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I’m trying to Learn Arabic. | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| delta910 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5874 days ago 267 posts - 313 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Dutch, German | Message 17 of 28 05 December 2009 at 7:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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In my opinion it is very hard, but only how you attempt to study the language. If you just focus on grammar right at the beginning you WILL be discouraged and just give up. I prefer to just listen, read, and build up my vocabulary. One thing though I do is study it up a lot each day. I try to much as much time as I can in the language as possible per day. I have been doing this for some time and I can understand some of what is being said. Maybe about 20%. Once I have enough input I'll just go back and take a look at the grammar. I have figured out some through my listening and reading.
But I will say this about learning Arabic. The ONE main factor in learning it is that you have to be highly motivated to learn it. If you don't have that motivation, you might as well not attempt it at all. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6033 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 18 of 28 06 December 2009 at 2:45am | IP Logged | ||
Haha, the article is great :). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Al-Irelandi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5534 days ago 111 posts - 177 votes Speaks: English* | Message 19 of 28 06 December 2009 at 1:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hmmm, a lot of generalizations in the article.
1) Comparisons between the Arabic dialects ( Morrocan and Egyptian) being akin to Spanish and French, i.e unintelligible, is far off. Its more to do with the speed the Moroccans speak then the actual vocab and grammar (which admittedly does differ in some areas), as I myself speaking Arabic Fushaa can easily converse with my Moroccan friend who has never studied Arabic, only knowing the dialect from his parents. Likewise other Western authorities on the language have given the example of a farmer from as far west as Morocco and another as far east as Oman still being able to communicate in their dialects, even without resorting to Classical Arabic, albeit speaking slower and with some unease involved. The transparency between the dialects/language is far greater than the writer wishes to admit. I mean many Arabs/Arabic speakers can even understand Maltese, due to it being of Arabic descent, despite it being cut off from the Arabic speaking world some thousand years ago. 2)His comments on numbers being opposite to the gender case that they are referring to is not as he said some random thing but happens when the broken plural form is employed so for instance we would say thalaathatu awaalad or 3 boys, with 3 taking a feminine form due to the aforementioned plural form. Not something too difficult, bearing in mind this took root with me minutes after covering it in class some 6+ years ago. 3) He says "So, if I go to Egypt or Lebanon in a year, having managed to get some near grip on my classroom language, I will be walking down the street asking people for a bite to eat in something that will sound almost as conversationally inappropriate to them as Shakespearean English would to us.". Again this is far from being true, being that this language is still used in formal instances, and still heard daily, unlike that of Shakespeare's dead literary stylistic language. Many Arabs, especially Arab Muslims, (in my everyday experience with them) hold the language in high esteem, due to their faith and even sometimes due to Arabism/Arab Nationalism (which is a dying out mentality alhamdulillaah), and wouldn't be jeering at one who has bothered to try learning Arabic, let alone trying to converse with them in it. And the language is not that different from the dialects as he claims e.g Egyptian A3deenee burghar or Arabic A3teenee burghar (Give me a burger), or I am thirsty (ana 3atshaan), which remains the same in both. Not akin to when Europe was in the middle/dark ages (as he claims) where generally only the clergy/rulers could read and write Latin, and speaking Latin with most peasants, merchants or layman wouldn't generally get you no-where. Again as I repeatedly mention, this is the problem when those inexperienced with the Arabic language try and attempt to comment on the same very language that they are not well versed in either its history or current reality. Edited by al-Irlandee on 06 December 2009 at 1:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6033 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 20 of 28 06 December 2009 at 2:42pm | IP Logged | ||
I suspect the author exaggerates for added drama. He's a journalist, what do you expect? ;).It actually made me want to study the language, not that I have the time right now. As inaccurate as it might be, the article it also very funny and passionate, which I think is more important for a general audience. It's good we have experienced people here to point out the errors. By the way, I wonder why everybody is going for MSA. If I were faced with the prospect of learning Arabic, my choice would be the Egyptian dialect. It's true that Egyptian Arabic won't give me 100% coverage of the Arab world but at least I will have mastered the language of one country fully. It would also give me a glimpse of Coptic, which I think is cool. Furthermore, if the author of this article can be trusted, it "is widely understood because of the Egyptian movie industry". I don't know if the movie industry is all that prominent, but at least it compensates for some of the advantages that MSA has over other dialects. Edited by Sennin on 06 December 2009 at 3:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Fazla Hexaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6261 days ago 166 posts - 255 votes Speaks: Italian, Serbo-Croatian*, English, Russian, Portuguese, French Studies: Arabic (classical), German, Turkish, Mandarin | Message 21 of 28 06 December 2009 at 4:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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If your aim is to master the language fully, and you don't want to learn MSA/Fusha/Classical Arabic (I'm grouping them in the same...group) you will hardly achieve your aim, as you won't be able to understand any kind of books, as all of them are written in MSA, even in Egypt.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6049 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 22 of 28 07 December 2009 at 7:35am | IP Logged | ||
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This article totally makes me want to study Arabic.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| pohaku Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5650 days ago 192 posts - 367 votes Speaks: English*, Persian Studies: Arabic (classical), French, German, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 23 of 28 07 December 2009 at 9:00am | IP Logged | ||
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I've been working on Arabic for about six months now after my Persian study partner and I added it to our daily routine. Because we have been reading classical Persian poetry for several years, we are very comfortable with the Arabic alphabet and know quite a bit of Arabic vocabulary, which makes up about 30-40% of the Persian vocabulary. Our goal is to be able to read Arabic, and we chose to practice with Alf Layla wa Layla (1001 Nights) purely for the pleasure of it. Between the time I work on it individually and the time we spend on it together, I probably average about an hour a day.
It is hard. But it can be done, and we're doing it. I've gotten the hang of the dictionary (a vital skill, but not as easy as it sounds, since the words are arranged by triliteral root--and the root of the target word is not always obvious), learned a fair amount of vocabulary and grammar, and I can usually work out the meaning of a passage pretty well. From here it will clearly just get easier. I get a great kick out of reading a passage in Arabic such as the one in which the genie comes out of the bottle before the amazed fisherman who has pulled the bottle from the sea in his net. Arabic is so distant from English in the way it expresses things (and also distant from Persian, for that matter) that there is great pleasure in working out these stories. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ANK47 Triglot Senior Member United States thearabicstudent.blo Joined 7096 days ago 188 posts - 259 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (classical) | Message 24 of 28 19 December 2009 at 10:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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I remember reading this article before I started learning Arabic, and now that I've reached a level that I'm comfortable with in MSA and a few dialects I can say that, yes, it is difficult to learn Arabic. The writer exagerrates some things like when he says MSA is the equivalent of Shakespearean English. If we used Shakespearean English on the news and in all written media then I'd agree, but MSA is used a lot and everyone knows it. A closer analogy would be Kings James Bible English.
However, he doesn't exaggerate the difficulty of pronouncing Arabic. I haven't studied every language there is, but I imagine that Arabic is the most difficult language to pronounce of all the major languages in the world. It's very rare that anyone who learned Arabic will be mistaken for a native speaker. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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