hoefferd Arabic log

[hoefferd]

The stars aligned unexpectedly, and I'll spend a lot of time in Cairo soon. So I'll drop all other efforts and focus on Arabic for the next year or two.

I'm overwhelmed but thrilled by the challenge. The distinction between spoken and written Arabic, the alien grammar, vocabulary, and sounds...

My battle plan is to get to a decent level in MSA first; I expect that living in Cairo will throw enough Egyptian Arabic at me that I will end up learning it anyway in parallel. There seems to be no obvious way to make the "right" choice when it comes to this.

So I'll memorize a good overview of the grammar first. I have a grammar written in Italian laying around, by Laura Veccia Vaglieri, and her explanations seem to make sense to me, possibly because it's an old book and learning Latin at a liceo in Italy in the 90ies had a similar vibe.

For vocabulary I've had a look at Gabriel Wyner's vocabulary list but flashcards do not seem to work well for me. I'll go with making silly pictures in my mind; e.g. car is "sayyarat", so I imagine a car sized rat and someone shouts at it "SAY YA!". This method has worked well for Russian for me; I joined a class of kids that had a head start of 9 years of Russian lessons on me, and graduated top of the class 3 years later. Making silly pictures is the best approach I know until I can make sense of the words in context.

[hoefferd]

Memorized conjugations of past and present by using my kitchen and living room as a memory palace. I think memory palaces​ are well suited to conjugations, as they have an inherent sequential structure; I see people on YouTube advocating them for vocabulary in general but I'm not sure it makes much sense. I might be wrong, and should try it to be sure.

[hoefferd]

I'm still at it, but I can confirm what I already knew - it's a massive challenge.

I've mostly focused on Egyptian Arabic. My impression is that native speakers will almost all advise you to learn FusHa first, but that's not what they did themselves; and with an illiteracy rate of 25%, I'm just not buying it that the literary register is as well understood as they seem to think. It's a really complex topic, but I've pretty much settled on going Egyptian first, but while keeping an eye on the differences from FusHa.

The good: Cairo is a very conductive environment for language learning. English skills are not widespread and people react very well to attempts to communicate in Arabic. Everyday language is not complex and you get to immediately use it.

The bad: it's damn hard. Despite lots of effort, I struggle to guess what an article on BBC Arabic is about, and then I go to a Romanian news site and get almost everything despite never having studied it. The root system does give you a boost in learning vocabulary, but you really have to learn all the words, not like with Indoeuropean languages where you get 80% for free. And I'm slow, slow, slow. My memory isn't as good as it was 20 years ago.

Pimsleur Egyptian Arabic is good. While Pimsleur progresses too slowly for other languages, for Arabic it's really what I need - repetition, again and again, to really hammer in those patterns and words.

For now, I celebrate the small successes - going to a shop and buy a top up for my SIM card, understanding that the guy next to me on the plane is asking for some coffee, being able to help the delivery guy calling me on the phone because he can't find my apartment (seems to be like half of the time, despite me having specified building, floor, and apartment number).

[nooj]

There's an Easy Language youtube channel with Egyptian Arabic.

Here's the playlist.

Good luck!

[Xenops]

Hello there! I anticipate learning Arabic in the future, and I found this snazzy list of free MSA resources: http://www.modernstandardarabic.com/free-msa-lessons/