man, arabic

[xfer]

i'm using some of my time this summer to learn a little about the language.

i'm really getting the alphabet and writing--supremely logical so far, even with crappy case remnants and masculine/feminine stuff--but damned if i can grasp the pronunciation.

how, exactly, do foreign-language keyboards work, and where can i get one?

 

[Burzumite]

I assume you're using Windows, if so, you can use a software keyboard, they're simple to use, all you have to do (for most languages) is just type in the letters or sylables, and it should display it in that language. To install one of these go to the control panel, and go to "regional and language options" and then go to the language tab at the top, the first section has a button "details." Click it. Go to "add" on the right hand side, towards the bottom. Pick they language, you'll probably be asked to put in your windows install disc. After installing, and a restard, there should be a "language bar" on your "taskbar" (or "Start Bar") towards the right end of it, select the language, and you should be set to use a standard keyboard for any language. I'm not sure, I've only used it for Japanese, and I'm sure that's quite different from Arabic. For further help, you should be able to look it up on Windows.com or by reading a help file.

Sorry for the poor grammer/spelling, (it is summer, teach) I've been up for more than 24 hours, and I can't sleep.

 

[avi]

yeah, the gender stuff is totally what killed me when I was learning Hebrew. I'd probably be better with it now, but when I was 12 it was awful.

 

[xfer]

yeah I know how to install the language--but I definitely need at least stickers to put on my keys to tell me which keys are which.

english is messed-up and illogical in so many ways and I could not even conceive of learning it from a different linguistic background, but at least we don't have gendered words. jesus christ.

 

[rachmiel]

its a beautiful script..

 

[xfer]

yeah, and even the sentences/words i can write myself look really neat! even though i'm sure they're relatively clumsy!

 

[mindspell]

english is messed-up and illogical in so many ways and I could not even conceive of learning it from a different linguistic background, but at least we don't have gendered words. jesus christ.

Well when you never heard anything else, gendered word aren't that hard. It is just for you people with languages without that it is hard. It is fucked to have words that are masculine in one language and feminine in another that it gets weird..

 

[rachmiel]

spanish at least introduced me to the concept of gendered words

 

[xfer]

yeah latin introduced me to the concept, so maybe i'm doing better than people who never had a gendered word background.

written arabic is soooo much more logical than english in soooo many ways, except for one major one--the right to left thing. not because i'm not used to it, but because it's annoying as fuck for a right-handed person to be covering the letters they just created with their hand, ESPECIALLY when all your letters are joined and influenced by each other. i can't imagine how it must have been before quick-drying ink.

 

[Helm]

Greek has gendered words and remains generally a complicated language. However I found English to be fairly logical and easy to learn.

 

[Baliset]

alex: you should talk to my sister about it sometime as she has been studying it for 12 years now.

 

[xfer]

helm, well, i can see learning basic english--just gotta learn a lot of irregular stuff. but i cannot conceive of learning the most important part of english--the various shades of meaning, connotations, et cetera that carry most of the meaning.

the "basic" form of english i'm talking about--which a lot of english language learners know an expanded version of--is pretty much a dialect. look on wikipedia under 'special english' and 'basic english'. the thing that worries me most about learning other languages is that in order to really be able to grasp the nuances of english expressed by synonym choices and word order and the like, you have to pretty much live in an english-speaking environment for decades. and i can't see myself living in, say, an arabic-speaking environment for decades to pick up the nuance stuff.

greg, next time i see your sister, i will totally try to get her to pronounce words including some of the 3-4 letters i simply cannot say properly.

 

[Baliset]

e-mail me the words or make a copy and i will ask her this weekend because she will be visiting my family in CT for father's day

 

[xfer]

don't harass her just yet--I have an audio program for learning Arabic I'm gonna check out after I get through these books on learning the alphabet/reading it, and they might have lessons on the stuff that I find hard.

the letters I find hard to say are cayn (ﻉ), ghayn (ﻍ), and hamza (ﺀ). cayn is a "pharygnal voiced fricative" (what?) which basically sounds like a voiced gag--"like the bleating of a lamb, but smoother". ghayn is "the sound you make when gargling" and "almost exactly the sound of the very strongly rolled Parisian r in French" (but there already is a basic rolled R in Arabic that's a different letter). and hamza is the "vocal catch" that's between the syllables in "uh-oh" or the Cockney "bottle" (bo-ul) or, I think, the CT-accent "New Brtain" (New Bri-ehn"). I can definitely do hamza, I just don't know how to incorporate it at the beginning of words ('alif) instead of between syllables. the ghayn is also supposedly easy to do, but I just don't understand how it sounds. the cayn, on the other hand...no clue. I almost threw up when I was experimenting.

 

[xfer]

oh shit i think i just figured out ghayn

 

[xfer]

so i talked to this girl who speaks farsi at the ice cream store, and she showed me ghayn, and i'm working with her next week and she might help me with hamza. however i guess persians pronounce ﻉ without the weird gargle so she can't help me there.

 

[Autumn Falls]

Good look with Arabic. My best friend is majoring in that and it seems rather difficult. On the otherhand I had my first year of Hebrew last year and it was damn fun but yea the gender is what really irked me. I find writing in a new alphabet to be most rewarding though.

Beh-chatz-lah-chah, Brandon

 

[FuSoYa]

(this is alex posting from CT; for some reason the Logout button isn't working)

today i have been battling with an aspect of arabic than is simultaneously insanely stupid and insanely cool--namely, the existence of fourteen or so "sun letters" in opposition to a mostly equal amount of "moon letters" that determine how you append articles to words (al-qaeda, but ar-rasuul, not al-rasuul, for example)

writing arabic is really, really fun and i think i write really prettily even though i know to a native speaker i have big, straggling, uneven letters that occasionally are reversed or disproportionate.

 

[Draft Dodging Scarecrow]

I was using some of my time to learn french, but then I learned some basic stuff and found it not interesting anymore. I think I'll take a look at Russian and German languages.

 

[FuSoYa]

french is retarded. next on my linguistic list are russian, polish, hebrew, tamil, spanish, and japanese. obviously i won't get to them all but i might get 1-2 more before i die.

(alex!)