WP's Log - Arabic, French, Kurdish - The Last Year of Languages!

[woodpecker]

Welcome to my log! I was once a very active participant at HTLAL, but I haven't been around much here.

Background
Since 2014, when I graduated undergrad (and became much less active on web forums), I've spent a little over a year on fellowship in Cairo, gotten most of an MA in teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language, and worked teaching Arabic in the eastern US. I've decided that this year will be my last as an Arabic teacher before I head to (non-language) professional school.

I'm fortunate in that my current job is not very demanding, and leaves me with a lot of time for other activities. I'll be using this log to keep myself honest about spending some of this last year of relative freedom on languages. I'll be focusing on three in particular: Arabic, French, and Kurdish. I may throw in a little Spanish in November and December, as I'm headed to Mexico for a few weeks in January.


Arabic - Very Advanced to Even More Advanced
I am now, after close to a decade of study, comfortable calling myself fluent in Arabic--indeed, I teach it for a living. That said, it's an endless endeavor--for instance, I still find most classical texts a huge struggle, though some recent grad school coursework helped me take big strides when dealing with classical prose. Now that the school year has started and summer grad classes are over, I find it's sometimes hard to put in the daily work. Hopefully logging will help with that.

My Arabic studies will comprise the following:

• Free reading of modern lit / news analysis, some in paper form and some in my "Learning with Texts" database.
• Watching at least one film per week, and perhaps also a مسلسل if I can find one I like in a dialect I want to work on.
• Structured work in the book "Anthology of Arabic Literature, Culture, and Thought" by Bassam K. Frangieh, focusing on expanding my passive command of classical vocabulary. I may supplement this with work from another classical reader, should I find one I like.
• A lot of my students are Lebanese heritage speakers this year, and while my job is to teach MSA it'd be nice to help them a bit with talking to their relatives. So if I have the time I may try to brush up on my eastern dialects (my main dialect is Egyptian).

French - Reading Fluency
I've dabbled in French since high school, and can pick up Le Monde and get the general idea, but I'd like to be much more solid by summer 2018. I will be focusing on reading, with a goal of being able to struggle through a novel by next summer.

Components:

• Work through Sandberg's "French for Reading" in a structured fashion by New Year.
• A quick run through "French without Toil" (which I worked through most of in ~2010), to make sure my pronunciation and grammar haven't deteriorated too far during my many years of singular focus on Arabic.
• Start to add in news and eventually easy literature once I feel I've regained my grasp on the basics.

Kurdish - from scratch
This is the one I'm most excited about. Iraqi Kurdistan looks likely to vote for independence next week, and I'm going to celebrate the occasion by giving Kurdish a proper go. I've wanted to get into Kurdish for a long time, but with Arabic being so intimately linked to my professional life, doing so always seemed a bit too indulgent. But this is probably my last chance for a long time.

I spent a few hours yesterday canvassing the available material and considering various opinions about whether Kurmanji or Sorani is a better starting point. While Kurmanji seems to have better materials, Sorani is what's spoken in the places I'm more likely to be able to visit in the next 5-10 years. After many years dealing with diglossia in Arabic, I feel pretty comfortable learning two dialects in parallel, so assuming I can track down the appropriate books I plan to take that approach, at least initially.

Components:

• "An Elementary Introduction to Kurmanji"
• "Kurdish Basic Course: Dialect of Sulaimania, Iraq"
• GLOSS lessons in Learning with Texts

يلى / en marche! / pêşve!

[NIKOLIĆ]

Welcome back to the forum! I'll be keeping an eye on this log.

I have a couple of question for you regarding Arabic. If one wishes to learn MSA just to understand it passively (reading and listening) or just to throw in a couple of phrases when speaking dialect, would you say that it is a waste of time to learn the correct use of cases and nunation, or would it be detrimental in the long run?

If you were to do it all over again, how would you go about learning MSA and dialect at the same time. Any tips or caveats? What would you have done differently?

!بالنجاح

[woodpecker]

Hi NIKOLIĆ, thanks for dropping by!

If one wishes to learn MSA just to understand it passively (reading and listening) or just to throw in a couple of phrases when speaking dialect, would you say that it is a waste of time to learn the correct use of cases and nunation, or would it be detrimental in the long run?

No, not a waste of time at all. I would even go so far as to say you'll never have true passive understanding if you don't learn the cases--there are certain types of sentences that only start to make sense once you have an intuitive feel for case. The منصوب in particular is incredibly powerful and, at least from a native English speaker's perspective, quite a lot to get used to.

I tend to think that people have the wrong instincts about case in Arabic--in many languages case is a real pain, and often not very logical, so they expect it to suck. But in Arabic it's simple (six markers that are almost purely for case vs. for example, the dozens of Ancient Greek transformations that could be case or could be some other thing), quite straightforward (only three cases, all used consistently), and generally adds a lot of clarity. In terms of work/reward ratio, it's a pretty great piece of the grammar to have down early. I rarely think explicitly about case when reading these days, but still fall back on it first when I feel I missed something despite knowing all the words in a sentence.

And of course if your interest extends beyond MSA to classical texts, their word order is quite a lot more free, and following them without a grasp of case is impossible.

Also, if the goal for you is spoken fluency, I'd worry the assumption that you can just "throw in a couple of phrases" when speaking dialect and be comfortable. Educated speakers use quite a lot of MSA whenever they talk about anything interesting. The MSA/colloquial dichotomy is not as real as people think--nearly all speakers are somewhere along a spectrum. El-Said Badawi has good essays on this topic if you're interested.

If you were to do it all over again, how would you go about learning MSA and dialect at the same time. Any tips or caveats? What would you have done differently?

I probably wouldn't! I started learning Arabic while on a gap year in Egypt, so I had no choice in the matter. But I tend to be a very reading-dependent learner, and with hindsight it would have been much more efficient for me to get to like ILR 2 before taking the colloquial plunge. Assuming you're committed to a colloquial focus, though, my main tips would be:

1. Understand that there's huge register variety at the bottom as well as at the crossover from fusha to educated colloquial. Illiterate Egyptians telling jokes a ful stand do NOT talk like college professors, (even if they're telling the same jokes this is probably true). For a long time while living in Egypt I wondered why I had such a hard time understanding the people in my (very working-class, traditional) neighborhood, but no trouble at all with professionals I met in daily life. Eventually I realized that they were pretty close to speaking different dialects of colloquial Egyptian Arabic.
2. Date somebody who only speaks Arabic, if circumstances permit. It's what finally got me over the intermediate phase--when dealing with diglossia, people have to care about you a lot not to just shift to a higher register so you will stop asking what things mean.