Category: Arabic

I have known the Arabic equivalent to “love” in English for quite a while. Of course there are many situations where love isn’t really accurate or appropriate, so yesterday I decided to find out how to say I “like” something. Well, there’s a reason I haven’t learned it until now, it’s a little more complicated than I anticipated. The closest thing to “like” in Arabic actually translates into “made me like (it)”. The reason this gets complicated is because the subject and object are reversed as compared to the English phrase “I like it.” If I say “I like her,” in English, I am the subject and “her” is the object. In Arabic, “She” is the subject and “me” is the object! So the verb is conjugated to agree with what is the object in the English phrase that I have constructed in my head. I think I can handle this when it comes to writing, but there is a considerable pause in speaking as I try to rearrange things to make them work. It really isn’t so bad if I make a noun sentence, but ironically, it is the first time that I find the verb sentence more intuitive than the noun sentence. Verb sentences start with the verb (always in the singular, but agreeing in gender unless it is non human) then subject, then object. So a literal translation of a verb sentence might be, “Hits he the ball.” The noun sentence equivalent is the more familiar, “He hits the ball.” With this new (to me) verb, the noun sentence involving a girl named Sally would be literally translated as, “Sally caused me to like her.” The verb sentence is more difficult to translate literally but it would sound something like, “She causes me to like her Sally.” It’s difficult to explain, but the verb sentence is actually more straightforward in meaning than the noun sentence IMO. If you are using pronouns (she, me) instead of proper names, the sentence could be done with a single word. There would be a “t” sound at the beginning for she, the verb, and then a “ny” sound at the end to signify me. The resulting word/sentence sounds something like “ta-jb-nee.” I like her, or literally translated, She causes me to like her…

The “ta” at the beginning isn’t a soft “ah” sound like we hear in English, it starts that way but it ends in the lower throat. It’s called “aien” and it is one of the sounds in Arabic that doesn”t exist in English. I’m doing OK with that one, not great, but OK. The one letter that is still giving me fits is “raien”, I can’t describe how it sounds really well, but it’s like starting with an “r” sound and ending in the sound of the letter “Aien”. So far it has succeeded in resisting my efforts to master it. The pronunciation of these letters is trickier when in words and you have to transition from one sound to the next. I’m getting better, but some things are proving to be more difficult than others.

tags technorati : Arabic arabic language learning

My teacher was telling me today that it isn’t my imagination, Arabic really is complicated. I met a guy on the bus who explained to me how easy it was for them to learn English. English grammar does seem like a piece of cake now. The trick with English is the vocabulary and the spelling. I do believe that English has, by far, the largest vocabulary of any language out there. Of course since we borrow from so many languages (A quote from our president, “The French have no word for entrepreneur.”) the spelling is all over the place.

Anyway, Abdul Summit (my teacher) tells me that at the local university you can take two years of classes on prepositions in Arabic, several more on verbs, etc. People spend their entire lives researching and innovating in the language itself. That’s pretty impressive…

One thing that I noticed today is how Arabic treats “to be”. In the present tense, simply being doesn’t require a verb at all. So “I am hungry” becomes “I hungry” in Arabic. The interesting thing is that because of the way words are derived from verbs, there are actually verbs for being surprised, hungry, sad, etc. The adjectives are derived from the verbs, along with the nouns. It can make translation a bit tricky, it certainly makes thinking about the sentences a workout… So here’s my understanding so far… There is a verb for “being happy”, from this we can derive the adjective “happy” and the nouns for the subject and object of the verb. The next form of the verb (which is pronounced slightly differently and also has slight conjugation differences) translates into making someone happy. From this we can derive the adjective for making someone happy, along with the subject (who is making someone happy) and the object (the person being made happy). Yes, there are words for all of these things. There are also different forms that I have not learned the meaning of yet. It’s an interesting system, but an expansive one. I’m starting to be able to recognize what part of speech words are even if I don’t know their definition, that’s handy. Participles and what we would consider gerunds are still giving me trouble. That leads to other problems, if I can’t tell the word is a noun, I can’t put definite articles (the ubiquitous AL-everything) on properly in strings of nouns and adjectives describing each other.

I picked up an Arabic newspaper today and tried reading an article. I’m making progress because unlike the last time, I was able to make some sense out if it. My estimate is that I was “getting” about 30% of the article. My teacher insists that that’s pretty good. It took me almost 5 minutes to read about 10 lines, so it’ll be awhile before I can just pick up a newspaper and start reading. I’m inching forward slowly….

Isaac

The last post was about pronunciation problems. Thinking just a little, I realized that English is filled with words like that too. Traitor/trader, cousin/cuisine, etc. I guess I just have to buckle down and learn those things. I still think that the verbs are a little different case though. Take the verb driss, it means studied. If you put more stress on the “R” sound (making it daRiss), it becomes taught. Literally, it means to make someone study. Like I said, it’s going to take some getting used to.

Isaac

arabic language learning grammar yemen middle+east

There can be big differences in the meanings of words with just a slight difference in pronunciation. maatar is airport, but matar is rain. Luckily, it would be difficult to confuse the meaning of those two words in context, but there are others where I have to be pretty careful. My ear and tongue are still having troubles distinguishing some of these differences. I’m not sure how good I’ll get at this since these sorts of things just aren’t all that important in English. I do think I’m getting a better feel for other pronunciation things like sekoon (a stopping of the sound) and shda (a “doubling” of the letter). At least now I realize that I’m getting confused with how pronunciation changes in different parts of the sentence, I used to just pronounce everything the same way. I think that that’s progress….

Isaac

arabic language learning grammar yemen middle+east

arabic yemen middle east language

arabic yemen middle east language

arabic yemen middle east language

I’m beginning to see why so many op-eds I read that have been written by native Arabic speakers sounds so pompous, it’s kind of how the Arabic language is structured. It’s difficult to describe, but here’s a (very) small example. In English, I might ask “What do you think Randy?”, but in Arabic you would say, “What do you think YA Randy?” The Ya is a way of addressing the person, even in informal speech. In proper Fusa (MSA), you might also say the equivalent of “I my name is Isaac.” (Ana Ismee essak). There is a fair amount “extra” stuff thrown in that could make the translated text sound stuffy. This is good because it gives me a reason to give them the benefit of the doubt when reading. I always assumed that they were pompous windbags, now I think that maybe they’re just windbags:-)

Isaac

arabic yemen middle east language