downsides to rosetta stone

the economist online writes a great piece on the downside to rosetta stone language learning.

overall, the OO highly recommends language-lovers to read the johnson blog.

facepalm! a lesson about afghan languages

this video shows the (both hilarious and highly disconcerting) repercussions if your interpreter can’t speak the local language.

quick knowledge bomb about afghan languages:

there are two official ones. dari and pashto. pashto is an indigenous afghan language spoken by the pashtun ethnic group (afghanistan’s largest) in afghanistan and northern pakistan. dari is simply the afghan government’s official name for persian. in its written form, dari is identical to farsi (iranian persian). in its spoken form, it has its own colloquialisms, but they are mutually intelligible. the relationship between the two is akin to canadian french and french french. in the northern areas, there are several minor turkic languages (related, but not mutually intelligible, to turkish). dari is afghanistan’s lingua franca.

ween is-sou2? oh sorry, i thought you spoke arabic!

if you’re like the OO, then you believe the study of ir is incomplete unless you can grasp it in at least three languages. it’s true that you’ll probably die earlier, but hey, you’ll die smarter. the OO himself, for largely this reason, has picked up a working knowledge of farsi, spanish, and hindi, in addition to the queen’s. but these are all indo-european languages. you want (useful) diversity, you go altaic (knowledge bomb: altaic includes both turkish and japanese, which are actually quite closely related!), sinitic, or afro-asiatic. and if you don’t want to take it from the OO, take it from cj cregg in the season 3 premiere of the west wing: “you guys want to get great jobs after college and serve your country? study arabic, chinese, and farsi.”

take it from cj cregg: learn arabic

but here’s the problem. study modern standard arabic in university or with a private tutor for three, four, or even five years until you’ve mastered it and guess what? when you go to syria or lebanon, and someone approaches you asking, ‘mneen?’ all you will be able to do is stare blankly and think of ways to exact vengeance on your arabic teacher. in the levant, ‘mneen’ is the colloquial way of asking, ‘where are you from?’ if you’ve taken only modern standard arabic, you’ve been practising, ‘min ayna anta?’

after arriving in damascus, you buy a mobile phone and use it to text that cute girl you’ve had your eye on in the bazaar (as public flirtation is frowned upon in damascus, chatting up à la text message is the preferred method). with your knowledge of modern standard arabic, you text her, ‘marhaba, anti mutzaweja?’ (hello, are you married?). she texts back, ‘;-), la a5i, ana 3azba. shu ismak?’…crap. did she just text you her math homework? what’s with all the numbers?

no, no, friend. this is the real modern arabic. the colloquial one, aka 3amiya (pronounced ‘aamiyya), that will get you invited to parties in beirut and a lower rent price for your flat. it’s the one that’s transliterated alphanumerically by the hip, generation y crowd. it’s the one you should have been learning for the past five years alongside modern standard arabic, aka msa or fus7a (pronounced fuss ha).

now let’s not be too harsh on msa. it’s incredibly useful. all formal written communication, newscasts, magazines, etc in the arab world use it almost exclusively. if you don’t know msa, you can’t read an arabic newspaper, and there goes your dream of being able to grasp the subject matter of ir in arabic. however, all music, films, and day-to-day conversation both at home and in the workplace are in 3amiya. if you don’t know the local 3amiya, good luck overhearing debates about the validity of arab nationalism in the local coffee house, and there goes your dream of being able to grasp the subject matter of ir in arabic. and how different is a local 3amiya from msa? arabs don’t like to admit it because for some strange reason it’s a sensitive subject in the arab world, but the answer is very. talk to your average arab in the middle east, ask them if you should learn 3amiya or msa, and they’ll put down the virtues of 3amiya and make it out to be an overly casual, lower-class way of speaking. one arabic language institute in damascus compares it to english slang:

“We don’t advice you to study Ammya (colloquial or Syrian dialect). A student doesn’t pay money to study slang or inferior quality language (I wanna, I gonna, You aint, ).”

that is a complete lie. if you only speak msa, you will never be accepted or immersed into arabic society. you will forever be a foreigner who can only appreciate today’s headline in ash-sharq al awsat, but not the local music and culture.

but how different is each country’s colloquial dialect from the others? again, the answer is very. palestinian, syrian, and lebanese are extremely similar to each other and are very mutually intelligible with egyptian, which is the most widely understood throughout the arab world thanks to egypt’s huge arabic film and music industries. saudi and gulf dialects are understood easily in the arabian peninsula, but you won’t have much luck giving directions to a cab driver in latakia or tunis. of all of the dialects, moroccan is the  most far-out. if you learn moroccan, you will really only be fully understood in morocco and barely understood in the rest of north africa. when you hit the levant, you may as well be speaking japanese for all the value moroccan arabic will give you!

what people don’t realise is that arabic is not really a language. it’s a language family, with a series of local forms that are too different to be considered dialects, but not quite different enough to be separate languages themselves. this is the reason modern standard arabic was created as the modern form of the classical arabic of the quran from which all of today’s ‘dialects’ are derived. but if you’re considering solely learning msa, consider this as well: when you speak to someone in msa, it will be as if you are a deaf person who can only write english, but not hear it. you will be understood, but an arab will usually respond in their colloquial dialect because it would be awkward for them to speak msa and, consequently, you will not be able to understand what they say.

the bottomline: if you’re learning arabic, take it on the good advice of mary-jane liddicoat, a very experienced australian arabic teacher and author of the only comprehensive colloquial arabic textbook known to man (syrian colloquial arabic: a functional course), when she says that the best thing to do is to integrate msa and colloquial arabic in your learning process by learning them simultaneously.