Learning Arabic
Arabic is spoken by over 300 million people throughout Asian and North Africa. It is also the official language of Islam, and so it is estimated to be used by one billion Muslims across the world.
As a native English speaker, one of the main hurdles I see is the way that the text is written from right to left and that the grammar is very different to English. There are also many sounds that I am not familiar with as they don’t exist in English, but someone who knows a language like Hebrew would have an easier transition. The best part of learning a new language though is having a go at these sounds and the realisation that you can make noises you didn’t know you could by moving your tongue around.
Arabic has 28 consonantal phonemes and the nouns are either masculine or feminine. When referring to a male, a masculine noun is used, and vice versa for a female. The feminine noun is usually formed by adding a special character – the ta marbuta – to the end of the masculine noun.
One Arabic word may have a number of plurals and adjectives come after the noun, so a “white house” in English becomes a “house white” in Arabic.
The most basic of sentence is called a nominal sentence, for example, in English it would be “the house is white”; but in Arabic there is no word for the “is” in this sentence.
Having a go at Arabic, even if it is just a simple greeting, will be appreciated by many people if you plan to travel to Asia or Africa, or even if you are just passing through your local community or a mosque.
Give the following a go:
Phrase: As salaamu alaikum – Syllable breakdown:as-sa-laa-mu a-lai-kum
Meaning: May peace be with you and a very common greeting.
Phrase: Wa alaikumu èl salaamu – Syllable breakdown: wa-a-lai-ku-mus-sa-laam
Meaning: And may peace be with you. It is the response to the above phrase.
By Vicki
Learning Dutch
Approximately 23 million people have Dutch as their native tongue, making it seventh on the list of languages spoken in the European Union.
Although most of those speakers live in the Netherlands, Dutch is also used by half of the population of Belgium (mainly in the north) and interestingly, it is the official language of the Republic of Suriname in northern South America.
The Dutch have long been recognised as one of history’s leading maritime nations and many words of Dutch origin are still used in this field today. Some examples include: deck, yacht and freight.
Dutch is a Germanic language which means speakers of German, English, Danish and Swedish will find a lot of common factors. Dutch spelling is supposedly easy compared to many other languages, as too is the basic grammar principles. If you are able to grasp the rules of how to conjugate regular verbs, then you are away. Unfortunately, irregular verbs are a different story and must be learnt by heart.
Two of the hardest parts of learning Dutch grammar are the word order and pronunciation. There is a guttural ‘g’ used that most English speakers will find hard to master. Again, like learning any language that is foreign to you, the best way is to expose yourself to speakers on a regular basis or by listening to everything and anything you can. Try listening to the radio, (eg. BBC World Service), watch a movie or search out something fun like YouTube that can be spontaneous and harder to understand than a usual language learning CD.
There are a lot of Dutch-speaker Australians so ask around and see if there is a local organisation in the area you live or work that you may be able to visit or meet up with. In one of my workplaces I had three Dutch speakers who liked nothing better that “chat” over their morning coffee.
Dutch has three articles: the indefinite article ‘een’ (a) and the definite articles ‘de’ and ‘het’ (the). Luckily you do not need to use different articles or adjectives for subjects and objects, and adjectives are inflected according to the type of noun they precede (de or het + noun).
When I travelled to the Netherlands in 1994, the capital Amsterdam was packed to capacity as people celebrated the Queen’s birthday long weekend. Unfortunately my Dutch was non-existent but the locals were wonderful and luckily for me, many were fluent in English and more that happy to help me out.
By Vicky
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