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So I thought this like a year ago, but I'm putting pen to paper (or rather fingers to keyboard) to memorialize it now.
So in my (very) brief study of Arabic (I took it my senior year of college for fun), one of the things that frustrated me the most was all the short vowels that weren't written out and that only had the vowel markings (fatHas and dommas, etc.) when the book was trying to be nice, which meant it disappeared halfway through first semester.
Anyway, it made it almost impossible for me to try to read through Arabic, and meant it took me forever to make it through a sentence, whether reading or aloud or just thinking. Part of this also is because I was a terrible student who was taking the class for fun, and wasn't willing to put in the man-hours to memorize.
So anyways.
People (aka my professor and higher-level Arabic students) told me that the vowels weren't arbitrary and that there were patterns (as will Arabic words in general) that I would begin to see and understand, even when it came to conjugating irregular verbs. (Sadly, I think the only verb I still remember to conjugate is "to study" and "to love")
ANYWAY, I remember thinking "Bullshit" at the time. I mean, there are patterns and this is obvious, but they weren't patterns that were useful to me. They were patterns that you could see if you had studied for a year or two more and had a bigger picture to look back on and pick out patterns with. If you've only been studying for a semester, you don't have enough vocabulary/grammar manpower to pick out patterns with.
I think it's a lot like Chinese.
You see, Chinese is a character-based language. I don't know what the official linguistic term is, but it's not phonetic. You look at a character and memorize it but you won't know how to read the character, you just have to memorize that.
Except.
That's only like 75% true.
If you know enough Chinese, you know that you can sort of guess at what the character is based on the radicals it has, some of the time. The left radical indicates meaning more often than not, the right can be used to indicate pronunciation, it's just not a reliable indicator. It's not all characters that are helpful in this way but generally the harder, more obscure ones do (which is helpful because those are usually the ones you don't know). And if you (by which I mean I) take a stab at pronouncing the character you've never seen before, you'll be right 50% of the time, just be off by your tone 25% of the time, just have the opening first consonant of the pronunciation wrong 12.5% of the time, and just be totally wrong the remaining 12.5% of the time.
But this is something nobody ever tell beginning Chinese students, to my knowledge, because these are patterns you pick up after you have a far wider arsenal of Chinese characters in your toolkit to compare, contrast, and pick out patterns with.
So anyway, I think this and Arabic are both similar in the way there are logical (well, semi-logical) patterns that only make sense if you've studied them both for long enough. Sucks to be a beginner, though.
So in my (very) brief study of Arabic (I took it my senior year of college for fun), one of the things that frustrated me the most was all the short vowels that weren't written out and that only had the vowel markings (fatHas and dommas, etc.) when the book was trying to be nice, which meant it disappeared halfway through first semester.
Anyway, it made it almost impossible for me to try to read through Arabic, and meant it took me forever to make it through a sentence, whether reading or aloud or just thinking. Part of this also is because I was a terrible student who was taking the class for fun, and wasn't willing to put in the man-hours to memorize.
So anyways.
People (aka my professor and higher-level Arabic students) told me that the vowels weren't arbitrary and that there were patterns (as will Arabic words in general) that I would begin to see and understand, even when it came to conjugating irregular verbs. (Sadly, I think the only verb I still remember to conjugate is "to study" and "to love")
ANYWAY, I remember thinking "Bullshit" at the time. I mean, there are patterns and this is obvious, but they weren't patterns that were useful to me. They were patterns that you could see if you had studied for a year or two more and had a bigger picture to look back on and pick out patterns with. If you've only been studying for a semester, you don't have enough vocabulary/grammar manpower to pick out patterns with.
I think it's a lot like Chinese.
You see, Chinese is a character-based language. I don't know what the official linguistic term is, but it's not phonetic. You look at a character and memorize it but you won't know how to read the character, you just have to memorize that.
Except.
That's only like 75% true.
If you know enough Chinese, you know that you can sort of guess at what the character is based on the radicals it has, some of the time. The left radical indicates meaning more often than not, the right can be used to indicate pronunciation, it's just not a reliable indicator. It's not all characters that are helpful in this way but generally the harder, more obscure ones do (which is helpful because those are usually the ones you don't know). And if you (by which I mean I) take a stab at pronouncing the character you've never seen before, you'll be right 50% of the time, just be off by your tone 25% of the time, just have the opening first consonant of the pronunciation wrong 12.5% of the time, and just be totally wrong the remaining 12.5% of the time.
But this is something nobody ever tell beginning Chinese students, to my knowledge, because these are patterns you pick up after you have a far wider arsenal of Chinese characters in your toolkit to compare, contrast, and pick out patterns with.
So anyway, I think this and Arabic are both similar in the way there are logical (well, semi-logical) patterns that only make sense if you've studied them both for long enough. Sucks to be a beginner, though.
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