does anyone up in this bitch know ARABIC

compared to a language with a roman alphabet?

or compared to chinese?

A lot of my girlfriend's relatives who go back to Lebanon for a month or two always come back speaking fluent Arabic (after only having a v. basic knowledge of the language before they went). I doubt they'd have any idea about written arabic though.

That's all I got.

semi-fluent

you mean semi-fluent, drooone

ha, why do I mean that?

speaking

because fluency means you fully understand and use conversational strategies to have technical conversations about complex abstract matters in hypotheticals.

semi-fluent then.
But, when they do come back, all they do is sit around speaking arabic. Like my gf's brother pretty much only speaks arabic around the house.

kind of annoying hactually.

did they grow up speaking arabic? because then they have a basic vocabulary and a basic understanding of grammar and a basic understanding of how verbs + adjectives modify nouns. i could easily become semi-fluent in farsi if i spent a month in iran, but then again it's my first language so it's already programmed in there somewhere (i speak like an elementary school student right now).

to be honest i think that the idea of "easy language" / "difficult language" is mostly socially constructed.

Yeah, I agree with you.

I don't think you could say they grew up speaking it. My gf was certainly surrounded by the language growing up, she has a verrrry basic vocab etc, but there's no way she can have a conversation (now or when she was growing up) in Arabic, but she's never had an inclination to learn either. Unlike her brother.

There are very few cognates.

hi! i'm lebanese, and that's hard. lol kidding :-)

arabic does strike as quite a hard language. i left it for a long time and now i hate talking to my grandmother, cuz i barely can, which i hate. oh god written arabic, tough.

There are very few cognates.

-- Casuistry, Wednesday, May 30, 2007 12:51 AM (4 minutes ago)

I guess what I was curious about is mostly whether anyone has experience learning a language very different from their native tongue, starting with no prior experience, at the college level. how long does it take reach a level of proficiency where you can, say, read a newspaper article and get the gist of it? part of me is convinced that it can't possibly be as slow-moving as high school, especially since only people who actually want to learn the language in question will be there... but then again, college classes meet less often, and a big part of learning a language is just spending as much time as possible immersed in it. is it going to take three or four semesters before I get beyond ordering food and constructing Fun With Dick And Jane sentences? I do not like being bored out of my skull.

to be honest i think that the idea of "easy language" / "difficult language" is mostly socially constructed.

on a related note, i read yesterday that tonal languages (like chinese) are easy for... chinese people! because of some genetic differences in the language processing part of the genome. so maybe not socially constructed but genetically.

reading the editorial page? 4 semesters of work is a safe bet.

where did you read that lfam? that sounds like some major correlation/causation fudging, seeing as we don't really even understand how the language-processing parts of the brain work.

dediu + ladd?

reading the editorial page? 4 semesters of work is a safe bet.

-- moonship journey to baja, Wednesday, May 30, 2007 1:23 AM (7 minutes ago)

My roommate is taking Arabic now, she's one week in to an intensive summer course and still hacking through the alphabet (and she's a top student). So expect a long learning curve, which I think is pretty obvious. Don't know about the grammar/conjugation/declension/etc yet.

where did you read that lfam? that sounds like some major correlation/causation fudging, seeing as we don't really even understand how the language-processing parts of the brain work.

-- moonship journey to baja, Tuesday, May 29, 2007 9:25 PM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

link: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn11939

And now it appears that there may after all be something in our genes that affects how easily tonal languages can be learned. Such are the findings of Dan Dediu and Robert Ladd of Edinburgh University, UK, who have discovered the first clear correlation between language and genetic variation.

Using statistical analysis, the pair showed that people in regions where non-tonal languages are spoken are more likely to carry different, more recently evolved forms of two brain development genes, ASPM and Microcephalin, than people in tonal regions. Dediu and Ladd accounted for geography and history, and the gene differences remained.

yes, dediu and ladd. i have no knowledge of their credibility or that of the new scientist. i just thought it was curious.

"Since both genes function in brain development, Dediu and Ladd propose that they may have subtle effects on the organisation of the cerebral cortex, including the areas that process language."

doesn't really seem like they know what the genes do exactly. i was being overenthusiastic in my original description of the article.

It makes sense that if you're used to hearing tones, you'd have an easier time with a tonal language. Just like if you're used to cases, you'd have an easier time with cased languages.

2 years seems ambitious for a language with no cognates, but generally speaking college language courses go twice as fast as high school courses, and if you really push yourself you can probably do it in 2 years?

well, I'd probably stick with it for at least 3 years, anyway, but I just wanted a rough idea of how quickly I could expect the class to move. I've never really learned a language starting from scratch (spanish is kind of a weird case because you get exposed to it so much just as background noise) so I honestly have no idea of how long it should take to reach a certain level of proficiency.

Immersion is your friend.

At my school there are first-year language classes that meet only once or twice a week. That seems completely idiotic and I'd avoid it if I were you. You really want to be hitting that part of your brain every day if possible.

it looks like it's two regular classes + two "recitation" classes each week. I am not really sure what this means; I am trying to draw an analogy based on science classes with labs but I can't really figure it out.

A recitation class I suppose is to help with pronounciation. To get you familiar with the language, you'd have to be able to look at words and phrases and know how to say it. Reading Arabic is a bit like reading English, you have to know for example how to look at "bough", "rough" and "through" and pronounce them correctly. It can help if you just think of the Arabic alphabet is sort of like a regular alphabet. Aleph, Ba, Ta = ABC. In this way, it's at least easier than say, Chinese which is all about having to memorize characters and their meanings.

I can read and pronounce Arabic fairly well, just don't ask me to translate cause most of the time I have no idea what it means.

I only studied a little Arabic in high school, which I've entirely forgotten, but I guess I wanted to pipe up and say DO IT. There is going to be a hurdle of learning a new character set, but I've found it to be more much rewarding to learn less related to my native language (my current moon language of choice is Japanese). The effort to learn some of the basics that seems to be scaring you off will be nothing compared to the general problems of getting fluent in whatever you study, so go for whatever interests you most.

Casuistry OTM w/r/t immersion. Consider something like Middlebury college's summer immersion program, as its in the States and usually has enough grant moneys to make it a cheap way to spend the summer.

Whoah, who takes Arabic in high school?? Besides, like, Arabs.

http://pix.epodunk.com/locatorMaps/mi/MI_21736.gif

I actually studied Arabic with my Latin teacher (Arabic had been his 'new' language for the better part of a decade, and he was happy to find a bunch of teenage boys who were willing to learn from him, even if some -- me -- weren't all that good about practice). A really incredible, kind guy; he used to make us wonderful mix tapes, and encouraged my questionable habit of translating DEVO songs into Latin. He died the year after I graduated from a fast cancer, I still miss him very much.

Being a good student has little or nothing to do with whether you can pick up a language well and at what rate IME. I've trained intensively on Korean, half-assed it through basic Mandarin, half-assed it in Japanese classes in college and tried to teach myself Urdu once for fun (before it became In Demand for certain fields). Arabic is about as hard as you let it be. You either give a shit about understanding the language and really want to be able to watch Al-Jazeera and grasp most of it one day, or you're wasting your time.

The difference between the hundreds of linguists who don't make the grade where I've come from and the few that do is that the ones who do well take an active interest in getting it, whether they do their own homework every night or not. They try to watch some movies and take a certain joy in being able to figure out the puzzle set before them. They learn the cusswords. They try to have conversations with native speakers for "fun." If you don't like puzzles and you hate subjects where you can't just "do the assignments" and get by, Arabic or any other language is totally impossible.

The guy I know who lived in a nearby Detroit suburb to Dearborn did my thing actually, the Japanese/Korean/Mandarin bit. Mostly Japanese. Then he married a Japanese girl. Two decades ago I imagine they'd have been lynched.

I should add that one's propensity for learning languages doesn't necessarily extend to all functions of communication - I got to where I could read a Korean newspaper without much trouble at all but still had to ask people to repeat themselves all the time. My aformentioned pal was a great speaker/listener but didn't do so well on the reading, etc. Your handicaps in English, whatever they may be, are typically going to show up more intensely in your foreign language ability.

sorry to hear that; it sounds like he was an awesome dude. thanks for your encouragement (although I think the Middlebury programs are a bit out of my price range, at least at the moment).

xpost: tombot it sounds like you are basically describing me (I vividly recall reading ahead in my 3rd or 4th grade French textbook and teaching myself all these verb conjugations that we were going to spend the next few months working on, just because I wanted to see how the language worked), so I will take that as a good sign. and I'm not really sure what my handicaps are in english; I'd like to think I'm pretty good at it. I do tend to speak pretty slowly, which would probably make native Spanish speakers think I was retarded or something, but honestly that's just my personality (I did debate in high school, so I can definitely switch to incomprehensible-onslaught-of-words mode when I need to).

Bummer, we didn't have Latin at my school, either.

Jacob, do we know each other? Either you're from Muskegon and you love the Bats and baseball, or there are a lot of weird similarities going on here.

If we go by the DLI categorization system, when I was there it was broken down like so, in time for the average class to reach a standard proficiency level from scratch:

Spanish/French = 25 weeks
Russian/Farsi = 47 weeks
Arabic/Korean/Mandarin = 63 weeks

average college class? ouch. that's kinda disheartening. but I'll just try to take it as a personal challenge :)

oh, nvm, I just looked up the DLI. I thought those numbers seemed pretty low (but it was mostly the ratio that I was looking at, i.e. Arabic being more than twice as hard as Spanish)

Hmmmm Laurel, I'm from around Boston and I sort-of love baseball, and feel that if I only knew what they were, I could love the Bats. I don't think we've met, but perhaps I'm your doppelganger!

"lol college"?

Hm all right, nevermind. I know a Jacob from Michigan who's studying Intl Relations or something with an emphasis on the Middle East who also is a music nerd so I thought he might have found his way to ILX. No worries.

one thing abt the DLI curriculum is that achieving a standard set of proficiency goals means the 25-week kids had to basically drink from the firehose regarding vocabulary while the 63-week kids had to learn all of maybe 30 new words a week

It's the reading issue that gets me with things like this. It's not as if you can't make great use of a language without knowing how to read/write -- a striking portion of the whole world is still illiterate -- but it seems like not being able to work with random text would start throwing roadblocks in the learning process, at some point: beyond basic learning tools with transliterations, you'd always need someone to speak with.

But anyway, if you really don't think you'll do more than coast through Spanish, then learn Arabic! So maybe it'll be hard, but (a) you'll know Arabic!, which is (b) probably the world language people in the west are worst about learning, and (c) seems like a really fun, flexible language, per all that florid hifalutin "classical Arabic" stuff, plus (d) an awesome, valuable skill, and plus (e) you'll always have "learn to read Arabic" as a life-goal on reserve for mid-life ruts or post-retirement free time. (And if you decide you want Spanish later, it's gonna be easier to pick up later in life than Arabic will be.)

(If you decide on Spanish, though, you should still attack it with the some zeal you'd have to spend on Arabic: learn something either way! I say this as someone who is incredibly crap at learning languages other than English and therefore recommends everyone else learn them in my stead.)

compared to a language with a roman alphabet?

learning new alphabets is not as hard as all that. I reckon that Arabic's non-IndoEuropean grammar and relative lack of vocabulary overlap would be the hard parts.

Having said that, Nabisco OTM in that Arabic would be a really kewl language to learn. Endless fun signing your name in Arabic script and reciting Quranic verses at parties etc.

I aspire to learning Arabic myself as together with French it seems to be the language to learn if you want to read academic stuff about teh middle of teh east (other than what is written in English, a lower proportion than you might think).

intermediate challenge = learning farsi, since the grammar is much more similar to english

yeah plus you can read ahmadinejad's blog

"lol college"?

do keep up

i wouldn't recommend it though unless you live in los angeles

we can get iranian state television on satellite now, it's much closer to watching some bizarro-world fascist state TV than you'd want it to be. complete with rac1st anti-israel cartoons every half hour, bizarre neologisms (can't use french words anymore), greasy-lens montage footage of public construction works set to classical music (particularly hilarious = five minutes of two dudes in a rowboat at sunset rowing past oil derricks in the gulf, set to pachelbel's "canon"), no neckties (too western).

also no women or white people! after 45 minutes, when the US ambassador suddenly showed, up he literally looked like caspar the friendly ghost (i'd forgotten what white people looked like). ok, there was one woman, she was practically in a burka (everything but the veil) and she was in a helicopter wearing big green headphones over her shawl, it was unintentionally hilarious.

that's something I would add, if you live in an urban area you can take mandarin or cantonese and always have some people to practice on/reading material to keep up/movies movies movies, arabic otoh is basically the web and al-jazeera. also everybody and his fuckin' mother-in-law is taking arabic around where I live so I'm kind of totally over the bandwagon on "arabic is cool/rare"

also chinese will actually respond to you in chinese when you try to talk to them and be really nice about how well you are coming along etc! Koreans be all like wtf white boy I don't like you mormon missionaries and I don't like the air force and I know you didn't learn that shit in college so fuck you I refuse to carry on a conversation in anything but English, this is my conversational practice time, not yours

where do you live that it's so 'hip' right now? I DON'T WANT TO BE THE LINGUISTIC EQUIVALENT OF A COMPUTER SCIENCE MAJOR IN 2002

Huh -- yeah, I can definitely see a huge boom happening for the decade, around DC for sure, but I'd guess the good/bad news is that we still aren't gonna get anywhere near a glut/overabundance of Arabic speakers, are we? (Haha non-Persian Americans learning Farsi = one step ahead of the worst-case scenario.)

OK here's your career plan bernard:

i saw an interview the other night with a mullah about whether the 1,000,000s of deaths in the iran-iraq war was justified or not, whether it was a waste or not

his response:

"so, the other day i was walking through the cemetary, and a woman was crying over a grave, and i was like, what's wrong, and she was like 'someone i love died fighting for islam', and i was all, 'FOOLISH WOMAN, (pointing at ground) why do you care more about someone you love who is eternally dead, than someone who loves YOU who can make you ETERNALLY LIVE? (turns around finger so he is pointing at sky)"

1. learn farsi 2. watch this station 3. become republican speechwriter 4. make millions

PS thanks for all the positive responses, dudes. nabisco, I think your list has just about convinced me... although I would add (f) gives a good foundation from which to learn other middle eastern languages, should I desire; (g) very different from english, which is good if you subscribe to linguistic determinism

baja: sorry bro, Bahá'u'lláh says that shit's bush-league

The Persian language is extremely sweet. The tongue of God in this dispensation has revealed in both Arabic and Persian. Persian, however, does not, and will never have, the magnitude of Arabic. Indeed, relative to it, all languages have been, and will remain, circumscribed.

(then again, I'm not Bahá'í, so I don't really have any reason to take his word over yours except that he's dead)

oh hey, i'm a baha'i

moonship journey to baha'i sonned in an auxiliary language beef

BUT SERIOUSLY THOUGH I don't know anything about baha'is except that they believe in the idea of an auxiliary language and I do too, which makes y'all okay in my book

I know they have a ridiculoid fancyass temple in Evanston, IL, which once served as both my ultimate "jog this far" goal and my less-pleasant "when you have walked all the way up here in the rain then CLEARLY you are having some personal issues" signpost.

Also they have some sort of "faith," IIRC.

it's sort of like ILE, except instead of "nabisco OTM" we're all "god OTM"

Laurel, funny that you thought you knew Jacob because when TOMBOT said he knew someone who lived close to Dearborn and learned mostly Japanese but also some Mandarin, I was like, "Matt?" -- until I got to the part where he married a Japanese girl. He might not have learned Korean, either, although he's currently doing doctoral work in linguistics at Northwestern.

Seals and Crofts converted to being Baha'is, IIRC. (Useless fact 31431243.)

"a croft of seals"

I went to a Baha'i wedding once. It was in a barn.

I actually studied Arabic with my Latin teacher (Arabic had been his 'new' language for the better part of a decade, and he was happy to find a bunch of teenage boys who were willing to learn from him

This is so my future. Hopefully not down to the "happy to find teenage boys willing to learn" perviness though. Well, you never know.

After I ever learn Greek, then Arabic, Old English, and Old Norse are next on the list. Then I can start worrying about Japanese maybe. Perhaps around then I will have actually picked up the Sanskrit bug that I hear goes around. I am convinced that I will have magically learned German through this process. Can Urdu be far behind?

Can anyone recommend good movies available on dvd featuring lots of Egyptian or Levantine Arabic?

I guess that could have been a separate thread... is there an arabic/MENA cinema thread?