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The French and Arabic Study Group

  Tags: Study Group | Arabic | French
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kanewai
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/kanewai
Joined 4649 days ago

1386 posts - 3054 votes 
Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese
Studies: Italian, Spanish

 
 Message 73 of 78
29 November 2011 at 9:58pm | IP Logged 
Bon matins habaabi!

I'm back from my diversion, and ready to tackle French and Arabic again. I don't quite
know how I'll mix it up, but it will be some combination of Assimil French, FSI French,
and FSI written Arabic.

My travelling buddy was Egyptian, and I played some of my Arabic mp3's for him. His
take:

    The Assimil recordings sounded forced and unnatural. He hated them.
    The FSI recordings sounded Saudi to him.
    Arabic Podcast 101 also sounded Saudi.
    The Saudis have the 'worst' accent (note: Myself, I like the guys' voices on the
    Podcast!)
    The Lebanese have the nicest Arabic accent.
    Maghrebi is difficult for everyone to understand.
    Eqyptian has a lot of non-Arabic vocabulary
    He can 'get by' in Turkey by using simplified Arabic


I'm also starting to suspect that these Arabic courses make things more difficult than
they need to be! Basic, conversational Arabic doesn't seem that hard when he explains
it.
2 persons have voted this message useful



kanewai
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/kanewai
Joined 4649 days ago

1386 posts - 3054 votes 
Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese
Studies: Italian, Spanish

 
 Message 74 of 78
11 December 2011 at 5:31am | IP Logged 
One week on, and I'm throwing in the towel on the FSI course. It's not bad per se, but
there's not enough explanation given to understand the sentences for it to work as a
home course. I spent a lot of this past week reviewing my notes, typing up the grammar
points from lessons 1-10, and making a new vocab list. I thought I was ready for
Lesson 11.

And I can't even make out the first four sentences. I know every noun and verb, I can
hear the tenses and cases, but I can't make sense of the sentences as a unit.

This isn't the first time. I've been stuck a lot in this course, and you lose momentum
when you try for days to untangle one or two sentences. I'm sure it would be fine if I
had an instructor; I don't think these are hard constructs; they just need more
explanation.

Take this:
كان موظف هنا قبل ساعة
The best I can do is: Here was an employee, he returned, hour.
And the next sentence is the same, but employee and hour are plurals.

I'm moving back to Assimil. And each time I return I appreciate it more and more. The
exaggerated accents are still rough, but in its favor:

  • Assimil uses Arabic script in an easy to read font
  • The words
    are all vowelled, which helps us beginners immensely
  • the dialogues are slightly
    more relevant than FSI's
  • There are ample explanations, even if they are in
    French
  • Since I'm cross-training in French at the same time, that works out
    fine!


Edited by kanewai on 11 December 2011 at 5:32am

1 person has voted this message useful



liddytime
Pentaglot
Senior Member
United States
mainlymagyar.wordpre
Joined 5989 days ago

693 posts - 1328 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician
Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written)

 
 Message 75 of 78
11 December 2011 at 5:36am | IP Logged 
I'm with you. FSI is so sterile. At least Assimil has some personality. I have speeded up some of the dialogues with
Audacity and it makes them a little more tolerable!
1 person has voted this message useful



kanewai
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/kanewai
Joined 4649 days ago

1386 posts - 3054 votes 
Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese
Studies: Italian, Spanish

 
 Message 76 of 78
14 December 2011 at 7:28am | IP Logged 
What Fresh Dialect is This?

I finished Assimil L'Arabe lessons 8-21, and I'm enjoying the pace. It's just fast
enough to be challenging, but not so fast that I get overwhelmed. It's a good thing
that I know some of the concepts already, because the French explanations are beyond
me. They help to remind me of the concepts at hand, but no more. I'll need to use more
outside resources pretty soon.

The limitations of Assimil are also coming more into focus. The normal L/R and
shadowing just don't work. The accents are too exaggerated for good shadowing, and the
grammatical structures are too different for parallel reading of the text.

The Arabic they use also feels different. In fact, the Arabic in every course I've
tried feels a bit different, though I can't put my finger on why. Assimil teaches
l'arabe moderne unifié
. Anyone know what this correlates too? It seems
different than the Modern Written Arabic that FSI teaches, and the Modern
Standard Arabic
that I tried to learn in school. But perhaps it's the same, and
Assimil simply starts with less formal language than the others started with.

Here's the dialogue from Lesson 20, for example ...

السلام عليك يا زيد!
وعليك السلام يا زينب!
هل وجع طدقك من العاصمة؟
نعم, وجدا له فها سيارة جديدة

*Since that's probably too small to read, here's Assimil's transliteration (I've
substituted Arabish text where Assimil uses irritating symbols):

As-salàmou 3alayka, yà Zayd!   
Wa3alayki as-salàmou, yà Zaynab!
Hal raja3a 9adìqouka mina al-3a9imàti?
Na3am, raja3nà minhà ma3ahou.
Houwa wajada lahou fihà sayyàratan jadìdatan.

Bonjour Zaid!
Bonjour Zaynab!
Est-ce que ton ami est revenu de la capitale?
Oui, nous en sommes revenus avec lui.
Il y a trouvé une nouvelle voiture.


Is this MSA? Or a dialect? I am sure that I learned asalaam aleikum in school,
for example. Why must every book be different? It almost makes you appreciate the
tyrannical standards of the French!

* Does anyone know the html codes for making text larger?



Edited by kanewai on 14 December 2011 at 8:43pm

1 person has voted this message useful



strikingstar
Bilingual Tetraglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4933 days ago

292 posts - 444 votes 
Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Cantonese, Swahili
Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written)

 
 Message 77 of 78
14 December 2011 at 8:42am | IP Logged 
kanewai wrote:
Is this MSA? Or a dialect? I am sure that I learned asalaam aleikum in
school, for example.


as-salaamu 3laykum is used for addressing a group with at least 1 male member.
as-salaamu 3layka is used for addressing 1 male individual. In this case Zayd.
as-salaamu 3layki is used for addressing 1 female individual. In this case
Zaynab.
Actually, it would be translated as And peace upon you, Zaynab. The "waw" is
always attached to the following word as grammatical protocol.

Kum, Ka, Ki are pronoun suffixes. They are used for nouns, verbs and prepositions.
y - me
ka- you (m)
ki - you (f)
hu - him
haa - her
naa- us
kum - y'all (m)
kunna - y'all (f)
hum - them (m, plural)
hunna - them (f, plural)
kumaa - you (dual)
humaa - them (dual)

For e.g.
He visited us = زارنا
My car = سيارتي
I'm going with him = إذهب معه

Note:
The word 3la becomes 3lay when a pronoun has been affixed to it.
To/Upon me is pronounced 3layya and not 3layyi.

Edited by strikingstar on 15 December 2011 at 8:13am

3 persons have voted this message useful



Monox D. I-Fly
Senior Member
Indonesia
monoxdifly.iopc.us
Joined 4895 days ago

762 posts - 664 votes 
Speaks: Indonesian*

 
 Message 78 of 78
12 August 2016 at 5:54pm | IP Logged 
kanewai wrote:

Take this:
كان موظف هنا قبل ساعة
The best I can do is: Here was an employee, he returned, hour.


The best I can do is: "An employee was here before an hour". Doesn't قبل mean "before"?


1 person has voted this message useful



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