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  • Commented

    @Mika McAuley 

    True, native Hebrew speakers seem to master Arabic better than natuve speakers of English or the Romance languages.

    As for trying to watch or listen to Arabic for someone who's learning it, you'll discover the biggest problem with the language: it's relative lack of reference and formal representation by a linguistic or historical body like most other 'big' languages. This is because of the very broad definition of 'Arab' and 'Arabic' where history, language, politics and religion get thrown in the mix.

    My advice would be start with a neutral source learning MSA (despite its relative uselessness as a communicative languages since no Arab uses it in day to day communication) but think of it as an intro to the target dialect you want/need to learn.

    Because without familiarizing yourself with a dialect (Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf, Magherebi), virtually all kinds of media will remain encrypted and seem like another language completely. Also be wary of the 'islamo-arabist' teachers who immediately start off by telling you the language of the quran is considered classical arabic (another sociopolitical and socioreligious rabbit hole).

    0 voted
    November 10, 2018
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  • Corrected
    0 voted
    November 15, 2017
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  • Commented
    You're welcome @Aliph. There is a large body of scholarly work about this issue of the language of the Quran, one book I can think of is The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran by Christoph Luxemberg. Although I'm familiar wih its thesis, i haven't read it myself, but it seems to confirm what a student of Syriac has personally told me and what many speakers of Syriac still living in Syria and Iraq today say. There are many other works by mainly German and British Orientalists who specialize in Near East or Islamic studies who have different opinions or varying degrees of agreement about this.. However, like i said earlier, all of this is rejected entirely by orthodox Islamic scholars.
    0 voted
    July 22, 2017
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  • Corrected

    Help me to understand the joke,please)

    You know, when I was born, the stork left me a block away from the house. Good thing I knew the address.


    It is a joke about the stork which is a large white bird that brings babies home. This is what parents say in some English speaking countries to their young children when they ask where babies come from.

    In the story the stork doesn't make mistakes and brings the right baby to the right house, but here he made a mistake. I think it could mean that the baby wasn't supposed to live, or could mean that he was adopted or maybe another meaning.

    so in short, the joke is about the stork making a mistake and the baby who knew the right address :D

    0 voted
    July 22, 2017
    1
  • Answered
    It seems grammatically correct but might sound better like this: 'I've gotten so used to you. I'll miss you so much when you're gone.' The phrase seems more likely a spoken sentence and would sound more natural with contractions the way i just wrote it. But if it is a line from a novel or a quote where emphasis is needed, then the way you wrote it would be more suitable.
    0 voted
    July 21, 2017
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  • Commented

    That is absolutely right @Patrick, and as @Aliph pointed out well, MSA material is either scarce, poorly written, or too local and in some cases all of that together. MSA doesn't have a formal body or institution that regulates it or collects it in a corpus say like Cambridge or Oxford do with English. Therefore, any advice or statements about 'proper' sources of learning Arabic (particularly from native Arabs) should be taken with a pinch of salt.

    Many experts and linguists specializing in Semitic languages tell us that contrary to what most Arabic would have you believe, the Quran is not a good example for learning either MSA or Classical Arabic. It contains many words from proto-Arabic and other Semitic languages as Aramaic (Syriac), Hebrew and Farsi. Some of the Prophet's contemporaries seemed to have problems with understanding it as the it was different from the Arabic used in pre-islamic Arabia such as the Arabic used by AlMutanabi and other famous poets of his era (which the linguists tell us is a much better reference for Classical Arabic).

    The lack of consensus over the meaning/interpretation of many verses of the Quran between the orthodox Sunni Quranic scholars, Shia/other scholars and secular linguists (many of them in the Islamic Golden age) has led to a lot of controversy which continues to this day.

    Even the 'Arabic' words in the Quran, many are either too archaic or already obsolete that we have stopped using them completely or use them with a different meaning or connotation. The same goes for Classical Arabic of the poets which modern lay Arabs (myself) included don't understand without extensive and often word by word annotation as in school or college literature classes.

    All in all, I would advice any learner of Arabic to focus on fluency rather than accuracy when learning MSA considering the unreliable sources, and learn to be tolerant of the ambiguity and simply accept the messiness of the situation!

    0 voted
    July 17, 2017
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  • Commented
    Thank you for the support @Assia!
    0 voted
    July 2, 2017
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  • Commented
    That is right @Hasia, MSA is always a good start to learn the more local Arabic dialects/varieties!
    0 voted
    June 20, 2017
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  • Commented

    @Aliph I think the reason Arabs 'seem' to be learning English and other European languages with ease rather than the other way around, is related to exposure (internet, academia, entertainment) and European Languages being taught as second languages in Arab countries (almost all study English, some French too).

    You'd be amazed at how foreign English or other Romance languages feel to Arab speakers (excluding some loanwords, words in common), but since they are forced to learn them (school/work), they don't pay much attention to these differences in syntax or phonetics. This is in contrast to Europeans or other learners who are interested in Arabic out of passion, curiosity or any other personal reason.

    0 voted
    April 12, 2017
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  • Commented

    You are right @Ellie Merryweather regarding the Arabic letters which seem so unlike Latin and Greek; even Cyrillic letters (used in Russian and some other Slavic languages) which look like a mix of Latin and Greek letters, still seem more familiar to the average European than Arabic script.

    Don't forget many other scripts seem just as bizzare to Arabs such as Georgian, Hindustani, Mandarin or Japanese.

    The initialy intimidating step of recognizing the letters, however, soon pales in comparison which other issues regarding learning Arabic. The messiest in my opinion is verb conjugation and and the issue of local dialects vs Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) which i briefly talked about in the article.

    0 voted
    April 12, 2017
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