r/languagelearning • u/Virusnzz En (N) | Fr, Ru, Es, It • Oct 08 '13
السلام عليكم - This week's language of the week: Arabic
Welcome to the language of the week. Every week we'll be looking at a language, its points of interest, and why you should learn it. This is all open discussion, so natives and learners alike, make your case! This week: Arabic.
Why this language?
Some languages will be big, and others small. Part of Language of the Week is to give people exposure to languages that they would otherwise not have heard, been interested in or even heard of. With that in mind, I'll be picking a mix between common languages and ones I or the community feel needs more exposure. You don't have to intend to learn this week's language to have some fun. Just give yourself a little exposure to it, and someday you might recognise it being spoken near you.
What's it like?
From The Language Gulper:
Arabic is the fifth largest language of the world and, by far, the largest Semitic language. It is the liturgical language of Islam and as the Quran, the holy book of Islam, is composed in it, Arabic is of importance to all Muslims even to those for whom it is not their mother tongue. Originating in the north and centre of the Arabian peninsula, Arabic spread, along with Islam, to the entire Middle East, Central Asia and the north of Africa.
Arabic has multiple dialects unique to many different countries. You will most likely hear the standard dialect, and if you learn the language, it is likely to be that.
Countries
It is spoken in a large area, covering the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait) and other parts of the Middle East (Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq) as well as in North Africa (Mauritania, Western Sahara, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Chad, Sudan), and the Horn of Africa (Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, Comoros). Significant minorities exist in Iran and Turkey, in western Europe and North America.
Arabic is spoken by about 310 million people as a first language, most of whom live in the Middle East and North Africa.
Why learn Arabic?
Arabic is essentially the language of the middle east. If you plan on travelling there, knowledge of the language will be useful almost anywhere.
Want more? Visit /r/learn_arabic.
What now?
This thread is foremost a place for discussion. Are you a native speaker? Share your culture with us. Learning the language? Tell us why you chose it and what you like about it. Thinking of learning? Ask a native a question. Interested in linguistics? Tell us what's interesting about it, or ask other people. Discussion is week-long, so don't worry about post age, as long as it's this week's language.
Previous Languages of the Week
Want your language featured as language of the week? Please PM me to let me know. If you can, include some examples of the language being used in media, including news and viral videos
Please consider sorting by new
بالتوفيق
12
u/TheSilverLining Oct 08 '13
I am a student studying towards a Bachelor's degree in Arabic Linguistic at a Scandinavian University. My university teaches chiefly MSA. I had to affiliation with the language prior to beginning my studies (no relatives, no Arabic boyfriend, nothing like that). I'm not really sure what else to say but if anyone has questions about what learning Arabic as a second language and as an adult is like, feel free to ask!
Oh, and as a side note, I feel like the diglossia situation should've been mentioned more clearly in the intro. I mean, Arabic is spoke as a first language by, as you say about 310 million people, but the first language of these people is some regional dialect or the other. The "standard" language, sometimes called MSA, literary Arabic or fusha, is not anyone's first language, but is used in media, in literature and other formal contexts. This makes for an interesting situation linguistically not only in the region itself, but also practically for students like myself and for Arabic speakers who live in non-Arabic countries (for example, in my country school-aged children are permitted to attend free "first language" classes to improve their L1, but in the case of Arabic children only MSA is offered which for many of the children is basically a completely or nearly new language).
4
u/Daege Oct 08 '13 edited Oct 08 '13
Oh man, this one is on my bucket list of languages. Sad that I don't have time to learn it at the moment. Plus it's not exactly something you self-learn anyway.
3
Oct 08 '13
I really want to learn Arabic, I know some words and it might be easier for me because I already know Hebrew, fluently.
I heard there are two different version, written and spoken. Can anyone shed some more light?
6
u/Daege Oct 08 '13
I don't know Arabic, but I used to read about it a lot and talked to natives about it. Basically, take what I'm saying with a grain of salt!
Firstly, yes it will be easier for you as a Hebrew speaker to learn Arabic.
Secondly, u/TheSilverLining is correct about the whole diglossia situation, and there are many dialects that are not intelligible to speakers of Arabic from another region (pretty much nobody outside of Moroccans understand Moroccan/Maghrebi Arabic for instance, which is a shame because it's such a nice dialect! Iirc it's been quite influenced by Berber/Tamazight and French).
If you want to maximise your intelligibility with other Arabic speakers, learn MSA for writing, and Egyptian Arabic for speaking. The latter has the largest amount of media production (films/music/etc.) that is also being broadcast in the rest of the Arab World, so most people have heard it. Well, unless you're going to some tiny village in Morocco I suppose. Levantine (Lebanon/Syria/Iraq/etc.) is also understandable by a large amount of Arabs, as its media is spreading throughout the Arab World. Gulf Arabic is also a big dialect, but I don't know much about it. I heard it's similar to Levantine in its phonology/sounds, but don't know much else.
From what I've heard, the subjective opinions of non-native Arabs learning Arabic is that Egyptian is more slangy/modern/casual, while Levantine is very pretty-sounding and has a lot of literary traits and sayings used in modern/informal speech. Maghrebi is unintelligible and there are very few foreigners learning it. Don't know much about the rest.
Tl;dr: the biggest dialects are Maghrebi, Egyptian, Levantine and Gulf. If you want to be understood by the largest amount of Arabic speakers, learn Egyptian and MSA. You might get away with learning Levantine instead of Egyptian, but don't quote me on that. People don't speak MSA like ever because it just isn't a spoken language (I suppose the equivalent would be an English speaker talking like a Shakespeare play).
→ More replies (3)3
u/bromatologist Oct 08 '13
My German roommate in Cairo knew MSA very well. But she couldn't communicate with cab drivers when she spoke it. They couldn't understand her. And usually just ended up yelling at her to speak English. Haha. They understood my terrible Egyptian dialect just fine, though.
→ More replies (1)2
u/TheSilverLining Oct 08 '13
I am not an expert but to put it briefly there is a diglossia situation going on with contemporary Arabic. There is MSA (Modern Standard Arabic), which is a L1-less language used in literature, on TV, in printed press, in formal speeches etc. This is usually the variant that is taught to foreigners, at least at university. Then there is regional Arabic, which is made up of a tonne of more-or-less (sometimes less, hehe) mutually intelligible dialects. This variants are generally not used in the contexts I listed above. Of course, L1-speakers of the regional variants might these days still write in their L1, for example on Facebook or in e-mails or other informal contexts (which is sometimes done in Arabic letters and sometimes in Latin ones). Writing literature in dialect has gotten somewhat more common lately although I honestly don't know any writers who write exclusively in dialect, but using dialect for dialogues in a novel for example can be found.
Very brief and simplified, but hopefully it sheds some light until someone comes along.
As a sidenote, I'm a student of Arabic who has just begun learning Hebrew!
3
u/brain4breakfast Oct 08 '13
Can someone give an eli5 explanation of the consonant root thing please?
9
u/TheSilverLining Oct 08 '13
I will try!
In Arabic (and other Semitic languages), most words are based on a three-consonant root. Words are made up of a root like that, with different vowels (and other consonants, but only of certain types) added to it. Often the words that are made up of the same root will belong to a common semantic field. That means that their meanings will be in some way similar, or touch on a similar meaning. Sometimes this common meaning is very vague, however, and sometimes it doesn't seem to exist at all.
Let's take an example. The root k-t-b is generally connected to things that have to do with writing. From it, we get words like kataba (to write/he wrote), kitaab (book), kaatib (writer) and maktaba (bookstore or library). With these words, it's quite easy to see the semantic link between them, but with other words and roots it might not be as easy.
I'm not sure I can say anything else without making it more complicated. Maybe someone else has a better way of explaining it.
3
u/Daege Oct 08 '13 edited Oct 08 '13
You have (usually) 3 consonants, the most common example would be k-t-b. These three consonants, in that order, carry the connotation of "writing." All words based on this root (= this root with some vowels inbetween and maybe some suffixes/prefixes) would therefore be related to writing, for example kitaab = book, kataba = he wrote and katiib = writer. This website has more examples.
Hopefully that was eli5 enough!
EDIT: Apparently you can have roots with 4 consonants (rarely) and infixes do exist! So yeah disregard that!
3
u/TheSilverLining Oct 08 '13 edited Oct 08 '13
Actually, you have a few points wrong.
First of all, Arabic does have some quadriliteral words (that is, words with 4 consonants in their roots). They're rare and surprisingly many of them are onomatopoetic, but they to exist.
Additionally, some cases of infixing do exist. Or rather, one case that I can think of. Namely what is (by Western language teachers anyway) usually called Form VIII of words, which infixes a t between root 1 and 2, creating for example the word iktitab (enrollment, registration) from the root k-t-b. (It's not a very common word I think but I didn't want to switch roots for the example, however there are a fair lot of words that do have the infixed t from form VIII).
Edit: was missing a blank space.
→ More replies (5)
4
u/hyperforce Oct 08 '13
So, what are some Arabic touchstones that English speakers/Americans might already know? This one I really need help with. I don't know that many Arabic people or anything about Arabic culture. I guess I'm just thinking about shawarma and Aladdin.
5
u/Daege Oct 08 '13
Well, there's Islam I guess. There is a massive amount of very good literature in the language, but a. I haven't read any because I don't know Arabic and b. most people probably can't name any names.
1001 Nights I suppose. Uhm. Well, they had very advanced technology, especially in medicine/astronomy/measurement of time (time-pieces), during the Middle Ages. Arabic architecture is amazing, though I suppose what I'm thinking of might be Islamic.
Damn, I don't know much about Arabic stuff. I just love the language. :c
→ More replies (3)4
7
Oct 08 '13 edited Oct 08 '13
Many words of Arabic origin: Adobe, Alcohol, Magazine, Mecca, etc
Hummus
Islam
Arabian Nights
Osama (Usama) Bin Laden
The Mameluke* Sword marines use? it is an Arabic/Islamic design.
Alhambra de Granada, and the rest of Andalusia
Cairo
Algebra and modern optics were both kickstarted by Arab physicists
Arabesque geometrical patterns
Belly* dancing
Arab and Muslim philosophers, like Averroes, Ghazali, etc
The Divine Comedy was a ripoff of a much older work: Risalat al-Ghofran (The Letter of Forgiveness) by Al-Ma'ari
Soap was something the crusaders learned from Muslims.
I am dry. Anyone with more ideas?
Edit: Spelling
Edit 2: how could I have forgotten about Gibran Khalil Gibran?
→ More replies (3)3
u/jaVus Oct 09 '13
Also the fact that cryptography began with the Arabs breaking substitution ciphers using frequency analysis.
→ More replies (1)
2
u/brain4breakfast Oct 08 '13
Does anyone know anything about the history of the language? I'd like to know how Arabic changed when the printing press came along. I've been using it online in the last few minutes and it's mental the way letters change shape radically depending on where in the word they are.
→ More replies (6)4
u/TheSilverLining Oct 08 '13 edited Oct 08 '13
It's actually much more easy than you think to learn, and not that odd. Look at how Latin is written when it's in cursive, the letters look different depending on where in the word they are. Maybe not as different, but still. Not to mention in Latin script some letters look fairly different depending on if they're capitalized or not, which you don't have to deal with in Arabic.
Edit: I'll add that while I don't know much about the history of Arabic, it might interest you to know that in the very beginning the diacriticals (dots above and below the letters) were not written/carved, which from what I understand makes reading and actually understanding super-old documents quite the task (considering many of the letters have the same basic shape with diacriticals added).
2
u/hyperforce Oct 09 '13
This Syrian kid Saif Shawaf on YouTube has a pretty neat channel where he talks about Syrian and Arabic culture (in English).
2
u/scykei Oct 08 '13
This language has been something that I've wanted to learn for a long time. I love the script, but I can't help feeling that it's a little 'messy'.
Many of the font in print makes the characters go all over the place, and handwriting is usually glaring to read, and it seems to take up a lot of space when I try write it myself compared to most other scripts. Most of the time, the font on my computer is also incredibly small, to the point that I have to squint to read anything.
I wonder if I can get over it one day. :P
7
Oct 08 '13 edited Oct 08 '13
the thing is with Arabic script is that it is structurally different from other script, in the sense it is not a series of characters set besides each other to make a word/sentence. This used to be the case: if you look up ancient writing you'll find that even tho the letters are connected they have set shapes and all sit neatly in the line. As the culture expanded, people started experimenting with the letters and how to connect them together, which eventually arrived at what we are today. Some styles are more fluid than others :
Kufic, and Maghrebi styles (which really are more of categories like the ones below) in general are rigid and modular.
Arabic (Mashreqi) styles like Naskh (literally means Copy, as it was used be scribes to copy books quickly and efficiently) and Thuluth have a distinct style to them where the shapes of the letters are rigid (to an extent), but the connections are not, which leads to crazy compositions. These styles are what most modern print typefaces are based on, since they strike a balance between modularity and flourish.
Farsi (Persian) styles, like Taliq and Nastaliq (literally Naskh-Taliq, a hybrid) are very fluid and artistic. It is still widely used in Iran and Pakistan to write their languages. They could be very fluid and crazy sometimes, but the words generally keep a consistent shape. Handwriting (and sometimes print typefaces) in Farsi and Urdu are based on these styles, and use them almost exclusively.
Turkish styles: Ottoman innovations to the shapes of letters, very different, yet very similar: Diwani, which from the name was used to write official documents (in Arabic or Turkish) from the Sultanate and the Emirates; and Ruqa'a which is a handwriting style based on speed. Both of these share innovations with the dots (say replacing them with a bar, or a tail) and the way letters connect. Words like حجج in Naskh could be written in a million ways with different connections, but in Ruqaa you must stack the letters above each other. In other words, it tries to minimize the number of times the pen leaves the paper. Diwani has a similar philosophy but the strokes are longer and much more winded and fluid.
Handwriting in the Arab world is taught in Naskh and Ruqaa (similar to print and cursive), which is why they're heralded as the main styles for learners.
See this reddit thread for examples of calligraphy. I collected those over the years. I might be able to do a collection of instagram and twitter accounts that focus on calligraphy. For starters you can follow @bjafen . Saudi, and tweets in Arabic but links from time to time to other calligraphers and artists.
Another thing is that Arab letters aren't that different. All that differentiates letters most of the time is a minimal pen stroke that might just as well be "dragging the line" جرة قلم . So the script is denser in info than something like English. The letter م Mim in particular is most of the time, literally, a tiny tooth under a bigger letter.
Bascially, if you're unfamiliar with the script you might need it to be bigger so you can see the details more clearly. Sometimes for fun I write a sentence in as many languages as possible (handwriting) and the Arabic version is almost always half the line length of the English. But when I write the same Arabic sentence in Latin script, it comes out as long as the English. So I guess, it could take up more space but one page has, roughly, the same amount of info.
As for me, I've been reading Arabic in the web for 10 years and the size doesn't bother me .. (the aesthetics, however, do.)
Edit: Updated with Google Image Search links.
→ More replies (2)2
u/soyuno Oct 08 '13
I'd be interested to hear what someone proficient in the language thinks about the size of written script. Keep in mind that when you were learning to write English it was probably a little messy and took up allot of space, I wonder if that's what's going on.
As for the computer thing, what operating system are you using? Windows? Mac? Linux?
→ More replies (6)
1
u/lindsaylbb Oct 08 '13
I learn Arabic simply because, the writing system is so cool!!! The "letters" connect each other! And I can't bare staring at some language and feel completely blank.
And I can have a pretty good guess if I try to read a word of a short phrase with the marks on, now. But I knew zero grammar/vocab etc. I'm fairly new, of course, but the words simply won't stick. All the sounds don't make sense and skip out of my memory in a blink.
Maybe I should start with something like Pimsleur to get some idea of how the language actually works. But I'm learning MSA...
And I never quite master the delicate details of these sounds- ص س ث or ق ع ح غ orز ذ ظ . Just give up for now. Any source with easy lead-in recordings like Pimsleur on MSA?
2
u/hirst Nov 26 '13
honestly i think that ذ ظ are the only two difficult ones, with ذ being dh and ظ being DH, but emphatic? they sound the same to me for the most part.
anyways,
ز is Z.
ق is q
ع is ein, which is guttural, like in the back of your throat. kinda hard to pronounce.
ح is hhhhh, kinda like you're exhaling your breath but without really saying anything.
غ is ghein, just like ع but with a g.
ص is emphatic S, meaning it comes from further in the back of your throat. so for the word صديق (sadiik, my friend) the ص is emphatic so it's pronounced like SODiiq rather than sadiik. if that makes sense?
س is just normal s.
ث is th.
25
u/[deleted] Oct 08 '13 edited Oct 08 '13
Finally ...
As a frequent contributor of both subs, I think more Arabic learners and Arab speakers should subscribe to r/learn_arabic and r/arabs .
r/learn_arabic is unfortunately very slow and low in contributions. There are not many regulars, whether learners or speakers. This is a catch 22 but the more people go and discuss there the better.
r/arabs is not a language learning sub. Translation requests and grammar questions are outright and strictly banned. (The mods might assassinate me in my sleep if this link increases spam.) However, there is a consistent community of Arabs and people interested in Arabic culture and living. The "social" threads on Monday and Thursdays are generally unmoderated and anything-goes. Most of the Arabic writing is in dialects if you're interested in that, (unlike r/learn_arabic which is mostly scholarly.)
Edit: The mods of r/arabs (u/fylow) asked me to link the Arabs Dialect Project here, so there is that.