I haven’t been doing any Arabic studying for a month or so. I have been talking on and off, and just like my other breaks, I feel that I am more comfortable with the Arabic that I know. Of course I also realize that there are some words that I have forgotten, they just aren’t coming to me when I need them. That’s easy enough to fix, review is always easier than learning new stuff. I’ve also been scanning some of the Arabic newspapers and I feel that I’m getting more out of them. I still can’t sit down and read them, but I’m getting the idea of a lot of headlines now. there’s two problems with me and the headlines. The first is that I just don’t know all the words. That’ll come with time. The other problem is that often times the headlines don’t make any sense. They only hint at what the article is about as opposed to summarizing it. Many times, I don’t really know what the article is about. I’ve been told that this is on purpose.
The newspapers in this part of the world tend to be written in a more literary style than the US. I’ve been told that this is because when they were released from colonial rule, they didn’t have any newspaper tradition at all. The governments went to the only writers that they had access to, men studying Arabic and Arabic literature. The press here is frequently criticized for being too editorializing and not facts based enough. I’m betting that their headline writing is a symptom of this.
I’m hoping that in the next part of my class, we’ll concentrate more on the papers and perhaps doing some more word drills. I’d like to have some text in front of me and be forced to identify the subject, object, predicate (which doesn’t necessarily involve verbs), masdars (gerunds to us English speakers), participles, etc. It’ll be about as thrilling as it sounds, but it will help me considerably. The dictionaries for Arabic frequently only list the roots of words, so if I’m looking for a participle, gerund, plural, or any other number of variations, I could very well be out of luck unless I can spot the root. If I come across a word I don’t know (which is very frequently in the papers), I usually need to know what part of speech it is in order to look it up.
I consider this progress. At least now I know what I need to know in order to learn more… I’m also hoping that studying will be more interesting if it’s primarily reading. We’ll see how it goes…
The newspapers in this part of the world tend to be written in a more literary style than the US. I’ve been told that this is because when they were released from colonial rule, they didn’t have any newspaper tradition at all. The governments went to the only writers that they had access to, men studying Arabic and Arabic literature. The press here is frequently criticized for being too editorializing and not facts based enough. I’m betting that their headline writing is a symptom of this.
I’m hoping that in the next part of my class, we’ll concentrate more on the papers and perhaps doing some more word drills. I’d like to have some text in front of me and be forced to identify the subject, object, predicate (which doesn’t necessarily involve verbs), masdars (gerunds to us English speakers), participles, etc. It’ll be about as thrilling as it sounds, but it will help me considerably. The dictionaries for Arabic frequently only list the roots of words, so if I’m looking for a participle, gerund, plural, or any other number of variations, I could very well be out of luck unless I can spot the root. If I come across a word I don’t know (which is very frequently in the papers), I usually need to know what part of speech it is in order to look it up.
I consider this progress. At least now I know what I need to know in order to learn more… I’m also hoping that studying will be more interesting if it’s primarily reading. We’ll see how it goes…