Arabic through semi-extensive reading

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thomas_dc
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Arabic through semi-extensive reading

Postby thomas_dc » Sun Jan 24, 2016 7:39 pm

Edit:
It's been a while since I started this log, and since then I've learned a lot!
I've discovered (wow) that it's quite annoying to go back and edit this first log post every time I make an update, so for the newest statistics and updates, go to the end of the thread!

I'd also like to clarify how I'm studying these days, because it has changed a little bit since the beginning.
I read mostly books, and I read them mostly through LingQ. Their new Ipad app is great and it even is starting to work better with Arabic, even though Arabic basically is not a supported language. If you prefer reading through your browser, you need to kindly ask the support staff to make the "classic view" available for you. They've recently updated their software with a nice new reading-tool, but it shows all Arabic text backwards, so until they get that fixed (which is not a priority to them) you need to use the classic view). LingQ costs money.. I think it's worth it, but I've heard that "learning with texts" is a worthy, free alternative. I don't know how it fares with Arabic though. (There's also something out there called "ReadLang")

I've changed my log-title to "Arabic through semi-extensive reading", because I think that what I do is more a mix between extensive and intensive reading. I'm not yet at a level where I can read without aid from a dictionary, but LingQ's instant look-up feature (and the concept of creating yellow words) is really helpful, and makes for effortless reading.

I've recently started writing a blog too, where I speak about language learning. I'll throw the link in here in case someone would like to have a look:
Language learning blog
Among my recent posts are a Assimil Arabic review and many other things that you can find yourself if you want.

I'm speaking on Skype with a new Syrian friend about once a week and trying to meet up with another (Syrian) friend in my town about once or two times a week also. It's really helpful!

I'm also starting to make more of an effort in learning Algerian Arabic. It's quite difficult, because it's an oral language, and I'm really a reading-guy... I've discovered that Algerians make great music though, and I've been listening to a couple of songs, following along the lyrics. Check out this one: Learning Algerian Arabic with Cheb Mami - I'm also open for music suggestions in Derjda or Algerian Arabic!

--- and here follows the original post (where I'm going to stop updating the page-count)

Hi everyone!
After experiencing the joy of finally becoming fluent in French years ago, I decided that I'd try and learn Arabic next. This proved to be quite an undertaking and though I've worked hard and stubbornly on it, especially with a heavy focus on cloze - deletions in ANKI, I sort of stopped.

After almost a year, I picked up a bilingual book - almost by chance, and figured I'd try and eat my way through it. Extensive reading as a method is generally recommended for students who are already very proficient in the language, so that unknown words can be guessed from context - I'm very far for being at a point where I can understand the 98% that seems to be the key figure for making extensive reading work optimally. I'm probably closer to 40-60%, and this is only in terms of understanding words, not the syntax, case, conjugation, time and so on - so there's a long way to go, but what really seems to work for me, is to use the parallel text. I witch from English to Arabic sentence after sentence, and as it's getting easier, paragraph after paragraph. Much to my own surprise, reading remains enjoyable this way.

I think that is was the user EMK, who has shared his experience with extensive reading for learning French (will someone correct me if I'm wrong?) - In his post he mentioned that after 500 pages he could "somewhat" read French, after 2500 pages he read with basic fluency and after 10000 pages he hardly ever came upon unknowns. - I figured that I'd try and log my "page count" here, in order to compare. As of now (24th January 2016) I can see very significant progress after having read my first 4-500 pages, but I still couldn't get much out of the texts without their translations.

One of my biggest worries in regards to learning Arabic though extensive reading is the pronunciation. I'd love to do some "Listen - Reading" or to try and use shadowing in my studies, which are both methods that have helped me a lot with my French in the past, however, good audio is really hard to come by in Arabic, and if you do find something that seems good, it's often in some abridged form or without translations available which makes it all a bit more different. Although I'd love to have audio play a bigger part from the start, I feel that I'd have to wait a little while until my vocabulary gets rich enough to watch documentaries, listen to the radio and so forth.

The books I've read so far are:
1. John Grisham - The Pelican Brief - it has 91 pages of Arabic plus its corresponding English pages
I read this very slowly and without understanding much of the Arabic or in regards to pronunciation. The book has a lot of dialogue and is written (probably abridged) in a simple fashion.

2. Earnest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea - 80 pages of Arabic. I really enjoyed reading this and got through it quickly. My reading speed already got a little faster from the first book. The descriptions can be a little hard to follow but there's a lot of thoughts and a little dialogue thrown in which makes it easier.

3. Lewis Carroll - Alice in Wonderland - 123 pages of Arabic. This was harder than the two preceding books, and I had some difficulties deciphering the font. In Arabic, the script is sometimes written in such a way that the letters come on top of each other instead of next to, but with all of the letter's "dots" in the same bundle (it's a little hard to explain, but imagine if you were to write a word with "ü" on top of "i" but with the "¨" and the dot on top of the "i" all in the same place. How would you know if the word starts with "ü" or "i"?)

4. Earnest Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises - 163 pages of Arabic. I really liked to read "The Old Man and the Sea", so I decided to try reading some more Hemingway (I have more books in the mail) - This one was a little more difficult, though. The dialogue is fine, but the translation isn't always that precise. Sometimes it has omissions, but what is even stranger is that the Arabic version sometime seems to add to the English text. I think that it's safe to assume that the English version is not the original, but an abridged version, so perhaps the Arabic translation is based on something else. This does make it a little complicated sometimes, though.
The book had some passages a little heavy in description (in comparison with what else I've read) - and this is the only book so far where I've found myself skipping a page here and there. I think it would have been easier if the two texts were more alike.

5. Albert Camus - L'étranger - 180-ish pages of Arabic.
I've read this book 11 times now - I read it many times in French and Danish when I was learning French, and I absolutely loved it. Most books I wouldn't want to reread just after closing it, but this one is an exception. This one was not a bilingual book, so I had to juggle around with my kindle with the Arabic version in one hand and the French original in the other. Apart from a little shoulder pain, it worked out well, and the Arabic translation seems to be of very high quality. My reading speed has improved a lot, and I "feel like" my pronunciation is improving - At least the words seem to "flow" better now. I'm also starting to recognize a lot more of the Arabic words when I turn from the French version to the Arabic. I still wouldn't get much out of reading without the original text, but I think I've gained quite a bit of passive word recognition.

6. Harry Potter 1 264 pages of Arabic
7. The subtitles to the Disney film "Frozen" dubbed in Arabic (about 25 pages)
8. The Subtitles to the film "The Night of counting the years" (About 12 pages)
9. Harry Potter 2, 287 pages of Arabic (Not worth reading!)
10. Part of Angels and Demons by Dan Brown (100 pages in, will get back to it)

And on lingq, where I'm reading intensively, I've read 382.000 words, or 1528 pages of 250 words.

2191 pages of Arabic so far

In terms of audio input, I've watched the following:
Frozen dubbed in Arabic, 1,5 hours
The Flintstones episode 1, 25 minutes

2 hours of Arabic film so far

In the future I'm going to read some more Hemingways (some of the longer books), Animal Farm by George Orwell, and "Lord of the Flies". I'd really love to get into the Arabic authors, but they're not as easily available as the English classics - I did come upon some bilingual versions of some Arabic books on a French webshop, though, and I might pick that up later.

I'm looking forward to being able to read Arabic books by Arabic authors without having to rely on a translation!
Last edited by thomas_dc on Sat Feb 11, 2017 10:33 am, edited 9 times in total.
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Tristano
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Re: Arabic through extensive reading (lower intermediate and forward)

Postby Tristano » Fri Jan 29, 2016 10:56 am

Hey man,
wow! This is great! I'm following your log. Good luck!
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thomas_dc
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Re: Arabic through extensive reading (lower intermediate and forward)

Postby thomas_dc » Wed Feb 03, 2016 12:52 pm

I finally got through the first Harry Potter book, which amounts to 264 pages of Arabic. I actually find Harry Potter quite hard - there's a lot of vocabulary that I don't know, and especially the descriptions are very difficult whereas I feel a little more at home with dialogue. I still rely very much on the L1 - in this case I only had the French edition which mean that both versions are translations from the English. This means that there sometimes is quite some difference between between two, but I can generally figure out where I am. I think that I have learned quite a bit, and am looking forward to digging into the second book later today. Th Tim with L1 in English.
I've now read 901 pages in Arabic, but it's still very foreign to me. I can't help but getting my hopes up, though, because when I've finished the Harry Potter series it'll be a lot more.
Tristano wrote:Hey man,
wow! This is great! I'm following your log. Good luck!

Thanks a lot for your comment! I hope I won't disappoint you ;)
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thomas_dc
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Re: Arabic through extensive reading (lower intermediate and forward)

Postby thomas_dc » Thu Feb 04, 2016 10:43 am

I got started on the second Harry Potter book yesterday, and after the first few pages it already looks like the translation is even worse than the first book. The translator leaves out big chunks of text and info and summarizes it a way so that only the most essential info is still there. I've read some reviews of the Arabic translations on amazon, and it appears that the third book has the same problem, but that the quality starts getting better from the fourth book and onwards.
It's really a shame that these books are translated so neglect fully.. I remember when I caught the "Harry Potter bug" as an adolescent and how it really got me started on reading books. This series is great for getting kids to read, but it just seems that most of the magic is left out in the Arabic translation (pun intended) which makes it a whole lot more dull.. I don't think that this translator has really realized how important a book series like this can be. Maybe it's not good or "important" literature from an academic point of view, but if it gets kids reading in their early adolescence, it has a huge potential to make an impact on the future society...

Anyway.
I'm not sure how I feel about reading this along with the translation. It gets confusing when the English original dwells on description and commentary while the translation quickly skips all this, but maybe this can somehow be a good thing, because it forces me to not read the texts directly "sentence by sentence" but rather in terms of understanding the content from the English version and then having to figure out how it's reformulated or summarized in the translation.. Maybe it'll be a little difficult though. Has anyone got any opinions on this?

I could just put the HP books aside and get back to bilingual books, but it IS supposed to get better from book four, and I kind of like this idea of sticking with it to the end of book 7 to see where it takes me..
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Re: Arabic through extensive reading (lower intermediate and forward)

Postby lenivets » Thu Feb 04, 2016 11:41 am

It's interesting about the translations. I just finished The Bourne Identity in Russian translation. I kept my English copy with me while I read it, but I never felt I needed it till almost the very end. There was a dialogue that didn't really make any sense, so I looked at the original and was surprised to see that the whole middle of the dialogue had been cut out. The dialogue was confusing as a character was talking about things they couldn't possible know, because the translator decided to get rid of the section where these things where explained to him. I started to compare the two books and there are significant cuts. Whole pages are gotten rid of. I hadn't realized this was a fairly common practice. Though it's funny that I actually think some of the cuts were justified, and the original author added too much fluff to some sections for a book of the page-turner variety.

I guess it can be annoying, but from the perspective of a someone fairly new to reading books in a certain language, there's something to be said for making the texts more accessible. I've got about as many Russian book pages read right now as you do for Arabic (though I read a fairly significant amount of news articles and the like before I started reading books so my reading is more independent), and I was surprised at how easy I found the Bourne book compared to some other books I've been trying to read which were Russian language originals. I imagine a slightly simplified book could be a good tool for becoming less reliant on the translation to help guide your reading.
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thomas_dc
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Re: Arabic through extensive reading (lower intermediate and forward)

Postby thomas_dc » Thu Feb 04, 2016 12:07 pm

lenivets wrote:It's interesting about the translations. I just finished The Bourne Identity in Russian translation. I kept my English copy with me while I read it, but I never felt I needed it till almost the very end. There was a dialogue that didn't really make any sense, so I looked at the original and was surprised to see that the whole middle of the dialogue had been cut out. The dialogue was confusing as a character was talking about things they couldn't possible know, because the translator decided to get rid of the section where these things where explained to him. I started to compare the two books and there are significant cuts. Whole pages are gotten rid of. I hadn't realized this was a fairly common practice. Though it's funny that I actually think some of the cuts were justified, and the original author added too much fluff to some sections for a book of the page-turner variety.

I guess it can be annoying, but from the perspective of a someone fairly new to reading books in a certain language, there's something to be said for making the texts more accessible. I've got about as many Russian book pages read right now as you do for Arabic (though I read a fairly significant amount of news articles and the like before I started reading books so my reading is more independent), and I was surprised at how easy I found the Bourne book compared to some other books I've been trying to read which were Russian language originals. I imagine a slightly simplified book could be a good tool for becoming less reliant on the translation to help guide your reading.


It's a good point that the translator should be able to make independent choices here and there in order to make the text more accessible for the reader he has in mind. In the case for Harry Potter, though, I think that for the most part, what is cut is the "comical" commentaries and observations that make these books enjoyable to read. They might not be important to the plot, but it just becomes a little more bland, albeit easier to understand perhaps. It also eliminates a lot of synonyms and metaphors, rendering the text pretty straight forward. Weather someone is furious or about to explode is unimportant, it's just translated as "angry". If someone has three double chins, he's just "fat" or "very fat"... and there are not a lot of exceptions to this.
I didn't know the Bourne films were based on books. What's the author's name? maybe I'll look them up in Arabic
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Re: Arabic through extensive reading (lower intermediate and forward)

Postby lenivets » Thu Feb 04, 2016 10:31 pm

The author is Robert Ludlum. The movies are only very loosely based on the books. Only the basic premise is the same. The books are based in the 70's and make references to the Vietnam war, Marxist terrorist groups, the Soviet Union and so on. The film makers decided to set the film in modern times, so all that had to go.
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fiolmattias
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Re: Arabic through extensive reading (lower intermediate and forward)

Postby fiolmattias » Sat Feb 06, 2016 9:33 am

What a wonderful effort!
May I hhoww much time you think you have spended when you have finished the 10 000 pages?
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thomas_dc
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Re: Arabic through extensive reading (lower intermediate and forward)

Postby thomas_dc » Sat Feb 06, 2016 2:03 pm

fiolmattias wrote:What a wonderful effort!
May I hhoww much time you think you have spended when you have finished the 10 000 pages?


Thank you!
That's a good question. I think my first 1000 pages have taken about a month, but that's with a very slow reading speed and with reading everything in English simultaneously. . My reading speed is getting faster though, so perhaps I can reach the 10000 page mark within 4-5 months. But we'll see. I do dedicate a lot of daily hours to reading right now, and I don't know if that will change in the time to come.
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fiolmattias
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Re: Arabic through extensive reading (lower intermediate and forward)

Postby fiolmattias » Sat Feb 06, 2016 3:14 pm

That is amazing! Please leave updates as you progress:)
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