languagelearning

:party-blob: Yalla, let's learn some Arabic :party-blob:

The letter ع is a tricky one because it is foreign to English and all European languages.

The letter’s name is عَين (عayn) which also means ‘eye’.

It is produced from the middle section of the throat by restricting the flow of air. You should be able to feel the muscles contract when you put your hand on your throat. In a way, it is the voiced counterpart of ح i.e. the vocal cords vibrate.

If you practice enough, you will be able to pronounce عarab, عumar(Omar) and عalii (Ali) correctly.

The ع is NOT a vowel.

By looking at all the forms, is it clear which is the core and which is the tail?

What is going on with the medial and final shapes you ask? It’s written this way so we don’t take the pen off the paper, which is an important consideration when it comes to the Arabic script lol. See the spoiler 👇

spoiler

It's commonly transliterated as 3 because it kinda looks like a mirrored ع.

You can also watch this video

:meow-fiesta: Let's learn some Arabic :meow-fiesta:

There are 28 letters in the Arabic alphabet. It’s written from right to left in cursive. There are no capital letters in Arabic.

أ ب ت ث ج ح خ د ذ ر ز س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ك ل م ن هـ و ي

Arabic letters have slightly different shapes depending on where they are in a word i.e. whether they stand alone or are connected to a following or preceding letter or both. We write in cursive which means we need to connect the letters, so they obviously have to adapt to their position in the word. Dw, it all makes sense, and is standardized.

Let’s take the letter "meem" م (m sound) as an example. In its independent (isolated) form it is made of a small circle, a small stroke to the left then a long downward stroke م. Now, when we wanna connect it to a letter after it, it would be quite inconvenient to do the long downward stroke then go all the way up to where the next letter starts :think-about-it: . That’s why we just drop the long downward stroke (the tail), leaving just the small circle and the short stroke to the left مـ

م + ب = مب

So م 's small circle is what we call a core, that part of the letter that distinguishes it, and can never be discarded.

Now let's look at how the letters ب ت ث behave. Remember, they all share the same ٮ shape, and so they behave the same way. The core part of that basic ٮ shape is just the initial tooth (that small vertical stroke) and ofc we still need that horizontal connecting line. The second tooth is considered the "tail", and tails get removed when there is a following letter, so that you can connect the two.

In the initial position (first letter in a word i.e. only connects to a following letter) it turns into ٮـ, ofc you need to add the appropriate dots(s) for the letter :

ب + م = بم

ت + ج = تج

In the medial position (the letter is connected to two other letters) the ب looks like this ـبـ :

م + ث + م = مثم

And in the final position (connected only to the preceding letter) they get back their tail ـٮ :

ب + ت = بت

Now let’s look at these letters س ش ص ض :wtf-am-i-reading: they all have that curved part at the end, and since they all have it, it doesn't help us tell them apart i.e. it is not part of the core, it's the tail. The core is سـ شـ صـ ضـ

After removing the redundant tail, you can still tell them apart, right?

س + ب + ص = سبص

م + س + ت + ض = مستض

In these 2 examples, ص is the final letter, so it gets to keep its tail because there is no reason to remove it. We’d only remove that tail if there was a following letter that wants to connect to the ص, e.g. سبصت

Check the comments for a complete chart of letter shapes.

good video, from the description:

1. the tone chart is wrong
2. tone sandhi
3. tone's phonological properties

she forgets to mention one of the tone sandhi cases but it's in the description

That is the letter ت, pronounced same as t

Yalla, let's learn some Arabic

There are 2 other letters that look exactly the same except for the dots, here is how to tell the three apart:

The ‫(b sound) ب‬ has the dot below its shell

The word “below” starts with the sound b.

Transliterated as b

The ‫ (t sound) ت‬ has two dots above its shell

The word “two” starts with the sound t.

Transliterated as t

The ث (th sound) has three dots above its shell

The word “three” starts with the sound th.

Transliterated as th

:read-theory:

Remember: these three letters have the exact same shape, only the dots are different. The only reason dots exist in Arabic is so we can easily tell letters like these apart.

Since they have the same shape, they behave the same way when we write them in cursive, which is the only way to write in Arabic. You'll see what this means when we talk more about the script.

Pronunciation examples:

ب (b sound) :

باب   door       baab

ت (t sound) :

توت   mulberry       tuut

ث (th sound, as in three) :

In this example the ث is ثـ

ثَوب   garment       thawb

Check the comments.

Logographic scripts seems like a pain in the ass, but if I can remember all the 150 pokemons

I've heard a lot of praise for it here and elsewhere, and I looked into it myself before. The praise is actually why I had seriously considered the method, their subreddit is full of success stories and people who absolutely believe in the method. Anyway, I was telling a friend about DS the other day and she was shocked when I said DS recommends at least 600 hours of input before you even start to speak. So it made me think yeah maybe DS is not an efficient method, then I found this thread

Is Dreaming Spanish massively inefficient?

I am convinced that a mixed approach to language learning, one that incorporates Comprehensible Input early on, is probably better than pure Comprehensible Input. Of course DS is a great source for graded listening material, no doubt. I wish something even remotely similar to DS existed for Arabic.

Of course, there are some major caveats here, which is that, firstly, in order to use this web-app you first need to be fairly proficient at Sutton Signwriting, i.e. you might need to try around for a bit between different similar handshapes before you find the exact right handshape that a sign is listed under; secondly, there seems to be no way to exclude certain features from your search, which means that you might have a lot of irrelevant results for a given search; and thirdly, the dictionaries naturally don't contain every single sign in every single sign language, and this is probably extra pronounced for smaller sign languages. A particular thing to note with regard to the dictionaries is that since this web-app is from 2017, you won't be able to find signs like CORONAVIRUS or RIZZ using it. The glosses provided for the signs also naturally don't provide all the shades of nuance, for instance you'll find both two-handed and one-handed variants of letters in SignMaker's Norwegian Sign Language dictionary but no indication of which version is more common.

Nevertheless, even with all its faults, I still find this web-app useful from time to time. I don't think there's any other program or web-app in the world that lets one search SL signs by their parameters, despite how useful such a feature could be for learning signs. Every other sign language dictionary in existence it seems is basically just a list of glosses in alphabetical order, each gloss accompanied by a video or diagram. This means that other dictionaries can fairly conveniently answer the question "What is the sign for [word]?" but not "What does this sign mean?"

So for instance, say I saw the Norwegian Sign Language sign for bull or ox (NO: okse), but I didn't know that that's what that sign meant. In order to identify the sign, I'd go into the Norwegian Sign Language version of SignMaker; I'd click on "click search" and select "2 clicks"; then I'd find the icon for "index thumb" (note: hover your mouse over the icons to read descriptions of them), and click on that; then I'd finally find the icon for "Index Thumb Side, Thumb Diagonal", and click on that. The green window on the left-hand side of the screen would then display a series of results for Norwegian Sign Language signs containing the selected handshape, in this case six results including two variants of the sign for bull. So then I just hover my mouse over the relevant result, and the gloss should appear.

So that's how you use it, basically, and I think that's a pretty neat thing to be able to do.

Hey there, I was wondering what good ways are to learn the Spanish dialect that is most commonly spoken in the USA since America has a lot of Spanish speakers and it's the second most prevalent language after English (like English, America obviously has a different version of the language compared to for example UK or India).

I had Spanish in school but only know a few basic things. I wonder if there is some way to really get immersed in the language (other than oc moving there and speaking with native speaker in person) to naturally learn it to be able to have conversations with Spanish speakers in America that sound as local/authentic as possible (so I don't wanna focus on artificial learning that focuses too much on grammar and uncommon words that aren't that important for everyday conversations).

Specifically Suret. Not an Assyrian, just interested in the language

I don't intend on learning ASL until I've already learned Norwegian Sign Language, but I know that a very large share of this site's userbase are from regions where ASL is the predominant sign language, so I hope this will be helpful for them.

Does anybody know a good site for Hawaiian slang?

The test word is "kumu". In an episode of the original Hawaii Five-O Kono says "This girl I met from Cleveland... Kumu." He means something like she's very sexy.

I asked about it in r/hawaii but they removed my post. I scuttled my ships. I was rude to the mods so I assume they'll ban me. Real aloha spirit they have over there.

Google was worse than useless. For example - google makes it hard if not impossible to search blogs.

Rant

It's very old news I know but google has really turned to shit. It's pathetic.

Edit 1

I made an edit. Google only has the "teacher" meaning.

Edit 2

See SoJB's comment and my reply. I think it was a prank.