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Learn Arabic

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114 pointsteleforce38 comments

Many years back, I wanted to learn Arabic, but, the problem is, there isn't one "Arabic". It seems you have to decide, do you want to learn Moroccan Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Levantine Arabic, Iraqi Arabic, Quranic Arabic, Modern Arabic...

When faced with this question, I just decided Farsi seemed a lot more interesting and accessible.

As I understand it these variants are mostly mutually comprehensible, so you may as well learn modern standard Arabic. The differences come down to pronunciation and the odd extra word.

But is there such a thing as "modern standard Arabic"?

yea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Standard_Arabic

There is but nobody speaks it.

You might be understood, but understanding others is where you run into problems :(

I think that "mostly" is an overstatement. I saw many Middle Easterns struggling to understand North Africans, to the level of giving up. Living in Sweden now I feel like saying "Arabic" is a bit like saying "Scandinavian" is a language.

My understanding is that MSA is understandable by most arabs thanks to media exposure but it's kinda like the transatlantic accent in that nobody speaks it natively.

Morroccan arabic is the most different one as they have strong spanish and french influences so it is less intelligible.

> אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט

> a shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot

> A language is a dialect with an army and navy

I studied linguistics + Persian as my primary language, but also took Arabic and Kurdish (Sorani) and a bunch of smaller, extinct languages (e.g. Middle Persian, Parthian). I'm a native speaker of Polish so approaching Arabic from the perspective of having learned PL/FA first was quite fun:

We had one exercise where we were given two different pieces of text to translate - the same joke in Moroccan and Iraqi dialects. If you showed them to me without much context there's no way I'd assume they belong to the same language.

But this is an extreme example of course (and my Arabic was terrible then, now non-existent)

Do you know some Yiddish also, or how did you come across that quote?

Hehe, nope it's a quote from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...

(I speak Polish and German, and had a short period when I was learning Hebrew while doing some projects for the Jewish Museum in Krakow ((ages ago, in Macromedia Flash times)). That being said, I'm good at forgetting the languages I studied as soon as I stop using them, be it some weird dialect of Middle Persian or Haskell)

EDIT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPJIMQS7C5Q and https://karolinacicha.eu/en/sklep/9-languages-2013/

(it's a fun album with songs in 9 languages spoken in that region, incl. yiddish, polish, Tatar, German, Romani...)

They certainly are not. I speak Levantine Arabic and learned MSA in school. I could understand Egyptian Arabic and Khaliji Arabic, but I have no chance understanding anything west of Egypt. There's a lot of extra words, even the simple words are different a lot of the time.

I traveled once to Egypt and the tour guide was delighted that I spoke Arabic. We started speaking in Arabic, but after a few minutes we switched back to English because we couldn't form complete sentences without any of us saying "What?".

No not at all, the differences are much broader than that. A Lebanese speaker can’t understand Moroccan at all typically.

Farsi or Kurdish you learn twice as fast as Arabic, its good choices for seeing the middle east. The Kurds already love America so it provides easy access to Iraq/KRG/Rojava without getting your head chopped off (there are two dialects of kurdish but Kurmanji worked for me at places of commerce anywhere in Sorani areas).

Yes, there is Standard Arabic and various Arabic dialects. The Middle Eastern dialects are closer to Standard Arabic while still different. In Morocco, Darija appears to be an Arabic dialect but it's actually more of an Amazigh language that uses approximately 70% Arabic vocabulary, which can be misleading

Egyptian Arabic is considered the standard Arabic language dialect.

I find it odd that Egyptian is used as the standard Arabic dialect. From what I understand Egyptian Arabic is heavily influenced by ancient Egyptian. I would have assumed standard Arabic would be based on a dialect from Arabia (now Saudi Arabia).

Egypt wasn't Arab until about the early 600s although I'm sure many people of Arab descent (Hejaz, Njad, etc) were there for many years. So to base the language on a place not Arab until only 1,400 years ago seems very recent to me.

One example I saw of an old ancient Egyptian word in modern Egyptian was the word "titi" meaning "to walk slowly". Egyptians now pronounce it "tata". But an example (from the link) " ‘Nefertiti’ means ‘the beauty walking slowly’ ". https://www.arabicwithhamid.com/ancient-egyptian-words-still...

No it's not

> It seems you have to decide, do you want to learn Moroccan Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Levantine Arabic, Iraqi Arabic, Quranic Arabic, Modern Arabic...

Why do you want to learn Arabic? Answering this question will point you to which dialect to learn..

Do you want to read Arabic? Learn Modern Standard. Do you want to watch television and movies? Learn Egyptian. Do you want to study Islam and the Quran? Learn Quranic. Do you have a particular interest in a region and speaking with the people of that region? Learn the dialect that is predominately spoken there.

There are great books on Iraqi Arabic at least. I used Duolingo and that, along with being on Discord with Iraqis.

Just find a community, that is how I learned other languages too.

Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is a good foundation.

Darija (Moroccan Arabic) is probably furthest away because it is heavily influenced by the Berber languages (and Arabs are not the majority in Morocco, they are just the largest minority). Also, Moroccans tend to do lots of context switching to French.

Egyptian Arabic is widely understood everywhere due to Egypt's strong position in the Arabic movie/TV industry.

It depends on why you are trying to learn Arabic. If the goal is to understand quran then standard arabic is going to be your goal. If you want to be able to read arabic text (documents) then it is using standard arabic. If you want to go to arab country except Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia and talk in a way that people will understand you then learn Egyptian dialect. It is the de facto standard dialect due to the media and the fact that about one from each Arab speaker is Egyptian. Then to understand other dialects you will get it by living or engaging with their speakers a little bit while they would be happy to talk sometimes in standard Arabic or Egyptian dialect themselves.

Also Egyptian Arabic tends to be the easiest dialect to learn for a beginner. It makes pronunciation much easier than i.e Iraqi dialect.

If the reason someone wanted to learn Arabic was because they thought they could learn one language to do all of those things, it's clear why they might just drop the idea when they learn they can't.

No they would learn standard arabic as everyone understands and can speak to some extent.

> [...] there isn't one "Arabic".

This is a misconception I always see online, sometimes by Arabic Teachers and native speakers. While yes, there are a lot of variants, the choice should be made obvious by the teachers (who I blame). Anyone who wants to learn Arabic, should learn Modern Standard Arabic (or Quranic, they're the same) for these reasons (non-exhaustive): 1- It is the most understood variant, as it is the lingua franca between all Arabic speaking peoples (and beyond). 2- It is similar to most other variants (Basically it's pretty near the vernacular variants of Peninsular Arabic, and not that far from the Levantine, Egyptian, and North African ones) 3- And MOST IMPORTANTLY : Unlike the vernacular variants, it is a written language with codified rules, clear grammar, and a vast lake of vocabulary resources.

Slightly related rant:

The most annoying idea I see spread all over is the comparison of Arabic and its variants to Latin and romance languages. Which is as misguided as a bent arrow fired from the hip. Latin is dead while MSA is live and kicking, being used daily by millions if not billions of people. Because of the Quranic staticity, Arabic is a pretty much "Frozen in time" language with little evolution. (A phrase written 1600 years ago might still be understood today, unlike in English or French for example)

I don’t disagree, but I’ll add that people learning MSA should learn a dialect along with it if they want to speak to real people.

Iraqi and Saudi arabic are the closest to standard and all ppl understand them... src: I am arab.

edit: and Syrian too

>It got so much easier. I wished that they could do that with more words, preferably all the words. Even better would be if I could have a link to each letter, with more information about that letter.

Do not do this! It feels easier in the beginning but it is to your detriment. The start up cost is slightly higher, but learning to treat each member of the Arabic abjad as a sound specific to that word will help you think in the dialect of Arabic you're targeting much faster.

There are tons and tons of YouTube videos about the Arabic script. Don't skip it!

Sounds like you know the subject, maybe you could explain a bit more. I'm confused as to why formatting the text without linked letters would prevent you from learning the sounds. In most languages cursive (linked letters) is not obligatory, and people learn the sounds before cursive. Why would that be a problem in Arabic?

It’s not that it will prevent you from learning the sounds themselves, it’s that it will take you longer to learn to read Arabic text that you’ve never encountered before. Part of what makes language learning difficult is the perceived lack of progress. The only way to overcome this is to ensure that your learning is as efficient as possible. That means using as few “intermediate representations” as possible — they take time to learn and, even worse, they take time to unlearn.

The thesis of this site is that it's easier to learn to read Arabic first with the letters separated . It seems like there should be a way for a browser plugin (or maybe just some user css, if that still works) to separate the letters on any website.

I went to the CSS reference docs to see how you would do this. I was thinking there could be a CSS rule like `character-form: isolated` or `text-transform: arabic-isolated`. There actually is a `text-transform: initial` but the initial part is a global value to reset the rule, not transforming the character to the initial form.

Searching the docs for "medial" (a less noisy name than initial or final) gave me the deprecated SVG attribute `arabic-form` which only existed on the <glyph> element in Chrome 1-39 and is supported nowhere today.

I kind of think you would need Javascript for this. I’m honestly a bit surprised there isn’t a text-transform option for arabic form, like `text-transform: uppercase` for latin, greek, and cyrillic characters. But that probably may be an indication on how rare it is that people actually change the form of arabic characters programmatically.

> Arabic is my life. Learning Arabic is the best thing I have done. Thanks to Arabic, I have discovered poetry.

Why should I learn Arabic? There's poems in the three/four languages I speak. Are the Arabic ones better?

What are your « 3/4 languages »?

Fluent in Czech/Polish/English. Can speak bad Slovak, understand a bit of German/French/Italian/Spanish, who doesn't...

I'm getting intermittent timeouts, here's archive in case we hug it https://archive.fo/kfSVV

You refer to yourself on the website, but we know nothing of you or your story. Also the connection to Finland would be curious too. That said, I have wished similar for some Finnish words when they get 'smushed' together. It's not always obvious that it's two words, and you can potentially break it apart to get the meaning easier.

Why was this flagged?

That’s a very good question!

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