Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 318 posts

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#181

Post by jki275 »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #170
Tor3 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends heavily on the language course. Duolingo's Italian course actually manages to teach grammar and usage through their standard translation setup, while their Japanese course does nothing of the sort. It does not work very well for the latter, I've been through most of it by now and it's just translation-translation-translation, which doesn't teach you much at all, because the translation to English really do…

Are you sure you don't mean "gozaimasu" in the taxi driver example? I learned what little Japanese I do know from Duolingo and it was somewhat useful on a recent trip to Japan. Our tour guides were mostly impressed and certainly didn't point out any glaring issues with it (although that could be Japanese politeness).

https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/itadakimasu-meaning/

And yes, in Japanese culture it would be extremely rude to point out errors in a guest's attempts to speak the language.

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#182

Post by int_19h »

smel wrote: post #116
theprotocol wrote: post #64

I am a native Arabic speaker. It is an awful language. As the article points out, the dialects are just too numerous for it to gain any kind of critical mass of adoption. But beyond that, I'd say the biggest problem with it is that there are just so many exceptions that knowing the rules of grammar is nowhere near enough to speak it correctly. edit: I also wanted to mention that written Arabic differs from spoken Ara…

I'm native arabic speaker too, and can tell you that your statement is far from the truth. Arabic is far more simple language with fewer exceptions than english or french (I love/speak french :D). There are only 3 tenses: Also it's derivational language which mean once you learn about a verb you actually learn about the whole lexical family of the verb. In english for example you have : Book, Author, Library In Arabi…

> In english for example you have : Book, Author, Library In Arabic (kitaab, kaatib, maktaba) which is the same root (k,t,b) and with simple rules you can discover all those words or even invent them if not used previously

I don't see why the word for "author" has to be derived from the same root as "book", logically speaking. There are a great deal more things than books that have authors.

The reason why this particular root that you've picked produces differences between "book" and "library" in most European languages is because they had two major sources from which their roots were borrowed: Latin (where "book" is "liber") and Greek (where "book" is "biblio"); and both roots were borrowed and used in this case. However, for most roots, the principle is exactly the same in European languages - a single common root produces a whole family of words, and new words are derived as needed. It's not something that's unique to Arabic.

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#183

Post by jki275 »

smel wrote: post #130
avaika wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that Arabic is simpler than English. It might have been simpler for you as your were the native :) For me Arabic and English both are foreign and I can definitely tell you that English was much simpler to learn. While words "transformation" might seem cool and convenient, there is no common rule on how to predict final meaning. Also the pronunciation is very (VERY) important. One tiny mistake and you will e…

you're right ! and a little bit biased because pronunciation is important for all languages out there I see the same issue with french foreign speakers too. In Arabic pronunciation is straight forward, in english pronunciation depends on each word (a,u,o) can have a different sounds (depends in which word used) and the emphasis also is a dark magic :D there are no such exceptions in Arabic Arabic can be difficult but…

The difference is that English words don't really change meanings based on pronunciation. Words do have many pronunciations, but the meaning remains the same.

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#184

Post by simias »

smel wrote: post #116
theprotocol wrote: post #64

I am a native Arabic speaker. It is an awful language. As the article points out, the dialects are just too numerous for it to gain any kind of critical mass of adoption. But beyond that, I'd say the biggest problem with it is that there are just so many exceptions that knowing the rules of grammar is nowhere near enough to speak it correctly. edit: I also wanted to mention that written Arabic differs from spoken Ara…

I'm native arabic speaker too, and can tell you that your statement is far from the truth. Arabic is far more simple language with fewer exceptions than english or french (I love/speak french :D). There are only 3 tenses: Also it's derivational language which mean once you learn about a verb you actually learn about the whole lexical family of the verb. In english for example you have : Book, Author, Library In Arabi…

I love learning languages and learning about languages. I considered seriously learning Arabic but I eventually decided against it mainly because, as the parent points out, there seem to be many variations between countries and also between formal, literary arabic and the spoken dialects.

Given that learning the language (in any form) is probably going to be a huge challenge the prospect of spending years studying the idiom only to end up in an arabophone country and not being able to fluently converse with anybody felt discouraging.

I eventually decided that I would focus on learning Russian instead, an other very difficult but obviously completely different languages (although it also features declensions and relatively simple conjugations minus the aspect thingy).

Do you think I was mistaken?

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#185

Post by jki275 »

kranner wrote: post #122
theprotocol wrote: post #64

I am a native Arabic speaker. It is an awful language. As the article points out, the dialects are just too numerous for it to gain any kind of critical mass of adoption. But beyond that, I'd say the biggest problem with it is that there are just so many exceptions that knowing the rules of grammar is nowhere near enough to speak it correctly. edit: I also wanted to mention that written Arabic differs from spoken Ara…

> 1. It's very convoluted and it takes many more words to describe things accurately than latin and/or germanic languages; 2. Due to geographical and cultural separation from the West, the vocabulary is just not adapted to modern life, so "workarounds" need to be used to refer things that have become common in our daily lives. This is exactly the situation with Hindi (and I'd venture to say all Indian languages). The…

I've noticed that in Tagalog and Japanese as well.

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#186

Post by pferde »

glangdale wrote: post #92

The "Idle Words" blog, home to the infamous "Dabblers and Blowhards" takedown of Paul Graham, also has a good article on Arabic ( http://idlewords.com/2011/08/why_arabic_is_terrific.htm ). Opening paragraph: I just finished a summer studying Arabic at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, an enjoyable adventure that I hope to write about in more detail later. MIIS offers a nine-week program in a bunch of…

Thanks for the link, it is an excellently written article, which manages to poke fun at Arabic's various weird quirks, and convey author's enthusiasm about how cool the language is, both at the same time. Very good read!

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#187

Post by isolli »

smel wrote: post #116
theprotocol wrote: post #64

I am a native Arabic speaker. It is an awful language. As the article points out, the dialects are just too numerous for it to gain any kind of critical mass of adoption. But beyond that, I'd say the biggest problem with it is that there are just so many exceptions that knowing the rules of grammar is nowhere near enough to speak it correctly. edit: I also wanted to mention that written Arabic differs from spoken Ara…

I'm native arabic speaker too, and can tell you that your statement is far from the truth. Arabic is far more simple language with fewer exceptions than english or french (I love/speak french :D). There are only 3 tenses: Also it's derivational language which mean once you learn about a verb you actually learn about the whole lexical family of the verb. In english for example you have : Book, Author, Library In Arabi…

It reminds me of Czech, where a fixed list of prefixes can be used to modify the meaning of any verb, with very creative possibilities!

https://mluvtecesky.net/en/grammar/prefixes

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#188

Post by barry-cotter »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #101
Uberphallus wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a polyglot, and what keeps me from trying to learn Arabic is precisely that. Back in the day I worked in a very international environment, two Tunisian colleagues spoke Tunisian to each other, but when the Moroccan or Lebanese guys from the other teams came to ask some questions, everybody switched to French. If was small talk, they would stick to Arabic with the Moroccan though. It's pretty amazing that Arabic,…

Would it be comparable to, say, Dutch and Afrikaans? They sound similar and up to a point people from those countries can have a conversation in their respective languages, but there's just so many differences that it's easier to switch to English.

Dutch and Afrikaans is probably in the top three most similar language pairs among Indo-European languages along with Spanish-Portuguese-Italian (a three way) and Danish-Norwegian bokmål. The fact that people switch to English is more a reflection of how good English language education is than the difference between the languages. If you are in Italy and you speak Spanish and English you’ll get more benefit from your Spanish outside tourist traps.

Re: Arabic, a great language, has a low profile

#190

Post by barry-cotter »

biggio wrote: post #174
fatihdonmez wrote: post #172

I'm turkish and because of hidden arabic imperialism and assimilation rooted deep in islam, I refuse to use even arabic words which are common in turkish.

Compared to Turkish I find Arabic quite messy

I’m not surprised Turkish is simpler. It was “reformed” so much after the foundation of the republic that modern Turks can’t understand Ottoman Turkish. It was written in Arabic script and had a great, great many Arabic and Persian words.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_language

> Owing to this sudden change in the language, older and younger people in Turkey started to differ in their vocabularies. While the generations born before the 1940s tend to use the older terms of Arabic or Persian origin, the younger generations favor new expressions. It is considered particularly ironic that Atatürk himself, in his lengthy speech to the new Parliament in 1927, used a style of Ottoman which sounded so alien to later listeners that it had to be "translated" three times into modern Turkish: first in 1963, again in 1986, and most recently in 1995.

Post reply on HN