Study plan if the only goal is "reading" - Arabic vs. an 'easy' language

[drp9341]

How would you guys approach a language which you only wish to be able to read, but you will probably want to be able to speak it in the future?

If for example, you wanted to learn to read Arabic, what would you do?

Given these two conditions:
1. Your goal is to be able to read more or less whatever interests you.
2. You want to also set yourself up so that if you wanted to learn to speak Arabic (Modern Standard Arabic) in the future, you'd be able to.


If it was Dutch, for example, I would probably do Assimil, (but I wouldn't spend too much time shadowing, or trying to practice word recall,) and work through a grammar workbook. Then start with graded readers, keep notes of all the new words in a notebook, and then progress towards reading stuff made for adult native speakers.

For Arabic though, there are a lot of other factors that come into play. The lack of (many) written vowels and many unique phonemes come are the first to come to my head.

How would you approach Arabic vs. an "easy" language?

[Querneus]

tl;dr: Standard Arabic is mostly a written language anyway. To speak Arabic, learn a spoken variety/dialect. Anyway, for written Arabic, you can simply grab some textbooks to work through, read some grammar while doing/making exercises, and use some readers. (I don't address the question of Standard Arabic vs. an easier language for learners who know European languages, but hopefully anybody interested in learning Arabic can get something out of this too long post.)



Once upon a time (a decade ago) I had a real intention to learn Arabic. I didn't actually find it that difficult and was doing just fine (at least in terms of learning a non-European language, the likes of Dutch or Spanish are naturally a lot less difficult), but I lost interest in it after a couple years. I really want say it's somewhere in the back-burner, but I'd rather learn a whole bunch of other languages before Arabic now, and life is only so long.

The funny thing about Standard Arabic is that it's really mostly a language you just read, write and listen to (when listening to newscasters, to someone reading something aloud, and a few other situations). You don't need to be able to speak it much. If, in the future, you'd like to speak it, then learning an actual spoken variety would serve you much better. You can speak to Arabs in Standard Arabic, but they will generally respond in some kind of spoken dialect (maybe heavily influenced by Standard Arabic, maybe not), which means that in oral communication you'll be regularly facing colloquialisms whether you like it or not. In fact, I would say you should learn something about the colloquial Arabics regardless, since modern written media also features colloquialisms with some frequency, the frequency being just a lot lower in Arabic when it is written than when it is spoken.

I don't think the phonemes give people too much trouble... Read some description of how you technically make them, and pay a lot of attention when you listen to various people or recordings saying them.

The omission of many written vowels... it is a source of confusion or doubt for a learner now and then, but you'll find it's not so bad. It is admittedly annoying that sometimes you can't immediately learn the pronunciation of a new word though, even though you can guess the meaning. Verbs in the passive voice also often look like their active voice version because of vowel omission. Writers will often help you by actually writing the first vowel, but often assume you'll identify the verb as a passive without any help just as well.



If I wanted to learn to read Standard Arabic, I would personally do something like the following. I make no guarantees this might work for you though.

1. Work through Haywood and Nahmad's A New Arabic Grammar of the Written Language (1962). It says "grammar" in the title, but don't be fooled, it's really a textbook. The written Arabic that is taught is quite old-fashioned, but that doesn't matter much. An answer key can be obtained.

2. At basically the same time, work through Schulz et al.'s Standard Arabic: An Elementary-Intermediate Course (2001, archive.org). It is a bit more difficult and faster-paced than the previous book, but I think it serves as a good companion for Haywood and Nahmad's textbook, especially because the written Arabic taught is more modern. It comes with an answer key (found at the end of the book).

3. Read an Arabic grammar or two. (Warning for this section: I'm a weird guy who really likes grammar.)
- I liked Faruk Abu Chacra's Arabic: An Essential Grammar (I read the 1st edition from 2007, but a new 2nd edition was published in 2017). It covers a lot of the basic stuff and can be read alongside step 1 (in fact, I read it before trying to work through a textbook...).
- I also have nothing but words of praise for the Defense Language Institute's All the Arabic you Never Learned the First Time Around (1997) when it comes to basic grammars. It's a very friendly grammar (as you can tell by its title). You can read the DLI's grammar for free on a lot of Internet places (they have made it freely available). You might want to read the authors' opinion on "how to be a good Arabic student".
- Much of the pain of learning Arabic grammar really comes from learning to conjugate verbs. Now, the real difficulty of learning Arabic as a whole is in the vocabulary, but as for grammar it's the verb forms. It's no walk in the park to get good at producing conjugated verbs correctly. Arabic conjugation is funny because it's full, chock-full, jammed full, of regular patterns (like the fact imperfect passives across forms begin with the vowels u-a-, u-a-a- or u-a-a-a-), it's just that the number of patterns is large. There are actually only 2 or 3 irregular verbs. Karyn Ryding's A Reference Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic (2005) is good for this, because she covers verb conjugation quite thoroughly (her grammar is weak in a lot of other respects though). She does not provide exercises, but I'd do both raw paradigm drills and would also make up sentences using difficult conjugation patterns.
- For syntax, El-Said Badawi et al.'s Modern Written Arabic: A Comprehensive Grammar (1st edition 2002, 2nd edition 2015) is very good. My main quibble is that they barely mention compound verbs (كان يفعل and such) and the uses of participles (فاعل، مفعول), but your textbooks will do an okay job at that. Also, unfortunately I have to say the romanization had quite a number of typos (at least in the 1st edition), but the original sentences in Arabic letters were fine. It is otherwise an excellent reference grammar. Do not be intimidated by its size (800+ pages), much of its meat is just example sentences. You'll also find it makes a lot of "links" to Cantarino's Syntax of Modern Arabic Prose (3 volumes, 1974-1976). Cantarino's book is very long, at about 1.5 times the length of Badawi et al.'s grammar. I'm not sure I'd recommend it, but hey, all its example sentences are taken from 19th and early 20th century novels, each of which comes with a translation, so maybe you can mine those...

4. Work through Dickins and Watson's Standard Arabic: An Advanced Course (1999). It says "course" in the title, but don't be fooled, it's really a reader, with many readings from real-world printed media. For this step you can use any other readers of your choice really, I'm just mentioning this one because it is in some sense a kind of sequel to Schulz et al.'s textbook. The aim would be to be helped to graduate to reading real texts.




A final comment that is worth clarifying now: most Standard Arabic textbooks use what is called "full pronunciation" in English. Arabic is funny in that its case endings (nominative, accusative, genitive) and quite a number of the verbal endings are optionally pronounced. "Full pronunciation" means that cases and verbal endings are fully distinguished, but actually, most Arabs just use the so-called "short pronunciation" most of the time, dropping most of the optional things. For example, you can look at a noun like فلافل (meaning: 'falafel', the food), and pronounce it falaafilu (nominative) or falaafila (accusative/genitive), OR simply use the short pronunciation: falaafil. You may also come across the term "pausal pronunciation", where full pronunciation is used for most words in a sentence except for the last one which is read with short pronunciation (so both pronunciation methods are combined).

This is not a problem because case and those verbal ending details don't actually do much in practice. An example contrasting pausal vs. short pronunciation:
هناك طرق كثيرة لإعداد الخبز تختلف من مجتمع إلى آخر
Strict transliteration: hn´k _ Trq _ kθyrä _ l´(i)`d´d _ ´lxbz _ txtlf _ mn _ mjtm` _ ´(i)la _ āxr
Pausal: hunaaka Turuqun kaθiiratun li-i`daadi l-xubzi taxtalifu min mujtama`in ila aaxar
Short: hunaaka Turuq kaθiira li-i`daad al-xubz-i taxtalif min mujtama` ila aaxar
Translation: 'There are many ways of preparing bread that differ from one community to another.'
(I added those underscores to emphasize word boundaries in the strict transliteration.)

Teaching full/pausal pronunciation to Arabic learners, as most textbooks do, makes sense, because you have to know about case for some of the declensions and about the verbal endings for some gender/number combinations if you want to write correct Standard Arabic, as these do show up in spelling some of the time. Just know that when something is not spelled out with consonants, it is generally omitted in "short pronunciation".



أتمنى لك حظا سعيدا
´(a)tmna _ lk _ HZ´ _ s`yd´
atamannaa la-ka HaZZan sa`iidan
I wish you best of luck.

[drp9341]

I've never studied any of the classics (Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanscrit etc.)

Latin fascinates me, since there are so many cool books and first hand accounts from ancient romans, but I don't see myself studying Latin anytime in the near future.

All the languages I've learned thus far, I've learned with the primary goal of speaking and listening at a high level. I've always treated reading and writing as either a tool to practice and learn new vocabulary and structures. In Italian for example, I've never read a novel cover to cover. I've read tons of blogs, wikipedia articles, academic journals, random news etc. online, but never an actual book. With Spanish I read lots of books back in the summer o 2012 when I was doing an exchange in rural Peru and had no internet or phone for 10 weeks, but since then I've only read one book, and it was simply because the book happened to look interesting, and it was about Mexico, written by a Mexican author about the fall of the Aztec empire.

In Polish I've read 2 books. However it was in order to improve my Polish, and not for the joy of reading itself.

I find that when I start to read in Spanish or Italian, the first few pages are hard, then I forget the book is even in another language.

I always assumed that people never bothered with pronunciation or listening practice if their goal is to read. However it makes sense that they would in fact focus on all four major skills.

The same way I used the written language to improve my speaking/listening, one would inversely use the spoken language to improve their reading skills.

tl;dr: Standard Arabic is mostly a written language anyway. To speak Arabic, learn a spoken variety/dialect. Anyway, for written Arabic, you can simply grab some textbooks to work through, read some grammar while doing/making exercises, and use some readers. (I don't address the question of Standard Arabic vs. an easier language for learners who know European languages, but hopefully anybody interested in learning Arabic can get something out of this too long post.)



Once upon a time (a decade ago) I had a real intention to learn Arabic. I didn't actually find it that difficult and was doing just fine (at least in terms of learning a non-European language, the likes of Dutch or Spanish are naturally a lot less difficult), but I lost interest in it after a couple years. I really want say it's somewhere in the back-burner, but I'd rather learn a whole bunch of other languages before Arabic now, and life is only so long.

The funny thing about Standard Arabic is that it's really mostly a language you just read, write and listen to (when listening to newscasters, to someone reading something aloud, and a few other situations). You don't need to be able to speak it much. If, in the future, you'd like to speak it, then learning an actual spoken variety would serve you much better. You can speak to Arabs in Standard Arabic, but they will generally respond in some kind of spoken dialect (maybe heavily influenced by Standard Arabic, maybe not), which means that in oral communication you'll be regularly facing colloquialisms whether you like it or not. In fact, I would say you should learn something about the colloquial Arabics regardless, since modern written media also features colloquialisms with some frequency, the frequency being just a lot lower in Arabic when it is written than when it is spoken.

I don't think the phonemes give people too much trouble... Read some description of how you technically make them, and pay a lot of attention when you listen to various people or recordings saying them.

The omission of many written vowels... it is a source of confusion or doubt for a learner now and then, but you'll find it's not so bad. It is admittedly annoying that sometimes you can't immediately learn the pronunciation of a new word though, even though you can guess the meaning. Verbs in the passive voice also often look like their active voice version because of vowel omission. Writers will often help you by actually writing the first vowel, but often assume you'll identify the verb as a passive without any help just as well.



If I wanted to learn to read Standard Arabic, I would personally do something like the following. I make no guarantees this might work for you though.

1. Work through Haywood and Nahmad's A New Arabic Grammar of the Written Language (1962). It says "grammar" in the title, but don't be fooled, it's really a textbook. The written Arabic that is taught is quite old-fashioned, but that doesn't matter much. An answer key can be obtained.

2. At basically the same time, work through Schulz et al.'s Standard Arabic: An Elementary-Intermediate Course (2001, archive.org). It is a bit more difficult and faster-paced than the previous book, but I think it serves as a good companion for Haywood and Nahmad's textbook, especially because the written Arabic taught is more modern. It comes with an answer key (found at the end of the book).

3. Read an Arabic grammar or two. (Warning for this section: I'm a weird guy who really likes grammar.)
- I liked Faruk Abu Chacra's Arabic: An Essential Grammar (I read the 1st edition from 2007, but a new 2nd edition was published in 2017). It covers a lot of the basic stuff and can be read alongside step 1 (in fact, I read it before trying to work through a textbook...).
- I also have nothing but words of praise for the Defense Language Institute's All the Arabic you Never Learned the First Time Around (1997) when it comes to basic grammars. It's a very friendly grammar (as you can tell by its title). You can read the DLI's grammar for free on a lot of Internet places (they have made it freely available). You might want to read the authors' opinion on "how to be a good Arabic student".
- Much of the pain of learning Arabic grammar really comes from learning to conjugate verbs. Now, the real difficulty of learning Arabic as a whole is in the vocabulary, but as for grammar it's the verb forms. It's no walk in the park to get good at producing conjugated verbs correctly. Arabic conjugation is funny because it's full, chock-full, jammed full, of regular patterns (like the fact imperfect passives across forms begin with the vowels u-a-, u-a-a- or u-a-a-a-), it's just that the number of patterns is large. There are actually only 2 or 3 irregular verbs. Karyn Ryding's A Reference Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic (2005) is good for this, because she covers verb conjugation quite thoroughly (her grammar is weak in a lot of other respects though). She does not provide exercises, but I'd do both raw paradigm drills and would also make up sentences using difficult conjugation patterns.
- For syntax, El-Said Badawi et al.'s Modern Written Arabic: A Comprehensive Grammar (1st edition 2002, 2nd edition 2015) is very good. My main quibble is that they barely mention compound verbs (كان يفعل and such) and the uses of participles (فاعل، مفعول), but your textbooks will do an okay job at that. Also, unfortunately I have to say the romanization had quite a number of typos (at least in the 1st edition), but the original sentences in Arabic letters were fine. It is otherwise an excellent reference grammar. Do not be intimidated by its size (800+ pages), much of its meat is just example sentences. You'll also find it makes a lot of "links" to Cantarino's Syntax of Modern Arabic Prose (3 volumes, 1974-1976). Cantarino's book is very long, at about 1.5 times the length of Badawi et al.'s grammar. I'm not sure I'd recommend it, but hey, all its example sentences are taken from 19th and early 20th century novels, each of which comes with a translation, so maybe you can mine those...

4. Work through Dickins and Watson's Standard Arabic: An Advanced Course (1999). It says "course" in the title, but don't be fooled, it's really a reader, with many readings from real-world printed media. For this step you can use any other readers of your choice really, I'm just mentioning this one because it is in some sense a kind of sequel to Schulz et al.'s textbook. The aim would be to be helped to graduate to reading real texts.




A final comment that is worth clarifying now: most Standard Arabic textbooks use what is called "full pronunciation" in English. Arabic is funny in that its case endings (nominative, accusative, genitive) and quite a number of the verbal endings are optionally pronounced. "Full pronunciation" means that cases and verbal endings are fully distinguished, but actually, most Arabs just use the so-called "short pronunciation" most of the time, dropping most of the optional things. For example, you can look at a noun like فلافل (meaning: 'falafel', the food), and pronounce it falaafilu (nominative) or falaafila (accusative/genitive), OR simply use the short pronunciation: falaafil. You may also come across the term "pausal pronunciation", where full pronunciation is used for most words in a sentence except for the last one which is read with short pronunciation (so both pronunciation methods are combined).

This is not a problem because case and those verbal ending details don't actually do much in practice. An example contrasting pausal vs. short pronunciation:
هناك طرق كثيرة لإعداد الخبز تختلف من مجتمع إلى آخر
Strict transliteration: hn´k _ Trq _ kθyrä _ l´(i)`d´d _ ´lxbz _ txtlf _ mn _ mjtm` _ ´(i)la _ āxr
Pausal: hunaaka Turuqun kaθiiratun li-i`daadi l-xubzi taxtalifu min mujtama`in ila aaxar
Short: hunaaka Turuq kaθiira li-i`daad al-xubz-i taxtalif min mujtama` ila aaxar
Translation: 'There are many ways of preparing bread that differ from one community to another.'
(I added those underscores to emphasize word boundaries in the strict transliteration.)

Teaching full/pausal pronunciation to Arabic learners, as most textbooks do, makes sense, because you have to know about case for some of the declensions and about the verbal endings for some gender/number combinations if you want to write correct Standard Arabic, as these do show up in spelling some of the time. Just know that when something is not spelled out with consonants, it is generally omitted in "short pronunciation".



أتمنى لك حظا سعيدا
´(a)tmna _ lk _ HZ´ _ s`yd´
atamannaa la-ka HaZZan sa`iidan
I wish you best of luck.

If I ever do study Arabic, I will focus on al foosHa. When I was a child, (8-11 years old,) I spent a ridiculous amount of time at my friend's house, who was Egyptian. His grandparents always watched him and his younger brother (who didn't speak English yet,) while his parents worked all the time. My aunt married his uncle, and my friend's grandparents honestly treated me like another grandson until they died some years later. They spoke no English, and I remember speaking Egyptian Arabic. I asked my uncle a year or two ago about my Arabic, like how the hell I was able to speak Arabic and he laughed saying I used to speak "caveman" Arabic hahaha. Basically I didn't conjugate any verbs, ignored all grammar, and just replaced English words with their supposed Egyptian Arabic equivalents. I remember watching Egyptian TV shows and talking a lot with his grandparents, but I also remember lots of times when everyone would argue loudly and I would have to ask my friend / cousin? what they heck they were fighting about. I tried to learn Arabic when I was around 16. I bought the rosetta stone, some grammar books etc. However I wasn't dedicated enough, and I was constantly frustrated that it wasn't even the same language.

A few years back I asked some Egyptian guy to say some stuff in Egyptian to see if I could understand, and I got a lot of individual words, and most of the words sounded really familiar, but I couldn't understand it. Nowadays my Arabic is limited to very basic things. I remember when I was in Israel with my girlfriend I was drunk sitting at a table in a bar with her and her friends and some even drunker than me Arab walked up and asked really aggressively in Arabic where the bathroom was. I responded in Arabic and he said thanks, then turned around asked where I was from and we talked for a few seconds. He shook my hand and went off to use the mens room. My girlfriend and her friends were looking at me like I had ten heads. I didn't realize that I had never mentioned her or to any of them anything ever regarding Arabic. I remember clearly telling them something along the lines of, "I made some bad choices in my youth that I'd rather not talk about. Long story short, I ended up in Syria doing what I thought was right." The next morning I told them the true story. I still think the funniest part of this whole thing is the drunk as all hell Arab super aggressively asking a group of blonde Polish girls, in Arabic, where he could find a bathroom. If I didn't understand what he said I would have probably thought he wanted to start a fight.

I'm so happy that this made me remember this story. I have even funnier Arabic stories, but those wouldn't be appropriate for this forum.

One day I'll learn to actually speak Arabic, insha'allah.

[IronMike]

ロータス beat me to it. I'm going to use the method from The Untranslated blog for BCS and maybe Cornish later this year.

[drp9341]

My aunt married his uncle, and my friend's grandparents honestly treated me like another grandson until they died some years later. They spoke no English, and I remember speaking Egyptian Arabic. I asked my uncle a year or two ago about my Arabic, like how the hell I was able to speak Arabic and he laughed saying I used to speak "caveman" Arabic hahaha.

This is a very weird story!

But why did you ask your uncle about your Arabic? Does he too speak it?

Hee is my friend's uncle, but he married my aunt, so now he's my uncle too Plus, he was there often and he heard me speak it when I was younger.

[subsius]

You could try;

"A Frequency Dictionary of Arabic: Core Vocabulary for Learners (Routledge Frequency Dictionaries)"

https://www.amazon.com/Frequency-Dictionary-Arabic-Vocabulary-Dictionaries-ebook/dp/B01BMCY55U/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=A+Frequency+Dictionary+of+Arabic&qid=1559525008&s=gateway&sr=8-2

These types of books present a vocabulary of 5000 words in context through thousands of sentences.

[Saim]

You could try;

"A Frequency Dictionary of Arabic: Core Vocabulary for Learners (Routledge Frequency Dictionaries)"

https://www.amazon.com/Frequency-Dictionary-Arabic-Vocabulary-Dictionaries-ebook/dp/B01BMCY55U/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=A+Frequency+Dictionary+of+Arabic&qid=1559525008&s=gateway&sr=8-2

These types of books present a vocabulary of 5000 words in context through thousands of sentences.

What a great resource, thanks so much!