I am often asked this question, so I thought about sharing my thoughts in a discussion, and I invite all Arabic teachers and students to share their opinion as well.
First it's good to point out that there is no right or wrong answer to this question it depends on what you hope to get from the language. I will try to present the pros and cons of each.
Advantages of learning standard Arabic:
- Plenty of online resources and well defined grammar rules. You have a wealth of books and online resources, blogs, websites and Youtube videos for learning standard Arabic
- It's understood all over the Arab world
What you can do with standard Arabic:
- You will be able to understand news broadcasts, read news articles, books, literary texts, the Quran since most Arabic written material is in standard Arabic.Some people make it look like standard Arabic is a dead language and no one uses it, but I don't agree to this. It's widely understood and it's used for almost all written Arabic material, news bulletins and even dubbed cartoon movies. It's just not suitable to use it for daily life conversations and may sound weird.
- Your knowledge of standard Arabic will be a very good foundation to learn a dialect later on. All forms of colloquial Arabic were derived from standard Arabic, All dialects evolved by adding transformations to standard Arabic, so learning standard Arabic makes it much easier, I believe, to learn a dialect later on. but not the other way round. If you have the dough, the onions, the cheese, peppers and mushrooms, you can make a pizza. but if you have the pizza it's very hard to go back to the basic ingredients. So your standard Arabic will be a very good foundation to start learning a dialect.
Learning a dialect:
- "Not enough online resources" I heard this comment from many people trying to learn Egyptian Arabic
- No well defined rules because we learn these dialects as kids by listening to people talking around us so there is no formally documented grammar, no standard way of writing, And so the best way to learn a dialect is to talk with native speakers.
- Some dialects are well understood in many countries while others are not. Egyptian Arabic for example is understood well because of the widespread of Egyptian songs and movies in the Arab world. I think this goes for Shami Arabic (spoken in the levant countries like Jordan, Palestine and Syria) and gulf Arabic. While some dialects are hard to understand for most Arabs like Maghrebi Arabic (spoken in Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria, and also known as darija) which for many Arabs sounds like a totally different language almost impossible to understand.
Advantages of learning a dialect:
- It might be easier than standard Arabic because standard Arabic has a complicated grammar, most dialects ignore a lot of the complexity in standard Arabic. so even though in standard Arabic the path is well defined, it's not easy, needs a lot of patience and determination. and it may take years to master the language
- Being able to communicate with people in daily life conversations
My opinion:
Learning a specific dialect only can never convey the beauty of Arabic. it's a language with so much logic in its grammar. I hear this comment a lot that Arabic sentences and language constructs are so logical like math equations. It's a language with a real philosophy behind it. One of my students wrote this in one lesson feedback "There seems to be a 'science' in the Arabic language." I was really happy with this comment because I felt I could make him see it. Learning a dialect directly is probably easier and more practical but I think it will not really make you understand how the language works, which is the best thing about learning a language. Being able to see how other languages found a different approach to expressing ideas.
What do you think?
All in all, everyone is different and has their own preference. For me, I say get a basic foundation in MSA, then work on a dialect to get to the level of being able to strongly communicate, and if you so wish, go back to MSA to strengthen yourself. One thing that comes to mind is that Arabs (and pretty much EVERYONE in the world) don't learn the formal version of their language first. They learn the spoken/local dialect first, then they go into the academic/formal version. Realizing this, I've always wondered why we who are learning Arabic are always told to learn the formal version first then a dialect. Why not follow the real life model?
In ending, I'd just like to say that as you rightly pointed out, standard Arabic is VERY rich and now I'm REALLY looking forward to studying it again, reading books, and just simply enjoying the language.
Thanks for writing this out.
In some ways I agree with what you said, and in other ways I have a different opinion. I began learning Modern Standard Arabic some years ago and then stopped studying for a (long while). Beginning again, I decided this time to start with a dialect. In my opinion, I think if a person is learning purely for themselves and their enjoyment (not for work, school, etc.) they should learn the basics of Modern Standard Arabic (the letters, proper pronunciation, how to read, etc.) and then move to a dialect (if they have the interest).
I think moving to a dialect can build a persons confidence, it allows them to speak to people, to watch movies and to basically enjoy the language. Afterwards, if they go back to MSA, they won't become overly tired, they may even become reinvigorated in relation to the language and feel much more motivated to tackle MSA. However, if they took the opposite approach, decided to learn MSA first to an advanced level then work on a dialect, they might become frustrated when they speak to people, but people speak to them in a way they don't understand, when they turn on the TV or watch a movie, and can't understand what's being said, and so forth. This frustration can lead them to give up in learning the language due to a lack of motivation.
I agree with most of the above points and I would just make the following additions:
1) If you look hard enough (and believe me, you have to look around quite a bit LOL) you <em>can</em> find a reasonable amount of resources for different versions of Arabic. It took me a couple weeks, but I finally compiled a fair amount of resources to learn Shaami.
2) It is really true that if conversational fluency is one of your goals then it makes sense to mimic the childlike learning process and go with a spoken variant. However, in my experience we can take advantage of our developed cognitive abilities as adults and learn both the written standard and a spoken standard in parallel (or least in close parallel). I don't think this is too taxing of our cognitive bandwidth, in the main, and allows us to experience the beauty of both (or multiple versions).
TL;DR, I don't think we have to choose, as long as we have the materials/sources to support our goals.
Thanks.
very useful :)
Just to address aegis' question: it is absolutely possible to read and write regional Arabic (and it's become a pet peeve of mine for people to call it "slang" or an "accent", slang and accent are part of a dialect, not the dialect itself). It's just not done very often for a host of reasons and Modern Standard Arabic remains the written norm.
This said, there is an enormous amount of vocabulary shared between MSA and regional variants (especially for advanced and esoteric concepts), so in that sense it's almost impossible to learn a dialect without learning words that are "coincidentally" MSA.
With the goals you described, I think you'd be much better learning a dialect that would be spoken in a region you want to go to/know more about and go from there. I agree with you about the beauty of a language in the sense that, as such a subjective term, it's almost meaningless to apply to language. I find Levantine Arabic extremely rich and fascinating, with it's interplay of Arabic, Greek, French, and Turkish influences. Some people find MSA more appealing, and more power to them. In the end, it's all about what you want to do with what you will have learned.
