If you give an עכבר a كعكة

[Neurotip]

Give in! Buy the calligraphy set! Life is short...

Glad our interests are converging again. I'm hoping to start Arabic again in January. Really enjoying your log at the moment, especially the insights from comparing Arabic with Hebrew. Keep posting!

[Deinonysus]

Give in! Buy the calligraphy set! Life is short...

Glad our interests are converging again. I'm hoping to start Arabic again in January. Really enjoying your log at the moment, especially the insights from comparing Arabic with Hebrew. Keep posting!

Þakka þér fyrir! Great minds think alike.

Arabic calligraphy seems pretty crazy, I can sound out normal Arabic texts except for unwritten short vowels, but I can't read Arabic calligraphy at all. I think you need to already know the phrase being represented in order to decipher it.

For normal writing I think my trusty old Namiki Falcon is good enough for my purposes.

20201026_125048.jpg

[cjareck]

I think you need to already know the phrase being represented in order to decipher it.

You're right. I wondered what inscription is on the flag of Saudi Arabia. I found a similar thing on the cover of a Polish book about Islam and I was told it is shahada. Then suddenly on the flag in the place of random lines, I could find words like Allah, rasulun and everything you need to say it

[Deinonysus]

I've been making good progress. After finishing chapter 2, I am now a third of the way through the Ahlan wa Sahlan workbook, and even better, I'm on track to finish FSI Levantine Arabic Phonology this week, which means that I can start Pimsleur MSA next week!

I'm no longer convinced that Duolingo is doing more good than harm. You can check out my thread about it in the Language Programs and Resources Forum if you want to read my full rant, but basically, Duolingo isn't teaching MSA or a particular dialect. It's teaching a weird Frankenstein hybrid of stripped-down MSA with some random dialectal grammar spliced in—and there's no warning about this! I couldn't even find an official statement about what kind of Arabic it's supposed to be teaching!

But I think I will try to finish the course, even if only to be able to tell others what to watch out for.

Progress-o-Meter™

العربية
: 14 / 19 FSI Levantine Arabic Phonology
: 76 / 230 Duolingo Arabic
: 13 / 77 Assimil L'arabe
: 2 / 6 Ahlan wa Sahlan Workbook

[Deinonysus]

The standard Arabic keyboard layouts are actually awful. Typing in the Syrian layout was hurting my hands, so now I only do Duolingo on my phone. You need to bend your wrists inward to type the two most frequent letters, ا and ل, and you also need to stretch your right hand and type multiple different letters with your pinky to type common words like جديد (jadīd, meaning "new") or جدا (jiddan, meaning "very").

I do enjoy creating new keyboard layouts, and I'm currently typing on a customized multilingual layout that I optimized with a brute-force algorithm. It's okay, but if I want to really optimize it I will need to learn to use genetic algorithms. I have a book about using genetic algorithms in Python, but it's pretty dense. Hopefully I'll be able to wrap my head around it and make some nice new layouts for the Latin and Arabic alphabets. Until then, I'll try not to type too much Arabic on my computer because it hurts!

I found another very close cognate between Arabic and Hebrew. In Duolingo I learned the Arabic word for kitchen is مطبخ maṭbaḵ, which is very similar to the Hebrew מטבח miṭbaḥ.

I started adding the vocabulary for Ahlan wa Sahlan chapter 4 and it's the biggest list so far, over two full pages! But it's mostly proper nouns (various Arab countries and their capitals, as well as several American cities and states), so it shouldn't be that bad.

At the same time that I'm trying to learn Arabic, I need to make sure that my German and French don't decay. I am using a French learning resource for Arabic, but I want to also resume watching and reading the news every day in French and German, so this morning I skimmed some headlines and watched a bit of DW and France24 this morning. I also skimmed a couple of Spanish language news sites, although my Spanish is still not as comfortable as my German or French.

Progress-o-Meter™

العربية
: 17 / 19 FSI Levantine Arabic Phonology
: 76 / 230 Duolingo Arabic
: 14 / 77 Assimil L'arabe
: 2 / 6 Ahlan wa Sahlan Workbook

[Deinonysus]

I finished FSI Levantine Arabic Phonology this morning! I think I'll try starting Pimsleur MSA tomorrow morning.

I was too tired to do Assimil last night but it's a short course (only 77 lessons even though it's the thickest Assimil book I own), so I'll probably finish it well before I'm done with Pimsleur or Ahlan wa Sahlan even though I miss some evenings.

Apparently there is a free streaming site for cartoons in Arabic called Spacetoon. I'll have to check it out once my level is higher!

https://spacetoon.com/

Progress-o-Meter™

العربية
: 19 / 19 FSI Levantine Arabic Phonology
: 77 / 230 Duolingo Arabic
: 14 / 77 Assimil L'arabe
: 2 / 6 Ahlan wa Sahlan Workbook

[Deinonysus]

My last few posts have been short. I think I'm overdue for a wall of text.

I think I need to take Japanese off of my "beginner" list in my profile. My minimum requirement is that I can introduce myself, make small talk, ask for directions, and order food. Even though I took a year of Japanese in college, I don't think I could do all that off the cuff in Japanese, while I could probably do it in Indonesian after just a few months of self study. I didn't feel comfortable putting Inuktitut on my profile for that reason, and if Inuktitut can't go up, then Japanese should come off.

On the other hand, I bumped French up to "Advanced". I'm perfectly comfortable using learning materials in French, and I can at least stumble through literature for adults (and the stumbling is mostly because of that darn simple past). I can't do that in Spanish or German, even though my speaking ability is actually better in German that it is in French. So I think French deserves to be on a different level. Most of this is probably due to all the free French vocabulary I get as a native English speaker. If I got as much free German vocabulary, my German would be better than my French.

français

It occurred to me: I'm learning Arabic in French, so why can't I learn French in French? I've seen good things written on this forum about the CLE books, particularly the Grammaire progressive du français series. I just bought a copy of the niveau intermédiaire (A2-B1). It should mostly be review for me. I would estimate that my reading is at a solid B2 while my other skills are somewhere in the B1 to B2 range.

The big challenge will be to avoid getting so caught up in French that I abandon Arabic. In particular, I want to make sure that I finish Assimil, Duolingo, and Pimsleur Arabic (MSA only) without any major breaks. Then I can replace the time slots that they occupy with French materials as I finish the Arabic courses.

So now I will be working almost exclusively with Resources for Arabic, but within the next three to four months I will start transitioning to French until the only Arabic resource I am still working on is the Ahlan wa Sahlan textbook, and hopefully I will be able to start consuming some Arabic media by that time.

The French resources I'd like to work on are:

• Duolingo (I did finish the course many years ago but it has changed a lot since then and it would be a good review for solidifying my vocabulary and grammar and eliminating writing mistakes)
• The Grammaire progressive du français series, and then maybe eventually the Vocabulaire progressive du français as well
• FSI French Phonology
• FSI Basic French

I don't think it would be useful for me to redo Pimsleur French.

I was thinking of doing DLI Basic Arabic, but now I think I'll hold off until I'm done with FSI Basic French. I think I'll also save the Pimsleur Arabic dialect courses for after I finish FSI Basic French.

íslensku

Like many little girls, my daughter is obsessed with Frozen. She has a little Elsa doll and she'll hold her up and say "yaago yaago!" She's 21 months old so that's how she says "Let it go". Since we're always singing it to her, I figured I would buy the sheet music for Frozen and learn the piano accompaniment as well.

I flipped to the end of the book and saw that there seemed to be a song in Icelandic. I understood several of the words. Then I saw that they didn't write the Icelandic noun ending "ur", they wrote it without the "u", which is a dead giveaway that it was Old Norse, not Icelandic!

As an aside, the Old Norse fits together almost word for word with the English translation. You couldn't do that with German! I've always thought English syntax is very Scandinavian, very different from the other West Germanic languages!

عربي

I finished the first lesson of Pimsleur MSA and I like it's approach towards the word endings that are normally dropped. It will drop them phrase-finally (as normal) but keep them within a phrase. So you know what they are when you need them, but are also used to dropping them in the appropriate spots right from the beginning.

Hebrew vs. Arabic

One cool thing Arabic had that Hebrew doesn't is a vocative particle يا (yā).

Many Hebrew and Arabic's pronouns and prepositions are very similar if not the same:

English	Arabic	Hebrew
I	أنا (anā)	אֲנִי (aní)
you (m)	أنتَ (anta)	אַתָּה (atá)
you (f)	أنتِ (anti)	אַתְּ (at)
he	هُوَ (huwa)	הוּא (hu)
she	هِيَ (hiya)	הִיא (hi)
to	ل (li)	לְ (le)
from	من (min)	מִן (min)

The preposition بِ (bi) in Arabic and בְּ (be) probably had a common origin (I'm too lazy to look it up), but the meaning has diverged. In Arabic it means with, as in كتبت بقلمك (katabtu biqalamika/i, or "I wrote with your pen"). In Hebrew it can sometimes mean 'with' sometimes, but the primary meaning is locative, not instrumental: it generally means "in, at, or on", which would correspond with the Arabic word في (fī). Wiktionary has a good description of when בְּ might mean "with":

With (an abstract noun); often used to form adverbs (like -ly).
‏הוּא הִתְכּוֹנֵן בִּזְרִיזוּת.‎‎ ― hu hitkonén bizrizút. ― He got ready with haste. (=He got ready hastily.)
‏אָכַלְתֶּם בְּיַחַד?‎‎ ― akháltem b'yákhad? ― Did you eat with togetherness? (=Did you eat together?)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%91%D ... position_2

Progress-o-Meter™

عربي

: 1 / 90 Pimsleur MSA
: 77 / 230 Duolingo Arabic
: 15 / 77 Assimil L'arabe
: 2 / 6 Ahlan wa Sahlan Workbook

[Maiwenn]

Hey Deinonysus!! Happy to see you've started studying Arabic. :) I look forward to following your progress.
A couple quick notes

Many Hebrew and Arabic's pronouns and prepositions are very similar if not the same:

English	Arabic	Hebrew
I	أنا (anā)	אֲנִי (aní)
he	أنتَ (anta)	אַתָּה (atá)
she	أنتِ (anti)	אַתְּ (at)
to	ِل (li)	לְ (le)
from	مِن (min)	מִן (min)

I think you probably just made a mistake writing "he" and "she" here, but just in case... أنتَ is the 2nd person masculine singular (you m.s.) and أنتِ is the 2nd person feminine singular (you f.s.). It seems like from one of the below examples that he is "hu" (הוּא?) which is close to هو. What's the Hebrew for هي?

The preposition بِ (bi) in Arabic and בְּ (be) probably had a common origin (I'm too lazy to look it up), but the meaning has diverged. In Arabic it means with, as in كتبت بقلمك (katabtu biqalamika/i, or "I wrote with your pen"). In Hebrew it can sometimes mean 'with' sometimes, but the primary meaning is locative, not instrumental: it generally means "in, at, or on", which would correspond with the Arabic word في (fī). Wiktionary has a good description of when בְּ might mean "with":

With (an abstract noun); often used to form adverbs (like -ly).
‏הוּא הִתְכּוֹנֵן בִּזְרִיזוּת.‎‎ ― hu hitkonén bizrizút. ― He got ready with haste. (=He got ready hastily.)
‏אָכַלְתֶּם בְּיַחַד?‎‎ ― akháltem b'yákhad? ― Did you eat with togetherness? (=Did you eat together?)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%91%D ... position_2

ب can also be used like في in Arabic! It's frequently used to avoid saying في... في... في... too much. For instance, one could say "يعيش في باريس بفرنسا"
Also, I think the equivalent of "בִּזְרִיזוּת bizrizút" in Arabic is بسرعة It's really neat to see the shared roots.

[Deinonysus]

Hey Deinonysus!! Happy to see you've started studying Arabic. I look forward to following your progress.
A couple quick notes

Many Hebrew and Arabic's pronouns and prepositions are very similar if not the same:

English	Arabic	Hebrew
I	أنا (anā)	אֲנִי (aní)
he	أنتَ (anta)	אַתָּה (atá)
she	أنتِ (anti)	אַתְּ (at)
to	ِل (li)	לְ (le)
from	مِن (min)	מִן (min)

I think you probably just made a mistake writing "he" and "she" here, but just in case... أنتَ is the 2nd person masculine singular (you m.s.) and أنتِ is the 2nd person feminine singular (you f.s.). It seems like from one of the below examples that he is "hu" (הוּא?) which is close to هو. What's the Hebrew for هي?

The preposition بِ (bi) in Arabic and בְּ (be) probably had a common origin (I'm too lazy to look it up), but the meaning has diverged. In Arabic it means with, as in كتبت بقلمك (katabtu biqalamika/i, or "I wrote with your pen"). In Hebrew it can sometimes mean 'with' sometimes, but the primary meaning is locative, not instrumental: it generally means "in, at, or on", which would correspond with the Arabic word في (fī). Wiktionary has a good description of when בְּ might mean "with":

With (an abstract noun); often used to form adverbs (like -ly).
‏הוּא הִתְכּוֹנֵן בִּזְרִיזוּת.‎‎ ― hu hitkonén bizrizút. ― He got ready with haste. (=He got ready hastily.)
‏אָכַלְתֶּם בְּיַחַד?‎‎ ― akháltem b'yákhad? ― Did you eat with togetherness? (=Did you eat together?)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%91%D ... position_2

ب can also be used like في in Arabic! It's frequently used to avoid saying في... في... في... too much. For instance, one could say "يعيش في باريس بفرنسا"
Also, I think the equivalent of "בִּזְרִיזוּת bizrizút" in Arabic is بسرعة It's really neat to see the shared roots.

Yes, I meant to write all of the singular pronouns because they are all very similar, but I got messed up! I'll fix the chart in the original post. The Arabic word في doesn't have an exact equivalent in Hebrew that is used the same way (you would always use be- for "in") but it is apparently related to פֹּה (po), meaning "here".

Interesting to hear that the Arabic b- can also be used like in Hebrew!

[Deinonysus]

Hebrew & Arabic Similarities

Egypt

I don't know why this surprised me but the Hebrew and Arabic names of Egypt are the same except that the Hebrew name has a dual number ending. In Arabic it's مصر miṣr and in Hebrew is מצרים miṣráyim. Modern Hebrew replaces the emphatic ṣ sound with "ts".

From a common Semitic source; compare Arabic مِصْر‎ (miṣr) and Ugaritic [cuneiform won't display] (mṣrm). The ending is the standard dual form, perhaps related to the ancient conceptualization of Egypt as two realms: Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. Connections have also been drawn to מֶצֶר‎ (métser, “border, limit”) and מיצר \ מֵצַר‎ (meitsár, “sea strait”).

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%9E%D ... 7%99%D7%9D

To Have

The Hebrew and Arabic ways of saying "to have" work similarly, although they use different words to do it.

"I have a house" in Hebrew:
יש לי בית
Yesh li báyit
Literally "there is to me a house". The preposition ל meaning "to" is inflected for the first person singular.

"I have a house" in Arabic:
عندي بيت
ʿindī bayt

The word عند is interesting:

A contraction of ع ن ن‎ (ʿ-n-n) or ع ي ن‎ (ʿ-y-n) in the sense of viewing, and يَدَا‎ (yadā, “hand”); see at hand, before one's eyes.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%B9%D9%86%D8%AF

I don't think this word has an exact equivalent in Hebrew, but the two roots meaning "eye" and "hand" are the same in Hebrew, so you could imagine that if Hebrew used the same word it would be ענד. If you add a first person inflection to this hypothetical word, the sentence would be almost the same as in Arabic and in fact the consonant letters would match exactly:
عندي بيت
ענדי בית

English

On Maiwenn's log I heard of the book Moi Tituba Sorcière, where apparently one of the characters is Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hester Prynne. To my great shame as a resident of Salem, I have never finished a Hawthorne novel. I was supposed to read The Scarlet Letter in school but I never got more than a couple of chapters in. So I just ordered a nice Hawthorne collection and I'm resolving to finish it by next Halloween.

Français

Je me suis trompé ! J'ai reçu ma copie de Grammaire progressive du français j'ai pensé, c'est très mince ! Et puis j'ai lu le grand mot : "CORRIGÉ"

J'ai commandé le livre même, et il arrive demain.

عربي

As I mentioned, I finished the first lesson of Pimsleur MSA on Friday. I think my time in the FSI Phonology course paid off. I was able to hear the sounds very clearly, including the distinction between short and long consonants. My only problem was, the ع (ayn) sounds were very very slight in the recording. I had a hard time distinguishing whether it was there or not, and I actually missed it in a word so I had a hard time looking it up. Hopefully as I get used to the voices in these recordings I'll get better at hearing it.

I'm making good progress in Duolingo. I'm on track to finish my league in first place this week. I have to admit that the vocabulary I've learned in Duolingo is sticking very well. It's really a shame that one glaring problem (replacing MSA grammar with dialect grammar with no notice) ruins an otherwise excellent course. All they had to do was teach one skill about cases (or maybe a couple) and the problem would be completely avoided!

It took over three weeks for my gold skills to "break" (which is how spaced repetition works in Duolingo these days). So now I'm finally reviewing the skills I finished almost a month ago. Maybe it took so long because a lot of material is revisited in later lessons.

It's taking me a while to get through all the new vocabulary from Ahlan wa Sahlan in Anki, but that's okay, there's a lot of it. I'll get there.

Progress-o-Meter™

عربي

: 1 / 90 Pimsleur MSA
: 84 / 230 Duolingo Arabic
: 17 / 77 Assimil L'arabe
: 2 / 6 Ahlan wa Sahlan Workbook