26 Comments
26
Kind of difficult to guess the meaning of ريجا if I have no idea where Riga is.
Riga is pronounced Riga in any dialect, since it’s a name of a European city. There are just not enough letters in Arabic to represent all sounds. However, just for a heads up. You can use پ for a p sound ڤ for a v sound چ for a ch sound گ for a g sound These are not Arabic letters though, only derived from the Arabic script and used in other central Asian languages such as Persian or Urdu (maybe others as well). Arabs generally do not use them, however, for clarity like if your name is Paul you can Just so to make it clearer write پول
IsRiga really correctly pronounced here. It sounds like 'raiuja'. I could not guess it would be Riga.
Depending on the dialect, is it not correct that it could be either Riga or Rija?
- 37
The Egyptian dialect pronounces "jeem'' as a hard "g" rather than "j".
Update: Something just dawned on me. If the city's name is pronounced with a hard "g", do the countries that pronounce "jeem" as "j", change to pronounce it as "g" to line up with how the country pronounces it's name, or do they stick with the "j" sound?
- 20
Probably depends if they're familiar with the city name or not, and also if there's a standard form in Arabic/their dialect for that city name, which is most likely with large old cities and/or ones that have a long trading history with theirs. Just like how in English we pronounce Paris with the final "s" sounded, because that's the standard in English, but smaller French towns and villages would be pronounced in the French style by those who know French.
- 37
I don't hear any "nunation", that is an "n" sound, but I do hear the alif being pronounced "eh" rather than "aah", which I just read the other day is a Western Arabic pronunciation; especially a North African way of pronouncing alif. Duolingo says we're being taught MSA. I though there was a standard way of pronouncing the vowels in MSA, but we're getting different pronunciations of the vowels. I don't know why, though.
- 270
The letter "Jeem" has the same sound as the letter J in English. This must be an Egyptian dialect. It would be nice if we had a hint that this is what they expected. If in fact it is a dialect they are using, it would also be nice if there was some flexibility for MSA. Rija or Reja for example
- 37
The letter "jeem" is being pronounced "j" as in "Jacques" here, not "g" like the Egyptian dialect pronounces it, unless they do "Jacques" as well in some locations.
- 11
Sounds more like Rija which is what one would assume with modern standard....also assumes people know Riga is a place
I have elsewhere seen the transcription ريغا, i.e. ghayn (gh) instead of jiim (j). That is also how Wikipedia (Arabic edition) spells it.
Arabic pronunciation (and everything else) varies a lot from dialect to dialect. I'm assuming they're teaching us MSA (Modern Standard Arabic) like most Arabic courses. This is basically Qur'anic Arabic adapted to the modern world and is spoken in real life by nobody other than newscasters.
So I'm assuming the spelling is standard and this is the pronunciation as taught for MSA.
It's worth noting that Arabic doesn't generally have a "g" sound. Some other languages which adapted the Arabic writing system and had both "k" and "g" sounds added a new letter for the "g" sound and use this letter only for the "k" sound. For instance Persian and Urdu use گ for "g". Other languages do it differently.
This is not to say that some Arabic dialects might not always pronounce ج as "g". I don't know enough. It could also be that some pronounce it either "k" or "g" depending on context, depending on speaker, or depending on what language the word was borrowed from. Again I don't know enough.
- 37
The speech of this sentence is way too fast! I had to play it a couple of times to understand "Baku" and ten or so times to figure out all the sounds in "and Riga". It sounds like "bakuwediiyujeh" to me. The "raa" even sounds like "daal"!
So Baku is a capital of Azerbaijan and Riga is a capital of Latvia. Yet why would you include these cities, since they do not have any correlation with the Arab world. Perhaps, Baku is a Muslim city, but Eastern Europe? And why not MENA cities? And frankly these are not very popular cities, no offense. A lot of people would just mistake them for names.
- 37
We are beginners learning to read. They are using short names that can be written with the letters we have learned so far.
