Envinyatar Diglot Senior Member Guatemala Joined 5296 days ago 147 posts - 240 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Modern Hebrew
| Message 9 of 11 01 September 2010 at 10:05pm | IP Logged |
Doitsujin wrote:
Learning to read Arabic is the least of the problems that most Arabic learners face.
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That's a study made in Haifa where people speak Hebrew. For them learning to read Arabic must be the biggest challenge about learning the language. Most other aspects must be way easier to them than to us because they speak a Semitic language too.
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Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5141 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian
| Message 10 of 11 01 September 2010 at 10:09pm | IP Logged |
Envinyatar wrote:
Doitsujin wrote:
Learning to read Arabic is the least of the problems that most Arabic learners face.
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That's a study made in Haifa where people speak Hebrew. For them learning to read Arabic must be the biggest challenge about learning the language. Most other aspects must be way easier to them than to us because they speak a Semitic language too. |
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Their biggest challenge is probably cultural, I'd say.
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Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5080 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English
| Message 11 of 11 01 September 2010 at 11:56pm | IP Logged |
Arekkusu wrote:
Their biggest challenge is probably cultural, I'd say. |
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Nope, that's not it. At least not for me. The biggest problem is the diglossia. To give you a simple analogy: Modern Standard Arabic is to spoken Arabic as Shakespearean English is to colloquial English. I.e., most educated native speakers understand it just fine, but few can converse in it for longer periods of time.
One of the best books about the difficulties of Arabic for linguists who don't speak Arabic is Arabic in chains: structural problems and artificial barriers by Robert Marzari. Unfortunately, it's a bit expensive and usually only available through the German publisher.
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