Team Middle East

An area with study groups for various languages. Group members help each other, share resources and experience. Study groups are permanent but the members rotate and change.
Cavesa
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4957
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:46 am
Languages: Czech (N), French (C2) English (C1), Italian (C1), Spanish, German (C1)
x 17549

Re: Team Middle East

Postby Cavesa » Sat Mar 05, 2022 10:58 pm

Hi, I've been occassionally reading this group, as I've been seriously considering to learn Middle Eastern languages. Not diving in just yet, but hope to, later this year.

I have already decided to learn Hebrew, just had to postpone it. And therefore my first question: https://www.formationhebreu.fr/ anyone tried that? It looks like it could be a good and actually structured video course. Any video playlists on youtube that I've found looked extremely chaotic. I plan to start with Assimil, but this looked like a good supplement, I just find no independent reviews of it.

And about Arabic: I would like to learn Syrian/Levantine Arabic, to communicate with patients. I've posted my questions on the arabic subreddit, got a rather informative but very discouraging answer, and i also got downvoted (not clue why, perhaps my questions are too basic and get asked too often?) So, most importantly: Do you think it is possible to reach an ok (B2ish) level in this dialect without any knowledge of the MSA? Or would I need to learn them both? One Arabic would already be a challenge, so I am asking whether I'd need to take two such challenges.

Not sure yet, whether I'll dive into Arabic. It could be very useful quite anywhere in Western Europe in my field, I don't plan to travel to Middle East anytime soon (how can anyone plan anything anymore anyways?!). But I mostly get discouragement from natives, like "It is too hard". I get it, it is hard. But would you say it is really a lost cause?

Would you say Hebrew and Arabic take twice as long as a european language, thrice as long, or even more to learn?

Thanks a lot for any answer in advance!
2 x

User avatar
thevagrant88
Orange Belt
Posts: 206
Joined: Sat Aug 11, 2018 1:30 am
Location: USA
Languages: English (N), Spanish (C1) Japanese (FU)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =14564#top
x 598

Re: Team Middle East

Postby thevagrant88 » Sat Mar 05, 2022 11:10 pm

Semi-follow up questions. I've been reading up on Persian for the last few days now and I have to ask those who'd know best.

Is Persian really that much easier to learn than Arabic? Things like the SOV word order, lack of common vocab with European languages, and a writing system that doesn't seem well suited for the language don't really make it seem like it would be that much of a break. I understand this is entirely subjective so I'm really just curious about others' experiences and whether Persian would be an easier entry point into Near East culture, even if only slightly.
0 x

User avatar
zenmonkey
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2528
Joined: Sun Jul 26, 2015 7:21 pm
Location: California, Germany and France
Languages: Spanish, English, French trilingual - German (B2/C1) on/off study: Persian, Hebrew, Tibetan, Setswana.
Some knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Ladino, Yiddish ...
Want to tackle Tzotzil, Nahuatl
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=859
x 7029
Contact:

Re: Team Middle East

Postby zenmonkey » Mon Mar 07, 2022 6:07 am

thevagrant88 wrote:Semi-follow up questions. I've been reading up on Persian for the last few days now and I have to ask those who'd know best.

Is Persian really that much easier to learn than Arabic? Things like the SOV word order, lack of common vocab with European languages, and a writing system that doesn't seem well suited for the language don't really make it seem like it would be that much of a break. I understand this is entirely subjective so I'm really just curious about others' experiences and whether Persian would be an easier entry point into Near East culture, even if only slightly.


Yes, for me it seems easier - but I'm just at the early stages of Persian and I stopped my Arabic studies early many years ago. But Persian remains a hard language to learn from a European background. Things like the enclitic form of the 'to be' verb (there are two forms, one attached and one not - you can therefore have 'I am' - man-am and man hast-am) are both really cool and add extra 'toil' when listening. One needs to get used to hearing both. But like you say, it's subjective.

The second post here by ProfArguelles is worth reading http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/fo ... asp?TID=69
1 x
I am a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar

User avatar
thevagrant88
Orange Belt
Posts: 206
Joined: Sat Aug 11, 2018 1:30 am
Location: USA
Languages: English (N), Spanish (C1) Japanese (FU)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =14564#top
x 598

Re: Team Middle East

Postby thevagrant88 » Thu Mar 10, 2022 12:44 am

Yes I referenced that post earlier. Persian culture does seem fascinating so I’ll peruse a bit. The language itself seems far more approachable from a grammar perspective than it’s indo-aryan cousins and has such a long history in that region. If I can find some quality books in the same vein as Assimil, Linguapgone, TY, etc aimed toward Spanish speakers I’ll certainly add it to the list. Thanks for the responses everybody.
0 x

User avatar
Saim
Blue Belt
Posts: 676
Joined: Sun Nov 15, 2015 12:14 pm
Location: Rheinland
Languages: Native: English
Others: Catalan, Serbian, Spanish, Polish, Hungarian, etc.
Main focus: German, Urdu
x 2311

Re: Team Middle East

Postby Saim » Thu Mar 10, 2022 3:30 am

Cavesa wrote:Hi, I've been occassionally reading this group, as I've been seriously considering to learn Middle Eastern languages. Not diving in just yet, but hope to, later this year.

I have already decided to learn Hebrew, just had to postpone it. And therefore my first question: https://www.formationhebreu.fr/ anyone tried that? It looks like it could be a good and actually structured video course. Any video playlists on youtube that I've found looked extremely chaotic. I plan to start with Assimil, but this looked like a good supplement, I just find no independent reviews of it.

And about Arabic: I would like to learn Syrian/Levantine Arabic, to communicate with patients. I've posted my questions on the arabic subreddit, got a rather informative but very discouraging answer, and i also got downvoted (not clue why, perhaps my questions are too basic and get asked too often?) So, most importantly: Do you think it is possible to reach an ok (B2ish) level in this dialect without any knowledge of the MSA? Or would I need to learn them both? One Arabic would already be a challenge, so I am asking whether I'd need to take two such challenges.

Not sure yet, whether I'll dive into Arabic. It could be very useful quite anywhere in Western Europe in my field, I don't plan to travel to Middle East anytime soon (how can anyone plan anything anymore anyways?!). But I mostly get discouragement from natives, like "It is too hard". I get it, it is hard. But would you say it is really a lost cause?


I don't see why it would be impossible. It's surely possible to learn languages primarily orally, as illiterate people have done for centuries.

A lot of Arabic speakers (and even learners) have an ideological attachment to MSA being important to learn, so it's not surprising you'd come across some resistence.

I personally don't know how I would go about it since reading is such a big part of my own learning strategy. Cutting out MSA completely means you won't have access to certain sources that will help you build your vocabulary, but given your goals it might not be a bad way to go about it necessarily. I do think you'd probably need to spend a lot of time with tutors, so I think anyone who's learned a very "different" language starting with tutors from the very beginning should be able to advise you on how to proceed.

In terms of audio input, there are lots of original Levantine TV shows and Syrian-dubbed Turkish dramas (some available on YouTube).

An invaluable resource for this is the Living Arabic dictionary (Levantine, Egyptian and MSA), which crucially has lots of example sentences: https://livingarabic.com/ .

Would you say Hebrew and Arabic take twice as long as a european language, thrice as long, or even more to learn?


I'd say Hebrew is easier than Arabic for speakers of European languages (and especially for someone like you who knows languages from a couple of different European IE families). The pronunciation, pragmatics and semantic fields are all similar to European languages. The main difficulty is in the morphology and the mountain of unfamiliar Semitic vocabulary, which is shared with Arabic.

I'd imagine that three times as long would be about right for Arabic, probably just twice as long for Hebrew.
4 x
log

شجرِ ممنوع 152

User avatar
louisianne
White Belt
Posts: 28
Joined: Fri Dec 23, 2022 11:06 am
Languages: Spanish and French, Catalan (Native), English (Fluent), German (B1), Arabic (B2), Russian (A2), Hebrew (A2), Persian (A2), Norwegian and Swedish (A1)
x 79

Re: Team Middle East

Postby louisianne » Thu Dec 29, 2022 11:58 am

Hi everyone, I am currently learning Persian, and my goal is going from A2 to B1-2 in the next year. But I am still figuring out how to do it.
2 x


Return to “Study Groups”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests