|
 |
Persian, Arabic, and FSI Ratings | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| ericblair Senior Member United States Joined 4510 days ago 480 posts - 700 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 1 of 16 03 April 2015 at 12:53am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
I thought Arabic and Persian were relatively similar languages. Where did I go wrong?
I noticed today that Persian is a Category II language which suggests 1100 class hours to get to S3 and R3 on the ILR scale, which is C1 on the CEFR. Arabic is Category III and shows TWICE the number of yours, 2200, and suggests half of them should be in country. What accounts for the huge difference? I can't imagine access to study materials is it. It must be something intrinsic to the language. Presumably the alphabets take roughly the same amount of time to learn. Since there are likely few cognates for either language, I can't imagine vocab being that much easier in one than the other. This leaves grammar. Is Persian grammar that much easier than Arabic grammar? Do they not both use the root-system thing for root building? Or is this a function of the diglossal Arabic situation and the time is because it is learning MSA + dialect and Persian is just...Persian? Thanks for any enlightenment! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ericblair Senior Member United States Joined 4510 days ago 480 posts - 700 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 2 of 16 03 April 2015 at 1:04am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Hmm, I swore I put this in General Language discussion...
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Speakeasy Senior Member Canada Joined 3851 days ago 507 posts - 1098 votes Studies: German | Message 3 of 16 03 April 2015 at 2:02am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Eric,
I have not studied either Arabic or Persian. However, a quick Google search yielded the following online quotes from "www.city-data.com", which I report without comment: QUOTE 1 They (Arabic and Persian) are unrelated languages from different linguistic families. Persian is more related to English than it is to Arabic. Persian languages are spoken in countries like Iran, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan etc., Arabic is spoken in the Arabian peninsula, Iraq and points west of there to Israel, and in North Africa (Egypt, Morocco). Persia is a distinct civilization from the Arabs, and was before Islam as well. They are also mostly Shia Muslims whereas Arabs are mostly Sunni Muslims. Persians have different food, musical traditions, and literary traditions. Really, all they have in common is being nominally Muslim and from roughly the same basic part of the world, but otherwise they don't have that much in common. QUOTE 2 The only link between Farsi (the language of Persia => Iran) and Arabic is that they both use the Arabic alphabet. Otherwise they are dissimilar and not mutually intelligible. The Urdu language of Pakistan also is written in Arabic alphabet, but is actually the same as the Hindi language of India, which is written in Sanskrit alphabet. The completely unrelated Somali language is also written by most people in Arabic alphabet. An alphabet is nothing but an arbitrary set of symbols which designate certain vocal sounds, and implies nothing at all about the language, just as there is no connection between Turkish, Polish, Finnish and Portuguese, which all use the same alphabet we do. Many Iranian emigrés call themselves Persian, in order to express their disapproval the Iranian government. The name Persia was changed to Iran in international diplomacy in 1935. UNQUOTE Ciao for now! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ericblair Senior Member United States Joined 4510 days ago 480 posts - 700 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 4 of 16 03 April 2015 at 2:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Interesting. I guess it is like assuming Italian and German should be really close to
equally difficult to learn since both use the same alphabet, more-or-less. But to an even larger extent. Thanks! It is a shame Persian isn't more popular. Fascinating culture, sounds lovely, and wonderful food. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 5860 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 5 of 16 03 April 2015 at 3:51am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
No one expects the Arabic / Persian confusion. That and the Spanish Inquisition. :P
Before addressing that subject, there's one correction to be made: in Speakeasy's post, there's mention of Persian being spoken in both Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. This is not right. Both countries speak Turkic languages: Azeri (or Azerbaijani) and Turkmen. I checked to see if there was a significant Persian-speaking minority in either country (things are seldom clear-cut in those parts of the world), but no. Afghanistan is different: over there, a significant majority of the population speaks languages closely related to Persian (Dari and Pashto). As for Arabic and Persian, they are unrelated. The third big language of the zone (Turkish) was also written with Arabic script until Mustafa Kemal (known as Atatürk, meaning "Father of the Turks") replaced it with Latin script in the 1920s. Arabic is Semitic, Persian is Indo-European, and Turkish is Altaic. They are as unrelated as you can get. Another aspect is the impact of having languages (related or not) written in different scripts (alphabets, abjads, abugidas, logograms, or other characters). In my modest experience, it's a whole other ball game. I remember having seen somewhere that (after an initial learning period) we don't actually "read" texts. Instead, we have photographic memories of familiar words and expressions, which we recognise when we are reading. Following that logic, it's easier for me (personally) to remember words in a foreign language if they are written in a familiar script (even in unrelated languages like Hungarian or Turkish) than related ones in a different script (Persian and Hindi are the classic examples). I'm not denying that the grammar must be easier: I'm learning Sanskrit and the grammar, although being incredibly complex, has a very marked Indo-European structure. However, I always feel that the "script effect" tends to be underestimated. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 4858 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 6 of 16 03 April 2015 at 5:36am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Because Persian, like English, is Indo-European, there are a few additional cognates: things like name/nām, thou/to, not/na, two/do, tooth/dental/dandān, murder/mordan "to die," donate/dādan, moon/māh. If you're familiar with other European languages, there may some additional obvious ones like mā "we," ki "who", panj "five," pa "foot." Presumably this is more likely than familiarity with Semitic languages such as Hebrew or Amharic that share vocabulary with Arabic. (Actually, the 2200 hour figure is probably under the assumption that you don't know another Semitic language, but the 1100 hour figure is probably not under the assumption that you don't know another Indo-European language.)
Many would say that Arabic grammar is tricker, though this is hard to quantify. The root-system thing is Arabic; Persian does not have it.
I would say this is the biggest factor. Arabic is hard for anyone who's not comfortable learning a language from the written form and learning a language from the spoken form, since the two are essentially separate (though closely related) languages. On top of that, much of the vocabulary and grammar is simply different and therefore must be learned twice. What the ILR refers to as learning "Arabic" is something more than learning one language, and something less than learning two languages. Also, Persian pronunciation is easier for English speakers. The pharyngeal consonants of Arabic give many people problems. I don't know if all that is enough to explain a doubling in time, but most factors seem to agree in making Arabic harder than Persian, and the combined effect could easily be that large. Edited by robarb on 03 April 2015 at 5:39am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ericblair Senior Member United States Joined 4510 days ago 480 posts - 700 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 7 of 16 04 April 2015 at 1:43am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
@Luso, that is a fair point on the script effect. Though I imagine that effect would be
the same for these since both use the same alphabet and drop short vowels, right? @robarb, that is a very clever observation about the underyling assumptions of FSI. I'd say it probably makes a lot of sense and is correct to think of it as you do. If Arabic is the root-system, what does Persian use? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4506 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 8 of 16 04 April 2015 at 4:47am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Tadjikistan has a big Tajik-speaking population though - this is another dialectal
variant of Persian along with Dari (spoken in Afghanistan mainly alongside Pashto). These languages get lumped together because they're spoken by Muslims in the same part of the world, and share the writing system, but as said Persian has way more in common with English historically speaking than with Arabic. However Arabic is like the Latin of the Muslim word - intellectual vocabulary in Persian often derives from Arabic, so you may experience a vocabulary bonus. I, for one, though, don't really like the FSI classification, because it focuses exclusively on monolingual speakers of English, and linguistic background is seldom that clear-cut in my experience (for me a lot of things become easier taking into account the fact that I was originally bilingual Dutch/English, so German was a lot easier for me). Furthermore it doesn't take into account such factors as social context and motivation. I find these ceteris paribus comparisons very hard to understand. In many ways, Chinese is much easier than French. Edited by tarvos on 05 April 2015 at 5:58am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
