non-issue in languages with fairly inflexible word ordering - for French, the general pattern of having the verb next to the subject and agreeing with it pretty much holds in the same ways it does for English.

False cognates are an issue, but a fairy minor one: either you'll get enough else that you'll figure it out from context, or it's probably tangential. It's just like a bigger version of sometimes misinterpreting an English word with more than one meaning.

Can you misunderstand something hugely in French as an English speaker with no background in the language? Yes. Can you understand a lot with a fairly small amount of effort? Also yes.

Bear in mind that I decided ahead of time to pick whatever the first article on 'le monde' was; if I selected an article for transparency (or, conversely, for opacity) the results would be even more striking. No political commentary on it, please - I apologize that it's a politically-charged subject.

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ellasevia
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 Message 51 of 53
30 November 2009 at 3:59am | IP Logged 
Volte wrote:
global_gizzy wrote:

Third point: This, I disagree with totally. How can you say that you can glance at a French newspaper and understand the gist of it without ever having to study French a DAY in your life? You cant really do that with English and ANY other language, I dont even know if you could do it with Arabic and something like Amharic...Maybe Italians/Spaniards can do this with one anothers languages, but I cant think of any language off the top of my head that one, as an anglophone, could do.

You might THINK you understand the gist of the article but if you just take the time to factor in false cognates, vocab, conjugated verb forms etc you wont have a clue! I think your point about understanding the gist was really far-fetched but well-intended.

Dont be fooled into thinking that English is as close to other languagese with Latin roots as as French/Spanish/Italian are. I only learned that recently!!!


English isn't as close to any other language as French/Spanish/Italian are to each other, but you can certainly understand the gist of a French newspaper article with no previous study of French - not every French article, and not flawlessly, but sometimes.

Here's the top article on Le Monde. The title is "Les Suisses votent massivement l'interdiction des minarets".

As an English speaker, you'll hopefully recognize "Suisse" as "Swiss", "massivement" as similar to "massive(ly)", and "minarets" are "minarets". It's not a huge stretch to try thinking that "votent" may be related to votes, and "inderdiction" has a clear cognate in the English "interdict" - while this isn't an everyday word, I wouldn't call it rare. This leaves 'Les' unknown, but a quick glance through a few articles should make it clear that it's an extremely frequent word, and considering its placement, an English speaker isn't that hard-pressed to guess that it's an article.

Conjugation is almost a non-issue in languages with fairly inflexible word ordering - for French, the general pattern of having the verb next to the subject and agreeing with it pretty much holds in the same ways it does for English.

False cognates are an issue, but a fairy minor one: either you'll get enough else that you'll figure it out from context, or it's probably tangential. It's just like a bigger version of sometimes misinterpreting an English word with more than one meaning.

Can you misunderstand something hugely in French as an English speaker with no background in the language? Yes. Can you understand a lot with a fairly small amount of effort? Also yes.

Bear in mind that I decided ahead of time to pick whatever the first article on 'le monde' was; if I selected an article for transparency (or, conversely, for opacity) the results would be even more striking. No political commentary on it, please - I apologize that it's a politically-charged subject.


This is a very good example. However, I would argue that "interdict" is a rare word in English; I didn't know it existed until just now. I only actually know the definition because I know what interdiction is in French (ban/prohibition/forbidding), so I know that "to interdict" is to ban/prohibit/forbid.

Otherwise, great example.

To an English speaker such as myself with very little experience with Arabic (I can sort of read the alphabet), I cannot read any of the Arabic from this headline from Al-Arab Online:

الإمارة العالمية تعجز عن دفع ديونها المتراكمة
دبي تترنح وأسواق المال تحبس أنفاسها
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Woodpecker
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 Message 52 of 53
30 November 2009 at 9:28am | IP Logged 
"Interdiction" itself is actually a word in English, not just "interdict."
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William Camden
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 Message 53 of 53
17 March 2010 at 2:16pm | IP Logged 
I recognise some Arabic words from Turkish. There is a discount from that. Marginal, but better than none at all.


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