eskandar wrote:Does anyone have any favorite materials for Palestinian?
There is this resource which looks very nice (and is available online):
https://www.amazon.com/Colloquial-Pales ... 0982159536
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eskandar wrote:Does anyone have any favorite materials for Palestinian?
vijayjohn wrote:LangMedia. I tend to use materials from a whole bunch of Levantine varieties, though, and personally don't care that much about whether they're Palestinian vs. Jordanian vs. Lebanese vs. Syrian (or Damascene vs. North Levantine Arabic or whatever).
Saim wrote:Why not? Once you're good at speaking it shouldn't be too hard to learn to read. The Hebrew script is pretty close to the Arabic script as well.
Saim wrote:I don't think you need to worry that much about stress. The stress is always either on the ultimate or penultimate syllable, except in loanwords. IME when you make a mistake it's pretty easy to learn from because it's like "oh ok, it's the other one".
vijayjohn wrote:Because the only scripts he knows are Roman, Cyrillic, and Arabic and he's scared to have to learn another one. I've sort of tried having this conversation with him before.
Eskandar bhai, have you ever considered learning Malay or Indonesian? EDIT: Or an African language? Maybe Swahili?
voron wrote:There is this resource which looks very nice (and is available online):
https://www.amazon.com/Colloquial-Pales ... 0982159536
eskandar wrote:I'm too anal for that, so I check the stress for just about every word I learn from a source like Assimil which doesn't mark it before making flashcards and trying to commit the word to memory. I'd rather learn it right the first time. Luckily I have access to native speakers and Wiktionary is pretty good in this regard.
eskandar wrote:Thanks, I'll check it out.
I can read the Hebrew script - actually it was the first script I learned to read after Latin, as a child, though I did have to re-learn it when I started doing Hebrew last winter.
The problem is more the vocabulary. My real interest is in speaking, and there are too many words I'd have to learn in order to be able to read - especially literary words that aren't used much in speech. I've encountered this when reading a play by Hanoch Levin, which was itself already one of the most colloquial pieces of writing you can find in Hebrew.
vijayjohn wrote:Interesting, that sounds a lot more like Arabic and a lot of the major Indian languages (including Malayalam) than I would have ever guessed.
voron wrote:I liked Arguelles's Arabic!
eskandar wrote:though this year I might finally start doing Italian, a language I've been telling myself I should study (without doing anything about it) since 2010, if not longer
eskandar wrote:His latest video seemed especially vain.
The Arabic professor gamely participates, but Arguelles clearly understands very little of what is being said.
dEhiN wrote:eskandar wrote:though this year I might finally start doing Italian, a language I've been telling myself I should study (without doing anything about it) since 2010, if not longer
Why "should"?
Yasna wrote:Funny you perceived it that way. I thought it was a nice little introduction to some significant Arabic literature that most viewers (myself included) were probably largely unaware of. And it was fun and inspirational to hear the conversation be held in Arabic.
Just wondering, but how did you ascertain that? Based on the subtitles, I got the sense that Arguelles was limited in his ability to respond intelligently to points the Arabic professor was making, but I didn't notice that he was having significant trouble understanding what was being said.
eskandar wrote:Bref, to the non-francophone, I seemed like I was totally fluent, whereas to the French-speaking waiter, I probably seemed like an idiot.
eskandar wrote:If the goal was to introduce Arabic literature, he should have just had the professor speak, or at least did a proper interview where the host asks short, open-ended questions and the guest gives long answers. I think one of the things that annoyed me was that he's got a professor of Arabic literature in the room, and rather than really interviewing him about Arabic literature--something his guest has devoted his life to studying--he uses the guy to make himself look good, when he's an utter dilettante on the subject. Many of his questions sounded like "here is what I think; do you agree that I am smart?" (And the professor was very polite: "yes, yes, you are so smart, that's exactly right.") But to be fair, if you found it informative and inspiring, then it's clearly achieved some purpose.
His English subtitles for the Arabic professor get some parts wrong, and leave some things out entirely, which I imagine were words and phrases he didn't understand well enough to translate. I didn't watch the whole video, but even in the part I watched, I think there was an occasion or two when the professor asked Arguelles a question and Arguelles didn't understand at first, struggled to respond, or his response showed that he didn't really understand the question. Mostly the professor says something and then Arguelles says something unrelated, or says جيد ("good" - and that's not even the right word in the context, where حسناً would be better) and then moves on to a different topic. All of that left me with the impression that he got the gist or broad strokes of what was being said but didn't understand much more than that. But again, maybe I'm being uncharitable here.
eskandar wrote:I'm just under halfway finished with the Kalila wa Dimna reader in Arabic.
I've recently dabbled a bit in Levantine Arabic
Persian: too much a part of my daily life for me to need to make specific plans.
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