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Which Pimsleur Arabic for Saudis? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Principiante Senior Member United States lucasgentry.com Joined 6069 days ago 130 posts - 138 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 7 08 February 2014 at 7:46am | IP Logged | ||
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I feel that Pimsleur Spanish was a wonderful introduction to Spanish for me. Obviously,
it didn't teach me loads, but it gave me great pronunciation. A few months ago, I moved to Costa Rica for more intense schooling and volunteering work, and I conistantly have people mention how good my pronunciation is (even saying that it's better than people who have lived here much longer than myself). Okay, so all that being said, I think Pimsleur is a fantastic start for language learning for auditory people like myself. My question: In the community where my parents live, there has been a strong influx of Saudi international students, who have come to the town to go through the university's intensive English program. This influx seems to be a relatively consistent pattern, and so I am considering Arabic as my next language to learn. I won't be actively learning it until September, when I move back to the States, because I want to focus on solidifying my Spanish learning while I have this amazing opportunity to live in Costa Rica. But if possible, I would like to begin scouting out learning materials for when I'm ready to begin my next stage in life. I'm sorry, I'm long-winded. I suppose HERE is the question I'm going for: If I want to communicate with Arabic-speaking students, most of which are from Saudi Arabia, which Pimsleur should I get, when considering my goals? Choices are: Eastern Arabic Egyptian Arabic Modern Standard Arabic I have heard that almost everyone can understand MSA, but it's a very formal form of the language, so I don't know if it would be optimal. (That being said, when I speak Spanish here, I tend to consistantly revert to formal Spanish most of the time, so I don't know if that's a big deal or not) At this moment, I don't have plans to read the written-form Quaran, as I am not a Muslim, but I may read it in the future, simply to be more culturally-knowledgeable. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Principiante Senior Member United States lucasgentry.com Joined 6069 days ago 130 posts - 138 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 2 of 7 08 February 2014 at 7:51am | IP Logged | ||
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On a related note, have any of you had experience with Audible? I've seen digital
versions offered up on eBay recently, selling promo codes to Audible that would specifically be to purchase Units 1-30 of Pimsleur for this language or that. I would prefer the physical CDs, because I'm not hip with "the Cloud", and I always think that a Cloud business could go bankrupt and I'd lose all my stuff with it, but as far as I know, with audible, I could download the individual CDs and burn them myself without much issue. Would you guys go for a deal like that, if it would help you save a decent amount on cash? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4720 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 3 of 7 08 February 2014 at 4:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think the Audible option is a good deal, but I'm not sure I'd trust a promo code bought on Ebay. You can burn Audible Pimsleur to CDs, but the track endings are pretty random.
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| Principiante Senior Member United States lucasgentry.com Joined 6069 days ago 130 posts - 138 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 7 08 February 2014 at 5:14pm | IP Logged | ||
That sounds pretty significant. Do you mean that, like, the ends of the tracks don't always correspond with the end of the lessons? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4720 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 5 of 7 08 February 2014 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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That's exactly what I mean. It breaks it into segments of 5 minutes or so, and so the end of one lesson and the start of another will be in the same track.
On the other hand, if you have a compatible mp3 player you can download them to the player. It works well and it is quite simple. So even if the cloud dies, you'll have your music files as long as you have the player. Edited by Jeffers on 08 February 2014 at 5:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Al-Malik Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member United Kingdom arabicgenie.com Joined 6945 days ago 221 posts - 294 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German*, Spanish, Arabic (Written), Dutch, French, Arabic (classical) Studies: Mandarin, Persian | Message 6 of 7 08 February 2014 at 6:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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Out of the three Pimsleur courses, I'd definitely recommend using the Modern Standard Arabic one (though I've never listend to it) - speaking Egyptian or Levantine Arabic will sound a little weird to Saudis (unless you're perfectly fluent in Egyptian or Levantine Arabic). Speaking a little MSA will certainly be quite helpful. Most Saudis will have a good level of MSA and will be happy to converse with you using it.
Alternatively, if you're planning to talk mostly to people from Saudi Arabia, it might be a good idea to learn some sort of general Saudi dialect (though, there are, of course quite a few subdivisions within Saudi Arabian dialects). I'm sure someone here can recommend some good resources for that. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 6955 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 7 of 7 08 February 2014 at 7:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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Personally, I don't think that any of the Pimsleur courses are really ideal for starting with a language like Arabic, since Pimsleur doesn't do a very good job of sensitizing you to the sounds of the language. They expect you to pick up on the subtle distinctions yourself, which may work in Spanish, but is less appropriate for Arabic, since Arabic has a number of phonemes that are hard to recognize and even harder to produce without some special, explicit attention.
Accordingly, while I think the Pimsleur Arabic courses are fine for practice, and for helping to reinforce a good pronunciation AFTER you've learned the sounds of the language, I think starting off with them is likely to lead to a fair amount of confusion/frustration among the different sounds. If your interest is in talking with Saudis, I would give consideration to making the FSI Saudi Basic Course, (available for free download here: http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php?page=Arabic%20Sa udi) your main course of study. It consists of 50 short lessons, with audio, but A) provides a clear explanation of the sounds, along with tranliteration to make it clear which sounds are in which word and B) deals with one of the major Saudi dialects. You can thus gain a pretty respectable speaking ability based largely on oral materials, but with much better grammatical explanations, and without having to master the Arabic alphabet beforehand. At least one forum member, William Camden, has used this course, and per some of his past comments, he found it quite useful in dealing with speakers of other dialects as well as Saudis. Another useful resource to help with pronunciation is the FSI Levantine Arabic Pronunciation Course, also available for free download ( http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php?page=Arabic%20Le vantine), which gives plenty of practice in both recognizing and producing the problematic sounds of Arabic. (Although it focuses on the Levantine variety, I think the major difference is with the letter "J", which in Levantine is often pronounces like "zh"; otherwise, most of what you'd learn from it would be fairly transferable to most other dialects.) In any event, both of the FSI courses are freely available to download, and in addition to being a whole lot cheaper than Pimsleur (i.e., free), I think they offer a lot more substance than any of the Pimsleur Arabic courses. Edited by daristani on 15 February 2014 at 10:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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