comparing the study of Chinese and Arabic
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jiaoshou -
One of the secrets that you learn in the end of 1st year Arabic is that all words are derived from
each other, a characteristic of the Semitic languages. So by knowing the root consonants in a word
and the regular patterns they are pressed into, you can guess the meanings of words. Now... in
reality this is easier said than done. It gets easier after you do it a couple thousand times, but
it works according to very predictable rules. Modern textbooks are good at organizing new lexical
growth according to what students know already. (i.e. the vocabulary lists in Al-Kitaab vols 2 and
3).
The analogy with Arabic is that Chinese students are always told (correct me if I am wrong) that
they will begin to guess the meaning of single characters from their knowledge of other characters
because certain component parts are included in more complex characters. (I always understood the
debate about traditional vs. simplified characters this way at least, that simplified ones take
away a lot of linguistic meaning.) After how many characters would you say that this kicks in?
From what I have seen so far, it is by no means a regular predictable phenomenon as in the Arabic
roots. Sometimes you get clues, but not reliable ones.
I'd like to go back to something Atitarev said above:
I find developing listening comprehension is much harder in Chinese as well. I may not recognise
the words I know. In Arabic, I recognise them much easier - apart from a few difficult sounds, the
words in Arabic are longer and are easier to distinguish.
The obvious point to make is that Arabic has those derived words, but they are written using an
alphabet, so lexical recognition takes place in both listening and reading.
Any tips for increasing listening comprehension skills?
If in fact there are so many instances to hear Mandarin in near-written form of the language all
around you then just talking with lots of people is one answer. In Arabic your chances of hearing
sustained MSA (if not on the television or in a lecture or public event) as a beginner are low.
MSA is like a level of purity towards which only certain levels of Arabic speakers who identify
deeply with the language strive to attain. For the first couple years in Arabic even when living
in an Arab country, diglossia is a blessing, since finding instances that reproduce the level of
language used in the MSA classroom is very difficult.
At one time there seems to have been a debate about standardizing a colloquial form of Arabic. I
imagine that that debate was DOA, given how attached many people are (1) to the complex grammar of
Arabic and (2) the cult of regional particularity in the Arab world. Textbooks nowadays often
ignore points of grammar in the beginning just to get the students communicating.
Intuitively, listening comprehension would be the hardest one. What about writing in Chinese? Even
though I live in the Middle East, I almost never write in Arabic. Part of it is that so much
interaction between people takes place verbally.
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atitarev -
Let me explain why I think Chinese is harder to understand by listening.
When we go through the list of new words, eg. using "New Practical Chinese Reader" textbook, they
usually make sense when you see both the character and know the pronunciation, especially
one-syllable words, since there are too many homophones - complete or partial. I listen to audio -
text first, then new words. The words become alive in a context, in complete sentences.
For example the words 住 and 祝 are both pronounced [zhù] but are used differently.
我住在墨尔本。 Wǒ zhù zài Mò'ěrběn. I live in Melbourne.
祝你身体好。Zhù nǐ shēntǐ hǎo. I wish you good health.
The Arabic phrase:
أنا أسكن في ملبورن [Ana askun fi Melborn] - "I live in Melbourne". The word "askun"
clearly identifies the meaning of the 1st person singular, present tense of the verb "to live".
You don't even need to use "ana" (I), it's clear from the verb form. It doesn't sound like
anything else. There are homophones in Arabic but not as many as in Chinese. The Chinese zhù can
mean many things, either as a word or as word component.
For me personally, Arabic grammar makes better sense than to an English speaker because of my
Russian background, Russian has 6 complex cases, not 3 (it applies to nouns, adjectives, numerals
and pronouns), verbs are conjugated but we write as we speak and constant exposure doesn't allow
to forget the cases and we always pronounce them. Well, in Arabic, you normally don't write case
endings and spoken dialects don't use this feature.
Quote:
Any tips for increasing listening comprehension skills?
Learn the basic words, then listen to sentences. Although it applies to ALL languages, it's more
so to Chinese.
Quote:
The analogy with Arabic is that Chinese students are always told (correct me if I am wrong) that
they will begin to guess the meaning of single characters from their knowledge of other characters
because certain component parts are included in more complex characters. (I always understood the
debate about traditional vs. simplified characters this way at least, that simplified ones take
away a lot of linguistic meaning.) After how many characters would you say that this kicks in?
From what I have seen so far, it is by no means a regular predictable phenomenon as in the Arabic
roots. Sometimes you get clues, but not reliable ones.
Some people say, you can learn the 1st thousand but still have trouble learning new words. Not
quite true but you still have to get through the same process. You always need 3 things:
1. the character itself - the way it looks, stroke order, components.
2. pronunciation(s).
3. Meaning(s) and usage.
The more characters you know the better, they will gradually fill the gaps because they are reused
but learning just characters out of context is not always useful.
There are some similarities between learning to read in Chinese and Arabic - you need to know the
correct pronunciation. Chinese require a lot of memorisation, knowledge of components to get some
meaning and often pronunciation (just a hint, by no means a definite clue). In Arabic, you need to
the short vowels, again your experience of patterns, grammar and vocabulary helps to get this
right.
Writing in Chinese and Arabic is the opposite in terms of skills required. Writing in Arabic is
rather easy, just skip the short vowels, use the "hamza" rules.
أحب اللغة العربية - "I like Arabic"
Pronounced as [uḥibbu al-luġa(ta) 'l`arabia] but written as [hamza-ḥ-b hamza-l-ġ-(tāʼ
marbūṭa) 'l-`-r-b-y-tāʼ marbūṭa], thus writing only consonants, the only vowel-like letter
is tāʼ marbūṭa (ﺓ) and there are no long vowels/diphthongs here. I find writing is much
easier than reading here, as you need to insert the short vowels based on your knowledge when you
read.
In Chinese, you have to bring up from memory the characters, which just don't come up when you
need them, if you saw them many times or even wrote them.
It's just my learner's brief summary of differences in learning Chinese and Mandarin, everyone's
different. I used simplified characters. The shape of the traditional characters is not that
helpful and not always, many simplified characters used a different phonetic component or they
just to easy to remember without them. It's up to you, which you want to use (I don't want to
start this can of worms, SC vs TC).
In your PM to me (I hope you don't mind ) you wrote:
Quote:
Too often, Arabic and Chinese are tossed in the same basket, as the "hardest" or the "least taught"
I don't quite agree with the 2nd bit. At present, Mandarin Chinese is not understudied. It's
booming in my opinion and there are plenty of resources.
DIGRESS
Sadly, it's true about Arabic. The main reason being lack of standardisation of spoken Arabic.
Greece tried to do the same for a long time - they used ancient Greek in writing but people spoke
colloquial (a quite different tongue). Now they standardised modern Greek. I can see 2 ways to
make Arabic more learnable and popular.
1. Promote standard Arabic to speech (perhaps a simpler version mixed with common regional
colloquialisms), they managed to do that in China, Taiwan and Singapore, why not do it in Arab
countries? Produce movies, songs, entertainment programs, etc. in MSA! Some expressions, which are
used in speech would need to be included to make it a live and modern language. I read there are
some areas around universities in Saudi Arabia where MSA is used for spoken communication.
2. Upgrade regionalects to become standard, like the did in Greece. Will this be a death to a
common language for all Arabs? I don't think so. If a dialect is written and used in media and
taught, then it will be known. The words common to many dialects + some formal words could be
included, thus reducing the gap. This may still create a few new languages still but the core will
still be the same or similar. The reality is that standard Arabic is not spoken anyway.
Both methods would require agreement between Arabs on the government level (doesn't have to be ALL
governments), to please purists, Classical Arabic would remain for religious purposes.
END DIGRESS
wushijiao -
Quote:
Any tips for increasing listening comprehension skills?
I think the only solution, is to just massively increase your listening comprehension. For the
last three or four years, this has been my personal obsession. I used to listen to tapes on a
Walkman, and play the same tape over and over, listening to it in full for a day, at least for a
month. I probably did that for an hour or two per day.
Then I entered the podcast era, which is great, save for the fact that there are some golden
materials on tape that don’t exist digitally, as far as I know. Since I got my iPod last year in
February in 2007, my listening news comprehension has steadily increased to great new heights.
Mandarin listening comprehension is brutally difficult. In Russian or Spanish (and I assume
Arabic), at least the words are long and they have grammatical suffixes or verb conjugations and
declensions, and then even if you don’t know a new word, at least you know it was a verb that
was in 3rd person plural, or whatever. In Mandarin, to a large degree, that same info can pass you
by at light speed. That’s why you have to get obsessed with exposing yourself to massive
quantities of listening using lot of different strategies!
renzhe -
I'll third the suggestion for massive amounts of listening.
It's important to have a basic vocabulary of a couple of thousand words. How you get those
(textbook study, flashcards...) is irrelevant, as long as you have a basic vocabulary of common
words. Then it's about overloading yourself with listening.
I listen to podcasts and watch TV shows daily, like wushijiao, and have made awesome progress in a
year or so. True, I still can't fully follow most conversations and I'm totally lost sometimes,
but I went from only noticing a blurb of unrelated sounds to following conversations and
understanding what's going on, which is great progress.
Chinese, like few other languages out there, requires listening until your ears bleed. You need to
invest a lot of time in this.
wushijiao -
Quote:
(2) the cult of regional particularity in the Arab world.
What do you mean by that? Do people, say in the Gulf, have a particular attachment to their spoken
dialect that disuades them from standardizing towards a MSA?
In general, I used to think that the analogy between Arabic and its diglossia and Chinese and its
diglossia was appropriate. But Mandarin is really in an overwhelming position of dominance
compared to other Chinese dialects and non-Chinese languages within China. The only slightly
difficult thing, for the average beginner or intermediate learner of Chinese, it can be a bit hard
to understand the regional varieties of non-standard Mandarin. There really aren't any CSL
materials aiming at helping learners understand how Shanghaiese pronounce Mandarin, or how Henan
people speak Mandarin...etc, while, from what I've read, there are quite a few materials
specifically aimed at teeaching colloquial Egyptian, Guld Arabic, Iraqi Arabic...etc. Correct?
Rezaf, do all people in Iran study Arabic? Aren't there a lot of loan words from Farsi that come
from arabic?
atitarev -
Quote:
What do you mean by that? Do people, say in the Gulf, have a particular attachment to their spoken
dialect that disuades them from standardizing towards a MSA?
...
There really aren't any CSL materials aiming at helping learners understand how Shanghaiese
pronounce Mandarin, or how Henan people speak Mandarin...etc, while, from what I've read, there
are quite a few materials specifically aimed at teeaching colloquial Egyptian, Guld Arabic, Iraqi
Arabic...etc. Correct?
Yes, dialects have a much higher usage and status with Arabs, as they are more than just local
speech. Standard Arabic is taught at schools and is in the media but everybody is expected to
speak dialects, some dialects being more prestigious than others.
For the same reason, if you are in Egypt you need to speak Egyptian (Cairene being more
prestigious).
Quote:
In sociolinguistic terms, Arabic in its native environment typically occurs in a "diglossic"
situation, meaning that native speakers learn and use two substantially different language forms
in different aspects of their lives. In the case of Arabic, the regionally prevalent variety is
learned as a speaker's mother tongue and is used for nearly all everyday speaking situations
throughout life, including most films and plays, and (rarely) in some literature. A second, quite
different variety, Standard Arabic, is learned in school and is used for most printed material, TV
news reporting and interviews, sermons and other formal situations. The extent to which the local
vernacular tends to interplay with the Standard variety in formal situations varies from country
to country.
In any case, there is no Arab region where MSA is spoken in a family, between friends and in
everyday situations, including business (oral) communications.
I personally don't see a need to have material about how e.g. Shanghainese or Henan people speak
Mandarin, perhaps more appropriate to learn the dialect itself. If you want to settle in Shanghai,
knowing Shanghainese would be a bonus after learning enough Mandarin.
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