Making Arabic conversation in the cab #Fi3M | My language mission and my log | Forum

Dear *glots,

I've been scratching the surface of Arabic for a while now but never actually felt I really got started for real. So here we go.

Background

I've always been into languages. In Sweden, we start studying English at a pretty young age in school and in 7th grade you have the opportunity to choose to study another language; Spanish, German or French. I chose Spanish and studied it for 3 years. That was it. Now it's all gone, basically. But this hasn't stopped me from having the interest in languages, e.g. I often try to improve my, and other's, Swedish, even though I'm native in it.

By almost pure accident I started studying Mandarin Chinese at a Swedish university at the end of January this year. By that time I was on vacation in Senegal (learning a little bit of Wolof and Mandinka, as well as French), but because the course is held online, I was able to begin the studies abroad. Over the Internet. In Africa. (The world never ceases to amaze me.)

Now I'm done with the first level (I'm continuing with level 2 this fall) and during these months I've also come across all these polyglot communities. I've watched YouTube clips, read blog entries, seen TED Talks, read news articles, etc. I'm hooked. At least by the fact of knowing I could know a lot of languages if I want to. No super brain needed.

#Fi3M

There's a couple of reasons #Fi3M got me hooked, but the main reason is to compare plain university studies to learning a language on my own. Therefor, I will not go for a 3 month challenge, but rather 4 months. That's how long my Mandarin Chinese lasted this semester.

During this time I will cover all the topics I learned during these 4 months (mainly from the book Integrated Chinese 1: Level 1):

• Greetings
• Family
• Dates and Time
• Hobbies
• Visiting Friends
• Making Appointments
• Studying Chinese (Arabic)
• School Life
• Shopping
• Talking about the Weather
• Transportation

Gaius Julius said
Fun goal

Good luck. If you get stuck with phrases in any of the mentioned topics – just ask

 

Start by greeting your cab driver, these will work with any dialect and with Persians, Turks, Indonesians and just about any Muslim:

Sallam alekum – Peace be on you (hello)

Sabax elkher – Good morning (The driver will reply: Sabax alnur)

Masa elkher – Good evening (use this after 12 at noon)

 

And saying goodbye:

Ma'a alsalame – with health

shukran – Thank you

 

x – the Arabic letter ح , like the first sound of "Hummus" , you can pronounce this as "h" until you manage to get the true sound correctly.

kh – the Arabic letter خ sound like the German "ch" as in "Macht" .

 

You probably already saw these in any phrasebook. And this is, of course, oversimplifying the pronunciation…. But first things first.

 

Bilnijax (good luck)

شكرا!

How do you feel about choosing dialect? Should I start at MSA and go over to Egyptian, or go with Egyptian right away?

And I'm a bit confused concerning romanization of Arabic. I think I've seen maybe three different ways of writing خ with letters, whereas Chinese has an "official" system, pinyin. Are there any rules here or should I just go with the one I prefer?

Okay, great inputs! Do you think it will be hard to mix those two up, standard and Egyptian? Could I do them side by side? Should I just focus on speaking Egyptian and reading standard you think?

By the way, arabicpod101.com presented a way of greeting someone (in MSA):  ﻣﺮﺣﺒﺎ

Could I use that with the cab drivers as well? Is it to formal? I just want to ask a native because it's hard to get what's actually "true" in these podcasts, even though they're stating a lot of things.

Edit: one more thing. As I'm trying to learn the alphabet I got that مرحبا consists of five characters: م ر ح ب ا. But both the transcript and the teachers pronounce it with a N in the end: how come? Do you guys have any good recommendations of quickly getting in to the pronunciation behind the characters when they're combined? Cheers!