Moderator:eskandar
shprakh wrote:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyldgH6pzmc
She advises her students to go for MSA because the differences between the dialects are very large. She even says sometimes it feels like some of them are different languages. Another of her reasons is that without Standard Arabic you're basically illiterate, which is true.
I wonder though if she really speaks MSA when she meets another native speaker (who is not an Arabic language teacher) from a country other than Palestine.
YngNghymru wrote:I would dispute that. I'm all for learning MSA, but a 'passive conversation' where you speak MSA and the other side speaks dialect is far more difficult than you'd imagine. In fact I'd suggest that the other way around is often easier in some countries! Taxi drivers will speak an MSA-esque form of their dialect with you in Jordan for example if they think you can't speak dialect properly, even if you're speaking dialect to them. If you learn to converse in Egyptian or Shami, everyone in the Arab world will understand you and you can just ask a person to speak more MSA-ly and ask them what words mean. Dialects do differ a lot and unless you're willing to learn to comprehend every dialect (which will come naturally with time I guess if you spend enough time absorbed in Arabic but in that case this entire point is moot since you'll be fluent anyway) then the idea of you speaking MSA and them responding in dialect is quite an amusing one. You might as well learn Egyptian or Levantine - which ultimately will probably put you in a better position to understand other dialects than a passing knowledge of MSA will - and converse that way.
Also people speaking MSA sound ridiculous outside certain contexts, and you might make people laugh.
rockisht wrote:you can speak dialect only in one country but you can speak MSA to everyone.
This.YngNghymru wrote:If you learn to converse in Egyptian or Shami, everyone in the Arab world will understand you
eskandar wrote:This.YngNghymru wrote:If you learn to converse in Egyptian or Shami, everyone in the Arab world will understand you
voron wrote:languagepotato: Is there an "official" way of spelling Maghrebi dialects with the Arabic alphabet? What written language do people use in everyday life? E.g. if I were a jeans seller at a market, and I wanted to put a note on my stall saying "I will be back in 15 minutes", how would I write it?
voron wrote:languagepotato: Is there an "official" way of spelling Maghrebi dialects with the Arabic alphabet? What written language do people use in everyday life? E.g. if I were a jeans seller at a market, and I wanted to put a note on my stall saying "I will be back in 15 minutes", how would I write it?
languagepotato wrote:
that's only partially true
that's only if you watch quite a lot of egyptian/shami tv, for example, i'm a native speaker of moroccan arabic, but understanding egyptian arabic is difficult for me, because most arabic tv i watch is moroccan. i understand most dialects just fine, but egyptian is like a different language to me, i recently tried to watch an episode of an egyptian series, i was like this is definitely arabic but WTF are they saying?
Merouane wrote:voron wrote:languagepotato: Is there an "official" way of spelling Maghrebi dialects with the Arabic alphabet? What written language do people use in everyday life? E.g. if I were a jeans seller at a market, and I wanted to put a note on my stall saying "I will be back in 15 minutes", how would I write it?
No, there is no official spelling of Maghrebi Arabic. When I chat with friends, we always use latin characters, although some people use the arabic script (to be frank I don't even know the layout of the arabic keyboard… -_- ). If I have to write down something I'd write it in Arabic script, with a very loose orthography… As far as I know, dialectal arabic has no official status in any Arab country (for now).
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