If you give an עכבר a كعكة

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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby cjareck » Wed Dec 23, 2020 12:30 pm

Deinonysus wrote:I keep getting confused between عند (used for possession) and هناك ("there is"),

My level of MSA is still a basic one, but there is also another way of dealing with possession "مع"
عندي ساعة
معي ساعة
Both mean I have a watch, but the second one means that I have it with me now, while the first states that the watch is in my possession I don't have to have it with me now. It is how I understood the explanation of that topic which was in DLI's MSA course as far as I remember.
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby lisānunā » Thu Dec 31, 2020 9:50 am

cjareck wrote:My level of MSA is still a basic one, but there is also another way of dealing with possession "مع"
عندي ساعة
معي ساعة
Both mean I have a watch, but the second one means that I have it with me now, while the first states that the watch is in my possession I don't have to have it with me now. It is how I understood the explanation of that topic which was in DLI's MSA course as far as I remember.

There is also the adverb - ظرف
لَدَى
+ pronoun suffix
لَدَي + (ـيَ - ـنَا - ـكَ - ـكِ - ـكُمَا - ـكُمْ - ـكُنَّ - ـهِ - ـهَا - ـهِمَا - هِمْ - هِنَّ)ـ
Example :
لَدَى العالم نعمة العلم
لَدَيَّ سَاعَةٌ

- Please let me know of any errors -
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Jul 01, 2021 1:41 am

I had a bit of an epiphany an hour ago, which is that I don't want to half-ass Hebrew and just scratch the surface of the spoken language. I want to learn the language thoroughly and be able to have advanced conversations, which means doing things the Deinonysus way: Learn Arabic, then learn Biblical Hebrew with reconstructed pronunciation, and then learn Modern Hebrew, whose demented spelling system will be easy with its more conservative cousins under my belt. It's sad to leave Greek for now because my motivation is huge and growing, but I think I need to get my Semitic project out of the way before I can study Greek without feeling guilty.

As a bonus if I ever do finish off my resources in Arabic and Biblical and Modern Hebrew, I have always wanted to learn Babylonian! Maybe that dangling carrot will help motivate me to work hard on my Semitic languages project.

To recap, the MSA resources available to me are:
  • Duolingo: Estimated time to complete, 1-2 more months
  • Pimsleur MSA: Estimated time to complete, 4-6 months
  • Assimil L'arabe: Estimated time to complete, 3 months (1st wave)
  • Assimil Perfectionnement arabe: 2-3 months, plus an extra 1.5 months to finish 2nd wave; total for Assimil, around 7 months
  • Ahlan wa Sahlan textbook (I have the primer and beginner book, not the intermediate book)
  • DSI Basic Arabic
I don't have estimated times to completion for Ahlan wa Sahlan or DLI Basic Arabic, but I'm sure it'll take quite a while. With so many resources I think it would be very easy to get overwhelmed and burn out, so for starters I think I will just focus on Duolingo, Pimsleur, and Assimil. That is my classic trio for starting out in a language and it will be very easy to get into a routine with them.

Duolingo should be the quickest to finish and I'm already about half-way through the course. I don't know what is wrong with its spaced repetition system, though. After over seven months away from Arabic, only three of my 19 completed skills have cracked. I'll just have to review everything manually I suppose. Once I'm done with Duolingo, I think I can start working Ahlan wa Sahlan back in.

I think it should take me about two weeks to do a full review and catch up. I wasn't away from Arabic for too too long so hopefully most of it should come back to me pretty easily. I've often noticed that a language stews a bit and consolidates while when I take a break and seems to be stronger when I get back to it later. Hopefully that will be the case here.
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby chove » Thu Jul 01, 2021 3:06 am

I think Duolingo slowed skill-cracking considerably, I've noticed it too recently. I suppose maybe they thought it was putting people off that their trees didn't stay gold for very long.
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Jul 01, 2021 8:57 pm

I was a bit dismayed in my drop of motivation going from Greek to Arabic. I was so excited to study Greek, and I could have been starting to read the Iliad within a matter of weeks. But I remembered how much I fell in love with Arabic last year, and I know I will have a blast studying that too. I thought about what my main motivations to study Arabic were, and one of them is that there are massive number of countries where Arabic is an official language, and a knowledge of Arabic will help understand their side of things. So in light of that, I installed the Al Jazeera Arabic app on my phone and I decided that every day I'll go through the headlines and see how many words I can recognize. I did that this morning and I mostly understood place names, although I also understood a few vocabulary words here or there like هذا and هل as well as a couple of names of people. But hopefully I'll start understanding more and more in the coming months!

I also decided that I want a better resource for learning to write in the ruqʿah script, which is how an adult would generally write Arabic. The Ahlan wa Sahlan primer mainly focuses on teaching to write like a computer font, which is not how a native speaker would generally write by hand. I searched the forum for references to ruq'ah and I found a very helpful comment from NIKOLIĆ in the Team Middle East study group where he recommended two books: Mastering Arabic Script: A Guide to Handwriting and Writing Arabic: A Practical Introduction to Ruq'ah Script. Of these two books, it seemed that the former was better for beginners so I ordered myself a copy. I might give the other one a shot as well when I'm more advanced.

In addition, I had a tough time finding any threads or articles recommending classic children's books that were originally written in Arabic, but I checked Amazon and I found a prolific author Taghreed Najjar, so I ordered a couple of her books. I had a very good experience doing an intensive reading of The Rainbowfish in the original German when I was first starting the language and it was a very positive experience.

I have been bouncing around between languages a lot lately, but I think it's time to go the distance and avoid Wanderlust for a while. I estimate that if I don't get distracted at all, it will take me four years to reach my desired level in Modern Standard Arabic, Biblical Hebrew, and Modern Hebrew, by which time I will be forty years old. I think what I need to do is repeat the mantra: my French is okay for now as it is. My German is okay for now as it is. There's a lot I can do with them already. I can wait a few years before I try to get fluent. As for other languages, well, they're not as much of a danger as French and German; I don't usually spend more than a month at a time on a language other than those (with the exception of my target Semitic languages).
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby Deinonysus » Sun Jul 04, 2021 2:59 am

Well I think my motivation is up to full! I'm excited that there are so many cool things I can watch and for once I'm more excited about the destination than the journey and I find myself wishing I could snap my fingers and understand the Levantine and Egyptian dialects!

TV

I was a bit saddened that Disney+ didn't seem to have any Arabic dubs available in the US (which is a shame because the Arabic voice of Elsa in Frozen has an amazing voice!) and I checked to see what was available on Netflix, and at first it seemed like they had a lot but it was all in Egyptian Arabic, which is an important dialect but not the one I was hoping to tackle first. But then I discovered that they actually have a ton in Levantine dialect as well, their category maintenance just sucks so you need to do a text search to find everything. Unfortunately a lot of shows show up for multiple dialects so you need to do some digging to see what dialect is used in a given show. Sadly there are a lot of false positives. Some of my favorite shows such as The Legend of Korra and She-Ra showed up in the "Arabic Audio" category, and since they're YA/children's shows they would probably be dubbed in MSA, not a dialect, but they don't seem to have any children's shows with actual Arabic dubbing.

But I have been watching Spacetoon a little bit. It has cartoons dubbed into MSA. I don't know if you can watch anything on demand but it streams internationally all day so I just watch whatever's on, just like we did in the old days. First I saw some CGI transformer show and then I caught the beginning of a DBZ episode. They said that DBZ was بعد قليل (baʿda qalīl). I had learned from Pimsleur that this meant "a bit later", but since DBZ came on immediately after they said it, I suppose it can also mean "next" or "coming up".

Books

I couldn't find any information about what Arabic children's books might be considered the most classic, but I was able to find one especially prolific author, Taghreed Najjar, through Amazon. I bought a couple of her books and they just arrived today. One of them is called ألبطيخة (al-biṭṭīḫah), meaning The Watermelon. This sounded a bit similar to the French word pastèque so I checked Wiktionary to see if the Arabic word was a loanword from French, but as it turns out it's the opposite! French got it from Arabic via Portuguese. I read the first sentence and I was surprised that I was able to understand everything! Not 100%, but I knew roughly what each word meant; there were a couple of variations on the root meaning eat, so I think I was able to figure out what they meant from context. Now that I've bought those children's books, Amazon has started recommending more that are originally written in Arabic (not translations), so I had to buy a couple more. One is by Maria Dadouch and is actually bilingual, which is great! It's about Eid and an interfaith friendship, so I'm hoping to learn a bit of culture from it. The author has one many awards and also has a few other monolingual Arabic books available on Kindle. There was also another one that looked cute by Dahlia Al-Mekawi called هذا هو أبي (haḏā huwa abī), meaning This is My Father. It's from the perspective of a baby girl talking about her father, so I'm preparing myself for some feels. I couldn't find anything else about that author.

Keyboard Layout

I decided it was finally time to make a new Arabic keyboard layout because the standard one is terrible and hurts to type, so I started looking for statistics for Arabic letters and to my surprise I found a paper about an Arabic keyboard layout that was optimized with a genetic algorithm, so the work was done for me! I couldn't find it available for download, but there was a picture of it in the paper so it was easy enough for me to make it myself using KBDEdit. It was very quick to learn and it's much more comfortable than the standard layout. I have already started using it.

Dialect Order

As I said earlier, I'm excited to start watching all the Netflix stuff in dialects, so I've been thinking a lot about when to introduce dialects and in which order. I'm considering doing the three levels of Pimsleur Eastern Arabic (based on Syrian speech) before jumping into the DLI Arabic Basic Course. Otherwise I'm not sure exactly where I'll fit it in, because I'm planning on using my car time slot on DLI. The DLI course has 143 lessons, so it will easily take me a year or two even assuming I can finish a lesson every 2-4 days, so by the time I get through it I would have presumably finished the Ahlan wa Sahlan textbook series by then, so I wouldn't have any other course to do along with Pimsleur. A 90-lesson Pimsleur course will only take me 18 weeks, much much quicker than the DLI course, so I think it makes sense to go through that first.

As I'm typing this, I'm formulating a new plan, which is to ignore the DLI course for now and just get as far as I can in the textbook series before I finish the Pimsleur courses. Then I can take a break from Arabic with hopefully a strong enough level to give me a decisive advantage in Hebrew, and then do a good amount of Biblical Hebrew and then Modern Hebrew. This would revise my timeline from 2 years of Arabic (maybe closer to 3 or more now that I've taken a closer look at the DLI course), 1 year of Biblical Hebrew, and then 1 year of Modern Hebrew (4-5 years total) to around 1 year of Arabic, 1 year of Biblical Hebrew, and then 1 year of Modern Hebrew (3 years total). Then I'll be free to "finish off" Arabic at my own pace without the sense of urgency that it's blocking my Hebrew progress. But I guess I'll have to see how I feel about my level of Arabic in a year, assuming that I can stay on task that long.

Progress

I've been keeping up a pretty good pace, averaging over 10 Duolingo review lessons a day, completing a Pimsleur lesson every day, and trying to catch up with Assimil fairly quickly (I've reviewed the audio for the first 7 lessons and read the text for the first 4; I'll probably do more tonight before I go to sleep). My Duolingo strength has gone from just over 50% to almost 70%, and at this rate I should be able to start learning new material within a week.
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby Deinonysus » Wed Jul 07, 2021 2:51 am

I've fallen a bit behind on Assimil. I was hoping to review a few lessons a day until I caught up to where I was before (which was lesson 24 or something), but I've only reviewed 7 chapters in 6 days. I'm doing pretty well with Duolingo and Pimsleur though. The strength of my Arabic tree is up to 76% from 50-something, and I've been finishing almost a lesson a day of Pimsleur (I just finished lesson 5). I think I've retained a lot of what I learned six months ago, and there aren't many words or phrases that I've forgotten. I did sadly forget how to say "regular chicken", one of Duolingo's typical crucial survival phrases.

My level of effort has fallen off a bit because I got sucked into Attack on Titan. I've only ever seen the first season, which is all that was on Netflix, but then I saw that Hulu had four seasons so I decided to rewatch from the beginning and then see what happens next. I'll get around to studying Japanese one of these days, but today I did end up inadvertently learning a new Japanese word, "hanchō". It sounded very similar to the English word "honcho" and the meaning seemed very similar based on the subtitles, so I looked it up, and sure enough, it comes from the Japanese word hanchō, meaning "squad leader". A lot of Japanese military ranks seem to end in "chō", including "taichō" which does seem to get shouted a lot in the most recent anime I've been watching.
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby cjareck » Wed Jul 07, 2021 6:41 am

Deinonysus wrote:A lot of Japanese military ranks seem to end in "chō", including "taichō" which does seem to get shouted a lot in the most recent anime I've been watching.

I've checked it in Google Translate, and the character is "長" that - at least in Mandarin - means "leader". So you add squad, platoon, company, battalion, regiment, and so on to it to have the name for the commander. But please do not confuse it with military ranks. You may be a 2nd lieutenant or 1st lieutenant and platoon leader who is a position, not a military rank. Some exception was made in the Soviet Union before the war where they abolished military ranks and had only positions that were de facto military ranks. Sorry for this correction, but it was stronger than me ;)
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby Deinonysus » Fri Jul 09, 2021 6:35 pm

Thanks for the clarification, cjareck!

Although the promise of lots of Netflix shows in Arabic got my motivation up to eventually learn Levantine Arabic and gain at least passive skills in other dialect, it didn't help much with MSA. I was a bit dismayed to see my motivation differential between Japanese, which I have no immediate plans to study, and MSA. I think the main reason for this differential is that I have a big connection to and love for Japanese culture, not just the language, and I have watched hundreds or maybe thousands of hours of anime. So I can't reach a comparable motivation for MSA until I find a cultural connection. And I think I was able to identify two main connections: the Islamic Golden Age, and 1001 Nights.

"Islamic Golden Age" is a somewhat misleading name and it implies that it was a theocratic age and that it was only a golden age for Muslims and not for all of humanity. But in fact it was the crucible that separated a modern scientific method away from ancient Greek philosophical navel gazing, and it laid the groundwork for and directly resulted in the European Renaissance and Enlightenment. I am dismayed that I only learned about this within the last several years and didn't learn anything about it in school. In fact, the renaissance is generally presented as:
  • Step 1: Classical Antiquity
  • Step 2: ???
  • Step 3: Profit Renaissance
Where Europeans just happened to rediscover the works of the ancient Greeks and rebuilt everything from the ground up.

So I am very excited to read not only modern histories of the Islamic Golden Age in MSA, but also primary documents from that era. As I understand it, MSA is so conservative that you can read documents from 1200 years ago without any more difficulty than reading an English document from a couple hundred years ago. My level of MSA is obviously much to low for me to be able to confirm that, but I'm hopeful. I took a look at an online copy bilingual copy of The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing (i.e., Algebra) (الكتاب المختصر في حساب الجبر والمقابلة تصنيف الشيخ الاجل ابي عبد الله محمد بن موسي الخوارزمي) by Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī (محمد بن موسى الخوارزمي). This book has absolutely massive historical significance. First, he introduced base 10 numerals to the Arab world (inspired by Indian base 10 numerals) and this book would later inspire Fibonacci to introduce base 10 numerals to Europe. Second, the word "algebra" is derived from al-jabr (الجبر) in the title of this book. And third, the epithet "al-Khwarizmi" was somehow mangled into the Western word "algorithm". So I am very excited to eventually reach a level where I can read books like this!

Second, I found a really cool online copy of a 15th-century edition of 1001 Nights that belonged to Antoine Galland, whose famous French translation Les mille et une nuits, published in 12 volumes in the early 1700s, is the most recognizable complete modern version and added in some famous stories such as Aladdin and the Magic Lamp and Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves that were not previously associated with 1001 Nights.

That gave me the idea to start reading Galland's version in French. I started in on the intro to some selected tales available on Project Gutenberg. I've only gotten a couple of paragraphs in but it seems so far that the language is very straightforward and easy to read. I'm happy to report that the time I put into familiarizing myself with the passé-simple last year seems to have paid off big time and now I can read simple fiction as fluently as I can read nonfiction. I doubt I'm ready to tackle Hugo yet but I shouldn't have much of a problem with the easy stuff.

I am considering spending some time on French alongside Arabic but I think I have to be very careful to make sure my work on Arabic doesn't get derailed. I see two possible ways it can work:
  1. I extensively read stories that are appropriate for my reading level such as Jules Verne's novels, Charles Perrault's fairy tales, and of course Galland's translation of Les mille et une nuits, as well as Tintin which I could already read fine when I was still at an intermediate level. I've also heard that Camus's L'étranger is a fairly easy read so that should o on the list too. This option is the most time flexible and would have the lowest likelihood of derailing my Arabic plans.
  2. I start going through the CLE Vocabulaire progressif du français books. This could give my reading level a big boost rather quickly. I think my level of grammar understanding is fine for passive reading, although I have a lot I would need to work on to improve my productive skills. I own the intermédiaire, avancé, and perfectionnement levels of the Vocabulaire series, and they have 95 chapters between them. I've gone through the first couple chapters of the intermédiaire level and it seems that a chapter can be made up of 2-5 units. I found that a particularly long chapter can take me 1-2 hours to finish including a quick review of previous lessons, so that might not be feasible alongside my Arabic studies. But if I can do a unit a day, that might only be 30 minutes a day and I may be able to squeeze it in. I don't know exactly how many units there are total, but doing a unit a day might take me around a year. I can't really decide how I want to play this. Maybe I could abandon Assimil for now, do a full chapter a day of Vocabulaire, and be done in 3-4 months, after which time I can start Assimil for realsies and get much more out of it. But I'm not sure, that would really throw off my Arabic timeline. I have to think about it.
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby Xenops » Fri Jul 09, 2021 7:51 pm

Some thoughts:
1. The BPL has access to The Great Courses, which include The Golden Islamic Age (last I looked).

2. I enjoyed Jack Zipes’ English editions of A Thousand and One Nights. He picked 500 or so of the most unique stories. Also unfiltered—I will never think of a sword sliding into a sheath the same way again. :shock: :lol:

3. My adult self, for some odd reason, prefers reading about the culture of Calormen than Narnia. :?
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