Arabic - voron

[kalemiye]

How is Arabic going Voron?

[voron]

Unfortunately I haven't had time for Arabic lately. I will resume it as soon as time permits.

Oh, and do you or anyone else happen to know if there is a website which I can use to generate word forms (conjugations, declensions etc) for any given Arabic word? I am all set to convert it to Kindle the way I did with Turkish.

[voron]

I have resumed Arabic after this long break (it's been 9 months!). Together with my other responsibilites it means that on workdays I do nothing but sleep-work-eat-study, but I just can't resist it.

I revised the alphabet and pronunciation, and I watched the videos from this youtube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/arabicdashstudio

The videos are really good, and I even considered buying the full course from them (the ones uploaded to youtube are teasers), but the price is really outrageous. The beginners' set costs £35 for each part and there are 4 part in total.

I am not sure at the moment what book I shall proceed with. The Russian one I started with is good for grammar, but as with most Russian language books its vocabulary is, let's put it mildly, not very well selected. They might start with words like "international relations" and "cultural heritage", but leave "my name is..", "I come from.." until a very late stage. Besides, its first edition was published somewhere around 60s, and even though it was revised a number of times, it still has traces of communist vocabulary.

Perhaps I should stick to Assimil. It was great for Turkish and Arabic looks ok as far as I can tell.

[voron]

Yesterday I created my first Arabic sentences.

I decided to postpone Assimil for a while, because I don't like it when I barely understand any grammar behind the lessons' sentences, and I went on with my Russian book (Kovalev, Textbook of Arabic Language). As I said before, its vocabulary choice is quite slanted, and besides it doesn't have any audio (which I am ok with, after all it's not the only source I am going to use, and I look up pronunciation of new words on forvo.com), but its grammar presentation is detailed and solid.

I am now at lesson 7 where the first text is presented (lessons 1-6 dealt with pronunciation and script). It teaches simple nominal sentences like "This is a student", "He is an Arab" etc. One of the exercises asks me to translate to Arabic:

1) He is a student. The student is active.
2) She is a teacher.
3) This is a school. The school is new.
4) This is a pencil. The pencil is big.
5) Muhammad is a professor.
6) Mother is ill.
7) Fatimah is a worker.
8) This is a man. He is an Arab.
9) This is a (female) student. She is diligent.
10) The suit is new.

Here are my answers:

1) هو طالب. الطالب نشيط.
2) هى معلمة.
3) هذه مدرسة. المدرسة جديدة.
4) هذا قلم. ال قلم كبير.
5) محمد استاذ.
6) ام مريضة.
7) فاطمة عاملة.
8) هذا رجل. الرجل عربي .
9) هذه طالبة.هى مجتهدة.
10) البداة جديدة.

[Meera]

عظيم! جملتك جيد جدا

[Babelfish]

You didn't connect ال with قلم in the 4^th sentence, but I suppose that's just a typo.

I wonder about sentence #6 - to the best of my knowledge, أم is just "(a) mother". If you mean "my mother" the proper word should be أمي, but I don't know if you're supposed to have learnt that yet in your textbook...

[voron]

Meera: !شكرا

Babelish: Thanks a lot for your comments!
Corrections:
#4: القلم
#6: The original Russian sentence said: Мама больна, so I think I was supposed to use the definite form (الأم, right?). And no I haven't learnt the possessive pronouns yet.

[Babelfish]

الأم مريضة sounds like a proper sentence: "the mother is ill". Ah, Russian and its lack of the definite article...

[voron]

Today I had a nice conversation on Skype with a guy from Egypt, and tried to read a few Arabic sentences with him, and surprisingly the most difficult thing for me to get right was not even the (in)famous ع or any of the emphatics, but the difference between خ and ح. His name is أحمد‎, and when I pronounced it aloud, he corrected me several times "It's not Ahmed, it's Ahmed!" I could hardly hear any difference...

[Meera]

Today I had a nice conversation on Skype with a guy from Egypt, and tried to read a few Arabic sentences with him, and surprisingly the most difficult thing for me to get right was not even the (in)famous ع or any of the emphatics, but the difference between خ and ح. His name is أحمد‎, and when I pronounced it aloud, he corrected me several times "It's not Ahmed, it's Ahmed!" I could hardly hear any difference...

The ح sounds like a really deep breath. And خ is like your coughing up something from the back of your throat like "KH". I dont know really how to describe, they are both hard sounds though.

[voron]

This year I want to devote more time to Arabic. I've picked a different book for my studies - it's Ibragimov's "Intensive course of Arabic" in Russian. Its contents is more or less the same as Sharbatov's Arabic, the book that I had previously chosen, but a big advantage is that it has sound recordings for each of its texts as well for word lists for each chapter. That's a big plus since I can now cut the sound file into separate words and export them into a flashcard program.
http://www.ozon.ru/context/detail/id/3376660/

The book consists of 2 parts, each containing 10 lessons, and it's supposed to take you to around B1-B2 level. I am planning to study 1 lesson per 2-3 weeks, so I should be able to finish both parts in a year.

Lesson 1 was revision for me: it teaches alphabet, pronunciation, and basic reading rules (like the assimilation of L in the definite article AL).
Lesson 2 was really dense: it teaches declension of nouns (including diptotes) and some general patterns for noun and adjective plurals; the construction of nominal sentences; demonstrative, personal and possessive pronouns; yes/no questions and questions with a question word; genitive construction (status constructus) and a few extra tidbits.

Shock #1: Arabic adjectives are as irregular as nouns, as far as formation of plural goes! I haven't yet seen a language where adjectives are irregular, and it strikes me as odd.

Shock #2 (not a real shock, but a difficulty anyway): Word memorization takes a lot of effort. Perhaps because of a different alphabet one visual cue is lacking, I don't know, but words simply don't stick. (I have experience with a non IE language, namely Turkish, and I don't really use any flashcards or other memorization techniques with it, I just read texts and the words stick.)

Motivational factor #1: I seem to have found a good study partner, a guy from Egypt who studies Russian. It's funny that he has to think to remember his MSA, but it's ok, I've already made up with the fact that MSA is not a spoken language.

Motivational factor #2: I seem to have improved my pronunciation to the level where I am actually understood.

Demotivational factor: I have learnt that I need a visa to go to Cairo, and I can get it in Moscow only. With a flood of tourists to Egypt (even recently after the revolution) I thought it would be a walk in the park to get there, but it seems like it is true for resort places only like Sharm el-Sheikh and Hurghada. I think Belarus has one of the stupidest visa regulations in the world, with its being affiliated neither to Europe nor to Russia.

I really want to go to an Arabic country one day, certainly no later than next (2014) summer when I already have some knowledge of Arabic.

Question to all: has anyone been able to talk to natives using MSA only? And I mean something that goes beyond just "How, how are you".

[eskandar]

Question to all: has anyone been able to talk to natives using MSA only? And I mean something that goes beyond just "How, how are you".

It's certainly doable but depends on how well-educated the person is and what their background is. Most often, I have communicated with a mix of what I know in MSA and what I know in colloquial dialects (mostly Egyptian), and very often I think that is the case with Arabs as well; they will tend to use a mix of their own dialect with MSA when speaking with non-natives, or even with native speakers from a very different dialect background. In my own experience I think I've had more people speak to me in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic--even when they are not Egyptians, but rather Moroccans or Libyans or whatever--than MSA, but that may be partly due to them sensing that I am a little more comfortable with ECA than MSA. Anyway, if your interlocutors are well-educated, they might have a whole conversation with you in MSA. Otherwise, they will probably still understand you if you speak MSA (unless they're illiterate), but might respond in their dialect, or a mix of colloquial and standard Arabic. Egypt would be one of those countries where the use of MSA is much lower because Sadat and Mubarak both (successfully) promoted narrow Egyptian nationalism (qutriyya) and the colloquial language over pan-Arabism (qawmiyya) and MSA, and because much of the Arab world understands Egyptian Arabic. Lebanon is another place where I think the use of MSA is relatively low. Some countries that claim to have good use of MSA (due to better education, or more cultural/political importance placed on MSA, etc.) would be Syria, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia (that I can think of right now).

[Meera]

Like Eskander I also noticed usually people talk to me in Egyptian rather than MSA. Unless it's someone from a Gulf Arab state. I noticed people from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain always talk to me in MSA and correct me if I use an Egyptian phrase, usually saying something like "that's not Arabic, that's Egyptian." But like Eskander said, it is probably due to the really good education in those countries.

[voron]

Thanks guys for your replies! Egyptian dialect seems really useful, I am really inclined to learn it after learning some MSA.

I want to share my little personal observation about dialects as well. When I was in Istanbul this summer, there were 2 guys at the hotel where I stayed, one from Lybia and another from Egypt, and when they talked to each other, it seemed absolutely seamless and spontaneous, I would bet they speak the same language. When I asked, they said each of them spoke their own dialect.

[kalemiye]

Demotivational factor: I have learnt that I need a visa to go to Cairo, and I can get it in Moscow only. With a flood of tourists to Egypt (even recently after the revolution) I thought it would be a walk in the park to get there, but it seems like it is true for resort places only like Sharm el-Sheikh and Hurghada. I think Belarus has one of the stupidest visa regulations in the world, with its being affiliated neither to Europe nor to Russia.

Then plan another trip to Turkey. In Mardin or Kilis Arabic is widely spoken , The demotivational factor here is that the dialect spoken there it's very different from MSA and almost nobody there gets any formal education in Arabic, rendering MSA useless. But people knows Turkish .

[voron]

I'm so happy, I just had my first online Arabic conversation with a girl from Morocco!

We both used the Latin alphabet which made impossible looking up words in the dictionary so I had to guess. At some point she said "Why don't you get married?" and although I didn't know the word for "get married", I could guess it because I already knew the words for "husband" and "wife". It turns out that the stories that the 3-consonant root system is helpful because you can guess many derived words if you know the base one were not lying!