Teaching myself Modern Standard Arabic... from scratch?

[Postbib Yeshuist]

I made a post on a similar topic in the Religion forum, but it was suggested I'd get more help here. But, before I begin, PLEASE go easy on me. I may or may not have any idea of what I'm speaking about...

I will begin a PhD in Religion and Culture at Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX) this Fall. I am expected to have demonstrated reading proficiency (academic level) in two languages by my second year. Preferably, they should be appropriate to my topic (see my signature), but I will most certainly be falling back on my BA in French to get the first out of the way. The second becomes the "trick"...

Given my topic, either Modern Hebrew or Modern Standard Arabic (which I understand is the "common" written language for publication, etc in the MIddle East) would be quite useful. Since I had a bad experience in Biblical Hebrew in seminary (dropped out three weeks in), and since MSA is ?considered a critical language by the US Gov't?, it seems like Modern Standard Arabic will be right up my alley. Of course, here's where the fun begins: I can't find a school within a reasonable radius of SMU that offers anything other than conversational Arabic and I don't think I have the money to cover travel expenses & tuition to a summer program. As such, I'm thinking I might try to talk the program into allowing me two years before testing on my second language and then attempt to learn MSA.

Now, before I open up for questions: yes, I am crazy. That being said, is it even remotely realistic to self-teach MSA over the course of two years? I would obviously seek help online, and if a course opportunity came along, I'd be all over it, but I need to prepared for doing it alone so I know if it's reasonable.

Thanks in advance (and again, go easy)

[Postbib Yeshuist]

PS It is worth noting that this is not a language I will need to speak. I need only be able to read and translate with a fair degree of competency.

[evieadelaide]

I'm far from being an expert in MSA, but I am proficient at the upper intermediate level (speaking, writing, reading) and am fluent in French and Spanish. While I think it highly unlikely to gain a more active use of the language on your own, if your heart's set on it, I think with the appropriate level of hard work, it is very possible to obtain the level of reading proficiency in a foreign language which you indicated--including Arabic (I would recommend that you request the extension in order to give yourself more time). Of course it will be very frustrating at first, but stick with it and use a variety of sources (it may also help to hear the language even if you don't speak it, so look online for various outlets). Once again, not an expert at all...just speaking from my own experience.

Good luck!

[ColorlessGreen]

It really depends on how motivated you are. Are you able to make a commitment to work on learning it every day? Will you get a textbook/workbook and work your way through it on a regular basis? The thing about learning a language on your own is that you, and only you, are responsible for making sure you do it. You won't have a teacher correcting your homework or a tutor pushing you to practice. You will be solely responsible for your progress.

That said, if you really can make that commitment, it shouldn't be any more difficult to learn to read/translate MSA than any other language (although I definitely would not recommend the self-taught approach for learning to speak!). Once you teach yourself the alphabet (which honestly isn't too hard, despite its initial intimidating appearance), the written language is not that bad. MSA is SVO like English, has noun-adjective order like Spanish, and, other than a bit of funkiness with determining specificity, shouldn't be that confusing for a native English speaker. MSA does have a consonantal root system, which can be either a blessing or a curse - a blessing, in that you will be easily able to identify new words with the same root as words you know, and a curse, in that you will have to memorize vowel sequences that correspond to each meaning. I have found that the pros outweigh the cons on that front.

If you want a simple textbook that will explain things basically clearly and hold your hand a bit towards the beginning, I can recommend Al-Kitaab as one that I've used with some success. It's a bit more focused on speech, but it also has passages excerpted from newspapers and websites that can give you some great practice reading. You might also want to pick up a copy of the Hans Wehr Arabic-English dictionary - in fact, it is on Scribd, if you want an online copy.

Good luck! I hope things go well for you.

[sibil]

I agree with ColorlessGreen - it can be done, the only question is whether you have the motivation. It takes a lot of work to develop strong reading proficiency in MSA in just two years if you're taking classes; it can take even more work if you're on your own. Since you said traveling is out of the question, I highly recommend you seek out a personal tutor. If money's tight, you can study Arabic on your own every day and then meet with a tutor once a week, once every other week, or even once a month if that's all you can afford, so that they can go over the progress you've made, answer your unanswered questions, correct your mistakes, etc. If possible, you should seek out someone with some level of teaching ability and/or a professional level of MSA (in other words, someone who was a teacher in an Arab country would be great, not just someone who learned it in school!)

There are tons of resources for learning MSA, from books and CDs to a wealth of websites and forums. I would work out curriculum with an Arabic instructor (you might email some professors at different schools, explain your situation, and ask their advice) so you know what textbooks you'll use and how much you plan to cover each week - then stick to it. Find other students at your school or nearby schools who speak and/or study Arabic, and form a club. There are some really fantastic forums for learning Arabic online where you can ask questions as you go along (I recommend unilang.com, wordreference.com, and lisanularab.org, amongst others) and you can find people who will correct your exercises and answer your questions for free on websites like livemocha.com and lang-8.com. Finally, uz-translations.net is your best source for (not exactly legal) free PDFs of just about every Arabic textbook out there (along with a million other languages).

Sorry if any of my advice was obvious, and good luck - Arabic is a tough language, but with enough dedication your goal is definitely accomplishable.

[Postbib Yeshuist]

Thanks for the advice everyone. I'll be meeting with my advisor in late May/early June and will bring this to his attention. He's encouraging me to do either MSa or Modern Hebrew (would the latter be any easier/harder?) so hopefully he'll be willing to help me bend the rules on the deadline.

[ColorlessGreen]

I've taken one semester of Hebrew, and 3 of Arabic, so I can speak from experience. Judging from my classmates in these two classes, I'd say they seemed to have less difficulty with Hebrew than Arabic. After just one semester, my Hebrew classmates had learned to speak about as well as my Arabic classmates could after a semester and a half. Of course, this might just be due to the fact that we spent longer learning the Arabic alphabet than we did the Hebrew (unnecessarily, to my mind - it shouldn't take half a semester to learn the alphabet).

Another factor is that there are fewer variants of Hebrew than of Arabic, so that's definitely a plus. I don't know what precisely you would be doing with Arabic, so this may not apply, but I'm sure you're aware that every Arabic-speaking country speaks a slightly different variant. Some differ only in vocabulary, some in grammar. MSA is really never used except in formal writing, as far as I'm aware. So if your interest is in formal academic papers or books, for example, MSA will get the job done, but if you would like to read newspapers or something of the sort, I believe that many of them are written more colloquially, with vocabulary or grammatical forms from the local dialect - but I am far from an expert, so perhaps someone else on this forum can correct me.

As to your experience with Biblical Hebrew, I can promise you that Modern Hebrew is quite different. It was essentially reinvented in the middle of the century, so it is less closely related to other Semitic languages now than it used to be. As far as I know, Biblical and Modern Hebrew are not mutually intelligible. Now, Modern Hebrew has fewer verb forms than MSA, which could be a factor in your decision of which one to study. If you do decide to study Hebrew, I recommend "Hebrew from Scratch." It's primarily meant for conversational learning, but it is also really helpful in explaining grammatical concepts, giving examples, offering useful vocabulary lists, etc. And really, I think you would be hard-pressed to find a textbook aimed at teaching a student to read and write alone.

I got a little bit off-track there, but what I basically wanted to say was that Modern Hebrew and MSA should be pretty similar in terms of "difficulty" (as a linguist, I don't believe in ranking languages based on perceived difficulty), but Hebrew might be a bit easier for native speakers of English. It varies, of course, based on the specific person, but the level of effort involved in learning either language would probably be very similar, so you should choose based on which one seems like it would be more useful in your future studies.

[Postbib Yeshuist]

Thanks for the follow up. I'll look into Modern Hebrew as well. Ultimately, I may have to decide on which language is "less complex." It is good to know that Ancient and Modern Hebrew are not necessarily interchangeable. That will help me avoid the mistake of taking Biblical Hebrew and then just thinking I can make a few changes and be up to speed

[sibil]

Modern Hebrew is definitely easier for an English-speaker to learn than MSA. The alphabet is simpler (though I agree with ColorlessGreen that this should not be a big factor), and more importantly, the grammar and syntax (and vocabulary to some extent) are much more familiar to an English/French-speaker than Arabic. Modern Hebrew is often described as a Standard Average European language with a Semitic rather than Indo-European base. On the other hand, MSA grammar, syntax, and vocabulary are much more 'foreign' to an English/French speaker and thus may pose more of a challenge.

However, you should keep in mind how choosing Hebrew over Arabic will limit your project; Hebrew has ~10 million speakers, 75% of whom live in Israel, whereas Arabic is spoken by 500+ million people across the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere. You might also consider that English bilingualism in Israel is extremely high (such that most Israelis read/write English quite well), whereas this is significantly lower in much of the Arab world.

So if your interest is in formal academic papers or books, for example, MSA will get the job done, but if you would like to read newspapers or something of the sort, I believe that many of them are written more colloquially, with vocabulary or grammatical forms from the local dialect - but I am far from an expert, so perhaps someone else on this forum can correct me.

Actually, virtually nothing is written in colloquial Arabic except for informal communication (email, chat, text, etc.) All Arabic newspapers (with perhaps a few rare exceptions) are written in MSA, as is nearly all other literature. Some people have written novels or poetry in colloquial Arabic, but even that is rare.

I got a little bit off-track there, but what I basically wanted to say was that Modern Hebrew and MSA should be pretty similar in terms of "difficulty" (as a linguist, I don't believe in ranking languages based on perceived difficulty), but Hebrew might be a bit easier for native speakers of English. It varies, of course, based on the specific person, but the level of effort involved in learning either language would probably be very similar, so you should choose based on which one seems like it would be more useful in your future studies.

Also as a linguist, I'd have to disagree. The difficulty of learning languages is of course relative to the learner's background, as you say, and for that reason learning Modern Hebrew is generally easier than learning MSA for people who speak English/French (see above). It's also a fallacy that no language is objectively more or less difficult for non-native learners to acquire; even given the relativity, Modern Hebrew would be much easier for an Arabic-speaker to learn than Modern Aramaic, despite Hebrew and Aramaic both being Northwest Semitic languages and essentially equally close to Arabic. This is because Modern Hebrew has undergone unnatural development (language reform, etc.) that led to its grammar becoming simplified and regularized, with the 'rough edges' filed off, so to speak. Modern Aramaic, not having undergone such developments, has retained a lot more of what makes languages difficult to learn: irregularity, exceptions to rules, quirky features unique to the language, etc.

With all that in mind I think Modern Hebrew would involve less effort to learn than MSA for just about anyone who speaks English and French. But, as with learning any foreign language (especially one from a different linguistic family than your own), it will still be a challenge, which is why I suggest you not rule out MSA. Simply put, there is just a lot more to read in MSA!

[rising_star]

Postbib,

Would you be interested/able to secure a summer FLAS or a Critical Language Scholarship through the Dept of State to study Arabic and/or Hebrew over the summer? Alternately, are you sure you can't do an independent study with an Arabic instructor at SMU to learn MSA?

[Postbib Yeshuist]

Postbib,

Would you be interested/able to secure a summer FLAS or a Critical Language Scholarship through the Dept of State to study Arabic and/or Hebrew over the summer?

Interested? Yes. Able? Honestly, I have no idea. I'm still in the early stages of researching this possibility.

Alternately, are you sure you can't do an independent study with an Arabic instructor at SMU to learn MSA?

I am looking into this possibility. To wit, http://fll.smu.edu/flttc/languages/arabic/curriculum.htm

Edited May 19, 2010 by Postbib Yeshuist