Zurich - Continuing with Arabic

Sample Page of My Book - Text and Vocabulary, Plus Exercises

Without really thinking about it, it seems that while I’m in Zurich, I try to learn Modern Standard Arabic and when I’m in Egypt, I go back to Egyptian Arabic. I’m not really getting the sense that I’m progressing, but I know I must be!

I dithered about taking classes again, but in the end I decided to teach myself via reading, since I’d like to be able to read fluently. I’ve been using the book “Easy Arabic Reader” to progress my skills. The cover claims “learn to read in Arabic almost instantly!”, which is, of course, a blatant lie.

I want to learn via reading because my French at A Level suddenly improved by leaps and bounds once I started to read novels in French. Unfortunately, I’m not finding it the same in Arabic.

I think there are several reasons for this (but I'm not reading a novel!) – firstly, Arabic has a completely different alphabet which means that I have to work a lot harder and I’m also reading much earlier in the learning process than when I did so for French. Secondly, whereas much of the vocabulary in French is similar to English so it’s easier to remember, there’s often no relation between the Arabic and the English: you’re just learning random sounds. Thirdly the grammar is more difficult or at least feels more foreign and I’m aware I don’t even know a lot of it (some of the ways things are phrased in my reader are really puzzling! And that’s even though I know, for example, that in Arabic if you put the verb first in a sentence, you no longer have to worry if the noun it refers to is singular or plural because you just use the singular). And, finally, Arabic is supposed to be one of the languages with the most vocabulary – since I’ve already learned three words for garden, the word for “not” changes depending on the tense, I know of about three or four words for woman, two words for “horse”, well, you can see how it all adds up and also increases the possibilities for non-comprehension.

Each time I read a new chapter (in reality, one short side of text), I feel thwarted. I need to go through it probably at least ten times, if not more, but weirdly on each repeat reading I understand more, even without looking up more vocabulary.

I’ll suddenly “click” what certain words are. Sometimes, it may be because I haven’t pronounced them correctly first time round and so didn’t realize what the word was, sometimes it’s because I’ve thought something is two words first time round and then realized that it’s just one word on my second or third reading. Written Arabic has this frustrating tendency to have spaces where you just don’t expect them to be or joins up words when you’re not expecting it, so I’m constantly getting confused. I do get fed up reading the same text so many times after a while and occasionally I’ll skip onto the next chapter just for some variation. On the positive side, I do both read and understand at the same time these days, which is more than I was able to do maybe a year ago where my whole energy was spent in just reading the words in isolation without being able to put them together.

But the book is well designed and repeats vocabulary as you go along to help you remember it and also so that you can see how one word can be used in different contexts. I'd really recommend it, since all my complaints are those of a beginner and not the book's fault at all. I carry the book with me everywhere so that if I’m waiting for my bus or need to take a long tram journey, I can delve into it. It also has some postcards in a more handwriting-type font, so that you can learn how to read that as well.

I’ve found a resource for vocabulary lists in English, Arabic and Egyptian Arabic (I’d forgotten to pack my book at the time), so I have a couple of them printed out for rote learning, too, just for variety. As if to highlight the greater vocabulary in Arabic vs English, apparently there is one word in Egyptian Arabic for a loud fart and another word for a quiet fart! I’m really not sure what that says about Egyptian culture. Don’t you just love learning languages?