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- Topic: Arabic >
- "دَجاج بارِد"
41 Comments
889
Afraid not. Arabic has a class of nouns called the collective, to which you add a simple suffix, usually ة, to form another form called the singulative. When we are talking about chicken in general, not one chicken, not a group of chickens that is small enough to count, but just the concept of chickens or a whole lotta chickens, we say دجاج. But if we are referring to to a particular chicken, it becomes دجاجة (dajaaja[-tun]). A group of chickens that you can actually quantify would be دجاجات, which is the plural. A similar pattern can be observed with many words that refer to animals, plants, and other objects you can find in nature, like rocks. A closely related concept is the instance noun, where adding a suffix to the infinitive gives a word with the meaning "a single instance/occurence of the action indicated by the infinitive," so ضرب would be "hitting," ضربة would be "a hit," for example.
- 577
tsuj1g1r1: Why are they accepting "A cold chicken" as a correct answer then? Is that vernacular?
- 889
They actually shouldn't, as that is an incorrect translation. But given the quality of this course, that is far from the most glaring mistake you'll run across, you know.
- 253
great explanation. is it like hair, or water which can be referred to as uncountable ? can i please ask then, a cold fish is also wrong? because it was accepted so now i am unsure if it is just a bad reported answer or a true case of "a".
- 889
It is the nominative marker. Standard Arabic has three cases, nominative (un), accusative (an), and genitive (in). If the first word had a definite article attached to it, those would have become (u/a/i) without the final -n sound. In practice, most native speakers use those endings incorrectly or inconsistently because they are absent in the vernaculars, so you can simply ignore them if it makes it easier for you.
Hi! It actually depends, if you're using Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) -which we call al-fuṣḥá (الفصحى)- then you pronounce the words fully inflected (nunation -in Arabic tanwīn ⟨تَنْوِين⟩- & diacritics -in Arabic tashkil ⟨تَشْكِيل⟩ and ḥarakāt ⟨حَرَكَات⟩-); for example, "الدّجاجُ بارِدٌ" would be pronounced 'al-dajaju baridon' but if you are using a certain dialect in a non-formal way; we usually ignore inflections all together "الدجاج بارد" would be 'al-dajaj barid'. Hope this cleared things up a bit!
If it is a formal text it is written on both words.
It is always pronounced in MSA Arabic unless it is on the word at the end of a sentence then it is not pronounced, even if it is written.
Why does the voice saying بارد sound so bad? It sounds like it's saying deregd.
Is there a vocabulary difference between chicken, the living animal, and chicken, the food? I know some languages like Spanish have a difference for fish as an animal vs food (pez and pescado).
- 889
See my response about the collective above. It's more like English than Spanish, where you say "fish" for the food, and "a fish" for the animal. Saying "I ate a fish," even if you did eat exactly one fish, would sound childish unless the context called for it. You just eat "fish." Same thing in Arabic.
- 577
Is anyone else having problems with the sound on Duolingo? On the question right now, when I clicked on the blue speaker icon, the sound didn't work. But, when I clicked on the underlined words the sound worked. The sound also works on the blue speaker icon in this discussion area. The problem is intermittent and happens on all my languages.
- 889
Me. And judging by the Japanese comment section, a lot of other people too, though they keep assuming it's a permanent problem with individual sentences rather than an intermittent problem with Duolingo as a whole, and the mods keep suggesting reporting those individual sentences to the course contributors. You can report it as a bug here; I'd done so myself already: https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
- 577
Do you know if it seems to be happening at certain times of the day, perhaps when there is high usage of Duolingo? When it happens to me, I never get sound with the exercises but I get sound in the discussion areas. Is that what happens on your computer, too?
- 889
But people around the world use Duolingo, right? So I'm not sure if there's a particular time when the traffic is heaviest, and if so, when it would be. But it does seem equally dispersed throughout the day to me. And no, it doesn't seem to work on the discussion area either! :O Does it only happen in a certain time of the day on your end? Actually, now that I think of it, today the Japanese script didn't show up at all during one lesson, and I tried refreshing the page and it still gave me blank boxes and sentences and everything, but then I opened a new tab and everything worked just dandy. Not sure if Duolingo or my browser.
- 577
Wouldn't it be something if all of us having the problem were using the same browser or internet provider!? I usually have it happen to me about three times a day spread out throughout the day. But it seems to happen around the same times of day. I don't know the times for sure, though, since I didn't keep a log. BTW, I just turned in a Bug Report.
- 889
I'm on Firefox, you? It's only been happening over the past week too. When did you first notice it? Hmm... could it be all the updates Duolingo is undergoing? Or a sudden influx of new users? Maybe because of the Arabic course? Were we the bad guys this whole time? :O Thanks for filing the report, by the way!
- 577
I'm running Microsoft Edge on Windows 10. It seems like its been going on for about a month. UPDATE: Yesterday, for the first time, I started loosing sound in the "Discussion" area of my Italian class as well as in the "Exercise" area. Update: When I lose sound, if I turn my computer off and then reboot it, seems to solve the no sound problem.
Yes, the sound quality, or rather the pronunciation, of Duolingo Arabic isn't optimal (at all). But: this is still a course in Beta, which means it has to be improved yet, by the users' comments and otherwise. One essential thing imho would be, like e.g. with Duo Spanish, that real men and women from different Arabic speaking regions would record the audio, instead of a computer. So e.g. people from Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Qatar pronouncing their educated version of the SPOKEN Standard (not their dialects!) they use when communicating with ppl from other Arabic speaking countries.
- 889
We don't use a spoken standard when communicating with each other; we usually just mix and match between the dialects. The dialects share many structural and lexical features between themselves that they don't share with MSA, kind of like the Romance languages and Latin. An Italian has a better chance of being understood in Spain speaking slow Italian and tinkering around with synonyms than they do speaking Classical Latin.
Bad comparison. People in the Arab World still use Standard Arabic when it comes to written media and news. People learn the language regardless of which school they attend. Latin on the other hand is taught in only in a small fraction of schools and is used only in the form of some fossilized proverbs.
- 889
We're not talking about whether MSA is as frequently encountered as Latin, we're talking about what Arabs use to communicate with Arabs who speak other dialects. Just this particular aspect of Arabic usage. And the answer is they use dialect, not MSA: even with MSA being taught in schools, it's still easier to communicate in dialect than it is to communicate in MSA, and so that's what Arabs normally do. The comparison I made with Latin was not about how rare MSA is to encounter in daily life, it was about how similar, lexically and grammatically, it is to dialects, and how similar the dialects are to each other. In this regard, the dialects are comparable to Romance languages and MSA to Latin, that's an apt comparison and I stand by it.
Why do a get a wrong answer when I respond with "a cold chicken"? The answer I get is "cold chicken" without an "a". Whats the difference?
