The aubergine and the dictionaries

When I lived in Germany in 1989 (yeah, I'm that old, shut it), I was learning several languages at the same time. My school required me to take two foreign language classes. Since I already spoke English, I couldn't choose English. So, I was learning French and Russian in German. I didn't do all that well. I rememeber very vividly having 5 dcitionaries on my desk in my room and poring over them every night trying to figure out what was being said in German and then looking it up in my German-French dictionary or Russian-German dictionary or my German-Latin or German-Greek dictionary (I was studying philosophy at the time).
One evening for dinner, we had something I'd never seen or eaten before. It was a sort of stew of which the primary ingredient was aubergine. Don't ruin the story for anyone else if you already know what an aubergine is. I didn't and, when I wanted to find out what it was, I discovered a problem with most dictionaries. A problem I recently encountered again.
I went to look up aubergine in my English-German dictionary. It wasn't in there. That's odd. So, I went to my French-German dictionary. But, aubergine is a French word. So, I got a handy little entry that said, 'Aubergine - n. f. l'aubergine'. Big help. Could Russian help me? Nope, aubergine was aubergine. I asked people in Germany, I asked people in the States, I asked other UK students in class, I asked anyone I could think of and literally no one I knew had any idea what aubergine was in English (if they knew what an aubergine was at all) or they just knew it as aubergine. I remarked to my friend, Frank, at the time that perhaps we just didn't have aubergines in America. To which, he replied, 'You don't have the moon in the States but it's in the dictionary.' Arguably wrong, but his point was well taken. I won't keep you in suspense any longer. An aubergine is an eggplant. An eggplant. Common enough that it should have been well translated. We'll leave for another time a discussion about my ignorance of an eggplant.
Dictionaries are way too generic in some cases to be helpful and it's frustrating for me as an American to know that most language dictionaries cater to the UK than the States because we just aren't a polyglot or polyglot-interested country (present company excepted). The statistics for foreign language usage by native English speakers in America are scary and abysmal. It would be nice to have dictionaries that focus on American English. But, it's a question of audience and ultimately, I can't blame the publishers for making a dictionary that appeals to their audience.
That brings me to my dissappointment this week. I recently purchased the Hippocrene Compact Dictionary for Arabic. I was happy to find a very small tome that could fit in the side pocket of my backpack. Imagine my frustration when I found that some very basic things were missing from it. Months, days of the week, verbs like think and a list of other things were missing from it. But inexplicably it had words like kleptomania, lunar and optician. The one positive thing I can say about the dictionary is that it has a really good and straightforward verb conjugation appendix that shows how to conjugate the four types of Arabic verbs. But that's not worth the $9 I paid for it.
If I had the authors in front of me right now, I'd tell them the story I just told you and then finish with chiding them to think about who will use a pocket reference. It's not someone who knows the language well. Write for the audience. It will make your works much more enjoyable by your readers and bring them back over and over again, even if what you write is just a dictionary.

Reading and Speaking Arabic

Well, I've moved on to another reference for learning to read and speak Arabic. I've actually got the reading part down now (although I don't always know the meaning of the words I can read) but I don't know exactly how the letters sound. I am going to remedy that by using a very inexpensive book called Arabic for Speaking and Reading. It's got an audio CD to go along with the lessons. This is good because it repeats the alphabet, a few of the greetings and a few of the words that I know. I was a little dissappointed that the audio CD is only about 40 minutes long broken up into roughly 38 sections. However, I'm only using it to get a sense of the sounds so I can move on to listening to the news or formal podcasts. It also has a nice listing of the different diacriticals and their sounds. So, it's a good mid-term reference to get started making the sounds correctly once you have a few words under your belt.

I also started listening to the ArabicPod101.com podcast today. I have to say I was much more impressed listening to it than the Arabic Podclass podcast. The people on 101 are conversational, natural and comfortable. They weave in some history and culture and they are very straightforward in explaining things to the listener. They break down the sounds and the grammar as it occurs, not fabricating the lessons in some artificial way. It's a nice balance between following natural language acquisition theories and practical acquisition exercises. My iTunes downloaded the 8th lesson as the most recent one for some reason although I see on their website that there are at least 9 episodes. They also have some tools and programs to use for drills and flashcards. I haven't tried them yet but if they are anything like their podcast, I'll be checking them out soon.

First 100 Arabic Words - FAIL

So, I was just saying how I had gotten the book called Your First 100 Words for Arabic. I had taken a good look at the first few pages and generally flipped through it for content. What I failed to see was how useless their list of the first 100 words actually is. There are no pronouns, no verbs, few adverbs, no prepositions, the list goes on of what is *not* on the list. For me, there are certain words that you must learn first thing in any language. You just don't feel like you're making any progress by just learning a list of 100 nouns. At most, you can point at things and say the word. That's just playing at learning in my opinion. If I wanted to sound like a 3 year old, I'd drink a whole lot more at inappropriate times. So, I'm going to put together my own list of words I think you have to learn first in any language to feel like you're making any progress. I'm going to put them into a separate post so it's easier to find when searching.

Some Progress on Reading Arabic

About two weeks ago, I bought a book, Your First 100 Words in Arabic, that would help me learn to write and understand the arabic script. It's not a bad book and it takes a practical approach. The carry cards in the back are worth the $12 or so for the book. But I just was struggling a bit with the first few letters because I couldn't keep straight some of the letters that are similarly shaped but differently diacritically marked. Like the letters 'sheen' and 'seen'. Just couldn't keep them straight. Then, I was returning from Qatar on Qatar Airways and I watched the in-flight map for a bit before landing as it switched from showing place names and shipwrecks in English to Arabic. Invaluable! Since most of the place names were cities around Washington DC, I could easily start putting together the sounds with the letters and figuring out the right sounds for the letters that were most confusing. From that 20 - 30 minutes of staring at the screen and sounding them out, I picked up the usage of about 12 - 14 letters (maybe 6 root letters but I'm counting the medial and ending variants as well). It wasn't too long before I was able to figure out a couple of letter sounds I wasn't sure of like the final 'n' sound. The word Washington in Arabic is now imprinted on my mind. Also, the shipwrecks were similarly phonetisized so that I was able to pick up most of the sounds of Titanic as well and worked out the 'taa' and the 'thaa'. As an aside, does it make sense for an airline to mark out where transportation had gone horribly wrong in the vicinity of the passengers?

Also, I watched a fair number of movies on the way back. I should point out first that I was able to have dinner with a couple of Lebanese people (Thanks, Tamara and Kamal) who live and work in Qatar and the UAE. Listening very careully to them ordering for me in Arabic, I figured out that 'wa' is the Arabic word for 'and'. Excellent word to know. I usually concentrate on pronouns and prepositions first in a language because they are easy demarcations in speech that are easy to use to figure out what came before and after in a sentence. So, now armed with 'wa', I watched the movies on the way back home. Every movie had Arabic subtitles. Every one of them. It was kind of wierd listening to a movie in Cantonese and seeing Arabic subtitles. Anyway, the word 'and' pops up a lot in langauge and it's often used by itself as a prompt for someone to continue. 'Your sister's been shot.' 'And?' That means that 'and' will show up in subtitles separate and distinct. A great help to anyone learning the language. So, that's how I figured out the Arabic letter 'waaw'. 'Waaw' is a single letter that is used to write 'and' much like in Spanish 'and' is 'y'.

So, all in all, a pretty good day for my Arabic. Now, I just need to get some focus on the rest of the alphabet so I can start using the Arabic dictionary I bought while I was in Beirut last November.