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TAC14 - More French than Arabic | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Cetacea Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie United States booh.com Joined 5117 days ago 80 posts - 163 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Arabic (Yemeni), Arabic (Written) Studies: French | Message 1 of 31 31 May 2010 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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After lurking and procrastinating for a while, I finally decided to start my own log in order to document my language learning process, and more importantly to keep me motivated by making my goals public. I wish to learn from others and offer my expertise mainly in studying Arabic.
My native languages are English and Mandarin Chinese, but I doubt I could offer much advice in these languages since I never “learned” them, but I do have some insight into Arabic which I learned through a long and enjoyable process. Now I have reached advanced fluency in Modern Standard Arabic and Yemeni / Saudi dialect, I can look back and offer some time-saving tips for beginner and advanced students. It is true that there is no shortcut in language learning, but when it comes to a structured language like Arabic, there is DEFINITELY a more efficient way to study it. I’ll go into it in more detail if there is actually interest on this forum. My short-term goals for the next three to six months are to keep improving my Arabic especially in the area of writing, and to start leaning French from scratch. Arabic: I started learning Arabic when I came to Yemen four years ago. After about two years of intensive study, I started to work and have been studying it on and off since then. I’m constantly improving my speaking since that’s what I use on a daily basis, but I noticed a decline in my writing once I stopped taking classes. I would rate my writing at intermediate, well below my speaking and reading abilities. For the next few months, I’d like to write one longish essay and transcribe at least one news item per week. The advantage of doing this while I’m in Yemen is that I have several local friends who are eager and ready, red pen in hand, to correct anything I write. It could be a demoralizing experience though when I get my paper back with red marks all over it. In addition, I’d also like to read at least 30 pages of novels per week plus other materials that I already read on a daily basis. French: I guess I can’t say I’m starting from scratch since I did take some courses in college, but honestly I don’t remember much beyond bonjour. I can’t blame it all on the school though since I took French only to satisfy the foreign language requirement thus never paid much attention in class as long as I could pass. When I was traveling in Niger and Morocco, I ran into several difficult situations when I really needed French to communicate, but I simply couldn’t put together a sentence. I hated myself for daydreaming in my French class. Hindsight is always 20-20. This time around, I hope I can really LEARN the language, and reach intermediate level by the end of the year. This will be my first time trying to learn a language using self-study methods AND in a non-immersion environment, I’ll need a lot of self-discipline to keep myself going. My resources are: FSI, Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur, and a list of 2000 frequently used words I downloaded from Wiki. Being in Yemen, I can’t easily get study material except what I already have and what I can download from the internet. Another obstacle which most of you don’t think of is that we sometimes get over 12 hours of power cuts per day: two hours on, four hours off, so I have to plan ahead to put enough files on my MP3 player and keep my headlamp charged and ready to go. I usually keep working on my laptop until the battery runs out, then I get up and listen to the mp3 files while doing some household chores. I tried Rosetta Stone Level 1 and Lesson 1 the other day, and thought the pace was frustratingly slow. After clicking and clicking for over half an hour, all I learned was a few new words while my eyes were turning into four little yellow squares. Has anyone used RS French Level 1-3? Is it going to pick up the pace later on? I haven’t started with FSI, but it looks promising. I will keep Pimsleur lessons in my MP3 so I can listen to them when there is no electricity. Software I use frequently for language studies: Anki and Lingoes free multi-lingual dictionary http://www.lingoes.net/ Both served me well when I studied Arabic and I expect the same with French. Now I’m done planning, just have to start studying! :) Until next time, 下次見, إلى اللقاء à bientôt Edit: Changed the log title to TAC14 - More French than Arabic 12/14/2013 Edited by Cetacea on 14 December 2013 at 10:05am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| staf250 Pentaglot Senior Member Belgium emmerick.be Joined 5490 days ago 352 posts - 414 votes Speaks: French, Dutch*, Italian, English, German Studies: Arabic (Written) | Message 2 of 31 31 May 2010 at 6:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'll follow your progress, while I'm learning Arabic and knowing French well.
Rosetta Stone is good while learning a good pronunciation of the words. I think it shall not help you to learn the language but you know that pronunciation is important speaking French. Good Luck. I used Rosetta Stone Italian not much and I really see, till now, the images to learn yellow, under, above a.s.o. Studying Arabic I'm not at the point that some letters together, thus a word, "flashes" me the word as a whole meaning included, but I'll overcome this :). Edited by staf250 on 06 June 2010 at 4:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6263 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 3 of 31 31 May 2010 at 8:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm definitely interested in any advice you can give me on learning Arabic, as I'm
planning to re-start on it in July. I'd be happy to help you with any questions you have about learning French, because I'm fluent in French (I major in French linguistics & literature at university), even if my writing skills lag behind a bit. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cetacea Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie United States booh.com Joined 5117 days ago 80 posts - 163 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Arabic (Yemeni), Arabic (Written) Studies: French | Message 4 of 31 04 June 2010 at 8:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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First of all, thank you staf250 and Sprachprofi for stopping by.
My French study is off to a good start. When I get to a point where I can ask intelligent questions, I sure will get your help. My week goes from Saturday to Friday, so here is my end of the week update: Arabic: Wrote a blog post about my trip to Ethiopia. This is part 2 of a multi-part trip report. You should be able to read it if you are at an intermediate level or above. As I mentioned before that I would like to share my experience of learning Arabic with learners of all levels. Here is my first post (in English) titled “Learning Arabic for Beginners - Myths and Misconceptions” 1: Arabic script is hard to learn. 2: I have to learn a dialect to communicate with Arabs. Someone on this forum gave an advice that “MSA is useless if you want to communicate with Arabs.”, so I thought I had to chime in and give my 2 cents. 3: ( Related to #2 ) When I speak MSA, people don’t understand me. 4: Native Arabic speakers make the best teachers for beginners. 5: Al Mawrid Arabic-English dictionary is easier and better for beginners because it lists words in alphabetical order. One thing I didn’t mention in my post but might be useful to the multilingual audience here is that Hans Wehr was originally published as an Arabic – German dictionary. There are also excellent Arabic-Dutch and Arabic-French dictionaries out there that list words by roots. In the future I may write about broken plural, 10 forms, how to use Hans Wehr or how to extract root letters from a word, etc. Do you have any requests/suggestions? French This is my first week and I’m still trying out different materials. I did the first half of FSI Unit 1 and like it very much, so I think I’m going to stick with that. FSI lessons are well structures and progress at a reasonable pace. After FSI I went back and finished Rosetta Stone lesson 2 and 3. RS went so slow comparing to FSI that I probably won’t continue with it. On the vocabulary front, I downloaded Anki French 101 deck and found that I already know most of the words except about 10 new ones. Then I downloaded French Intermediate deck where every word is new to me. I didn’t find anything between 101 and intermediate. I’m trying to learn these new words completely out of context, not sure how well it’s going to work out. Comparing to Arabic, French is sooooo much easier. I’ve gotten further in a week than an entire month with Arabic! Edited by Cetacea on 04 June 2010 at 8:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cetacea Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie United States booh.com Joined 5117 days ago 80 posts - 163 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Arabic (Yemeni), Arabic (Written) Studies: French | Message 5 of 31 08 June 2010 at 4:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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Arabic
Bedouin dialect: I transcribed a short clip taken from a Bedouin TV series called Finjan Addam فنجان الدم and translated the dialogue to MSA and English. It gives you a flavor of a unique dialect, but I don’t recommend that you learn it for obvious reasons: there aren’t enough people speaking it to make it worthwhile. Italian I just learned that a good friend of mine from Italy is going to be staying with me for a month starting from the end of June. Even though I had no plans to learn Italian when I started this log, it’s too good a chance to pass. I’ve decided to put French on hold for the next two months and concentrate on Italian. I don’t have any academic goals for Italian, just want to be able to get by in Italian when I go to Italy later this year. Let’s see how far I can get in two months. French Being temporarily put on hold until August. I’ve never had the experience of learning two languages at a time, especially two closely related ones, so I think it’s better to concentrate on one at a time, besides it’s only for two months. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5113 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 6 of 31 08 June 2010 at 9:58pm | IP Logged | ||
IMHO, there are more than enough websites out there that explain the 10 verb forms and the most common broken plurals. I believe it would be more helpful if you wrote about topics for intermediate learners that are usually not well explained in traditional textbooks such as resolving the ambiguity issues in real-life texts without vowel signs. Take for example a highly ambiguous imperfect form such as "لم يعد", which could be read in a number of different ways depending on the context. Or readings of "ققد" as /fa-qad/ vs /faqada/, readings of "لما" as /lamā/ vs /lammā/ vs /limā/ etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cetacea Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie United States booh.com Joined 5117 days ago 80 posts - 163 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Arabic (Yemeni), Arabic (Written) Studies: French | Message 7 of 31 09 June 2010 at 1:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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@Doitsujin: Thanks for asking the questions. I explained each term with vowels fully marked on my website: لما / فقد / لم يعد Explained. It's too difficult to get the formatting right on this forum.
Here are the short answers if you have to make a wild guess: ******************* "If you understood the rest of the sentence, you would know which meaning to apply. But in situations where you don’t understand the rest of the sentence and you are forced to guess blindly (e.g. in an exam), then go by these rules: – The most common meanings of لم يعد are “no longer” and “didn’t consider or wasn’t considered”. Try the two and see which one fits better. – فقد is easy to tell. Just look at what’s coming after it. If it’s a verb, فقد means “therefore, already,” if it’s a noun, فقد mean “lost, missed” – When لما is used at the beginning of a sentence it usually means “when”, and when it’s used in the middle of a sentence it means “for that, in order to, with the purpose of” , and when it’s used in a conditional sentence with “لولا…. لما” it means didn’t / wouldn’t have / couldn’t have." Let me know if it helps and feel free to ask if you have more questions. I will do my best to answer them. If I don't know the answer, I can always ask a native speaker. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5113 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 8 of 31 09 June 2010 at 4:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the detailed and nicely formatted explanations on your blog.
BTW, you missed لم يعد = ما وعد. (=he didn't promise). :-) Edited by Doitsujin on 09 June 2010 at 4:18pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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