Arabic-L:PEDA:more Large vocabulary responses

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Fri 13 Dec 2002
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject:Large vocabulary response
2) Subject:Large vocabulary response

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1)
Date:  13 Dec 2002
From: Antonio GimÈnez <huesteantigua at yahoo.es>
Subject:Large vocabulary response

Dear Munir,

Maybe you will find interesting *The Semantics of Form in Arabic, in the
Mirror of European Languages* by David Justice (1987). He says, among  
other
things, that "public understanding of Arabic has suffered from much the  
same
stereotyping and exoticism as has that of Chinese, aggravated perhaps by
political factors" (p. 7) and revises many commonplaces about Arabic and
Arabic learning.

Personally, I agree with Jan Hoogland's response. Most Arabic speakers  
and
media do not use but a small part of what is listed in Arabic  
dictionaries.
The same applies to any language with a large textual corpus. As a  
native
Spanish speaker, I cannot imagine having to use or know every Spanish  
word
included in the smallest dictionary. The thing is that many methods and
dictionaries for Arabic learners pay little or any attention to  
pragmatics
and diachronical aspects: everything is Arabic, sure, but which  
century's
Arabic? This leads many students to take their Wehr's dictionary as an
"impossible must learn", making no distinction between common words,
not-so-common words and archaisms. Nearly native ability is replaced,  
as a
desirable while difficult aim to attain, by an impossible encyclopedic
knowledge. This results in many learners clinging to their dictionaries  
to
look up every word they find without retaining any of them because they  
lack
a living experience of the language.

In other words, native speakers swim in a lake of vocabulary and just go
into "the ocean" as scholars, while learners are directly thrown into  
this
same ocean without any life jacket...

I have been teaching Spanish to Arab elementary learners, most of them
fluent in French, for 3 years and I don't think there is such a thing  
as an
Arabic native speakers' gift for other languages. As far as I am  
concerned,
optimistic results in their vocabulary achievements should be related  
to the
fact that I tried to throw them "in a swimming pool", avoiding rare  
terms.
Of course, there are many other reasons like attitude and learners'  
beliefs
about the aimed language which could be discussed.

Antonio Giménez
huesteantigua at yahoo.es

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2)
Date:  13 Dec 2002
From: Michael Akard <michael_akard at hotmail.com>
Subject:Large vocabulary response

> "I began studying Arabic after the age of thirty, and† people around†  
> here are
> amazed at my fluency.†"

That's truly commendable, and I applaud your achievement. But the issue  
here is not whether an older beginner can reach a high ability level in  
Arabic, but whether such a person can acquire true native-like fluency  
-- thinking and dreaming in Arabic, and reading and writing Arabic with  
the same facility as his or her native language. I would like to think  
it is possible, but I have never heard of anyone succeeding. Would you  
say that you are truly bilingual, functioning identically in Arabic and  
English?

Michael Akard

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End of Arabic-L:  13 Dec 2002