
Reading Arabic 'hard for brain' - k3dz
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11181457
======
hasenj
> When someone learns to read Arabic they have to work out which letters are
> which, and which ones go with which sounds.

How's this different from any other language?

> telling the characters apart involves looking at very small details such as
> the placement of dots.

Really? Try reading Chinese characters.

The real challenge with learning Arabic is that no one speaks the
classical/standard Arabic as a native tongue, each region has its own dialect,
and so to be really effective at using Arabic to communicate with real life
Arabs, you have to know a lot about 2 or 3 major dialects. Even in online
writing, people mix standard Arabic with their own dialect or major dialects.
If you understand Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian, Syrian,
and Iraqi dialects, then you can communicate effectively with 90% of Arabs.

Basically you have to learn several (related) languages before you can
communicate like a native Arab in the middle east. It's like learning Latin,
Italian, Spanish and French at the same time.

Reading is trivial in comparison.

~~~
sliverstorm
> Really? Try reading Chinese characters.

I studied Japanese, and I found that once you learn a Chinese character, you
recognize it instantly like a picture. They have unique shapes, and not many
are similar enough that you have to peer at it to discern the difference.

Identifying Chinese characters, to me, is like distinguishing the letter "A"
from "B"

<http://mural.uv.es/ciucama/kanji.gif> <= it may well look like gibberish to
you, but I'm sure you can notice that they are largely unique, and even if you
only look at the 'shape', you can tell the difference.

From what I've seen of Arabic, identifying characters is often like
distinguishing "0" from "O" and "l" from "1", or "W" from "VV"

[http://www.stanford.edu/dept/lc/arabic/alphabet/images/Arabi...](http://www.stanford.edu/dept/lc/arabic/alphabet/images/ArabicAlphabet.jpg)
<= disclaimer: this IS gibberish to me, but even so I can notice than many
many letters are very similar to others.

~~~
hasenj
o and 0?

No, worst case it's like trying to tell appart l, i, j

Anyway, being a native Arabic, I don't see any inherent difficulty in the
writing system.

I only encounter a problem if the font is bad or too small, or a combination
of both. 10px in most standard Arabic fonts doesn't work very well.

I don't know if Kanji is readable at 10px, but I personally can't read it at
that size. Any native Japanese/Chinese to shed some light?

~~~
jbm
Not native, but I can read most kanji at 10px. (Some of the more complex ones
with 12 or more strokes can be a bit difficult but you can usually guess them
from context)

~~~
Natsu
I notice that I have a lot more trouble trying to read Japanese in smaller
fonts, but I'm also not that great at reading it to begin with.

At least Japanese has katakana & hiragana, though, which have only a few
strokes and are quite prevalent in normal writing. I've seen dense walls of
tiny Chinese writing that looked positively impenetrable.

------
pg
I sensed this when learning classical Arabic in college. Even after a year of
intensive (= every day) Arabic, I really had to think to read the letters.
Back then there were already stories about studies showing the letters were
hard for kids to learn, though IIRC they were just statistical studies.

~~~
jbm
I studied classic Arabic when I was much younger for religious purposes. I
never found it particularly difficult, but whenever I try to read normal
Arabic it becomes an exercise in futility. I wonder if there is a real
difference between reading the two or if it was just what I was used to.

~~~
kranner
Do you mean because normal Arabic lacks vowel markers? If so, I've got the
same problem reading Urdu newspapers and fiction; one has to speak the word
out loud and guess from the context what it 'completes' to.

------
malkia
"Israeli scientists believe they have identified why Arabic is particularly
hard to learn to read."

Nothing wrong with that, but someone would take it politically :)

~~~
endtime
Israelis learn Arabic like Americans learn Spanish, so there's a good non-
political explanation for it. :)

~~~
malkia
Ah, reminds me how we had to learn russian back in the commie days (I'm from
Bulgaria). Nothing against russian, or it's people, but the regime required
it.

------
andolanra
The research this seems to be discussing is at least partly described in
"Language status and hemispheric involvement in reading: Evidence from
trilingual Arabic speakers tested in Arabic, Hebrew, and English" by Raphiq
Ibrahim and Zohar Eviatar. So far, I haven't been able to turn up a copy, so
I'll just list my non-neuroscientist questions and concerns. I don't mean that
I don't believe it necessarily; just that I have trouble accepting a lot of
these statements without further qualification and discussion.

\- Lateralization of brain function is a tricky business, because it's prone
to exaggeration and urban legend. I'd like some clear citations for statements
like, "When you are starting something new, there is a lot of [right
hemisphere] involvement."

\- Given the preceding statement, I'd also like some clear citations for "When
the eyes see something for just a short time, and it is at one side of a
screen, only one brain hemisphere is quick enough to process the image." When
I first read this sentence, it made sense to me, but things which appeal to
common sense are not necessarily true.

\- What are the actual rates of recognition for the letters by the different
speakers and for the different hemispheres? Was it really an all-or-nothing
result, or was it a 49%-or-%51 result?

\- Because this experiment (apparently) only tested individual letters, how
does one take into account the fact that Arabic letters change their form in
various parts of a word? Perhaps Arabic words are easier to read than Hebrew
words because the letters, when put together, have a more recognizable shape
than Hebrew letters, which have a more uniform outline. Would right-brain
recognition of Arabic words vs. Hebrew words yield different results than the
individual letters?

\- Arabic is widely spoken in Israel, but what percentage of the Arabic
speakers were native Arabic speakers who learned Hebrew later in life, and
what percentage were native Hebrew speakers who learned Arabic later in life?
How much later in life?

\- Arabic typeset on a computer can differ radically from calligraphic Arabic
and handwritten Arabic. What variety was tested? Would handwritten Arabic
(which generally uses lines instead of dots for diacritics) aid or hinder
understanding?

In general, science news prepared by non-scientific sources leaves out a lot
of detail, but these are questions which I think could have a lot of bearing
on the truth of this experiment.

------
tokenadult
Needs a lot more replication before I'll believe it. See _Reading in the
Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention_

[http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution-
Invent...](http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution-
Invention/dp/0670021105/)

for a good recent, research-based account of how reading works.

------
jurjenh
I wonder what the implications of this are with respect to maths / logic. IIRC
the left hemisphere of the brain does more of the logical thinking, with the
right being more creative - does this mean that people who read / write a lot
of Arabic tend to have more developed logical or analytical skills?

Arabic numerals spring to mind, though they originated from India originally
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals>), and algebra and trigonometry
have been developed a great deal by Arabic and Persian scholars - all these
are fairly fundamental to mathematics.

I wonder if there is any causation due to the written language, or would it
merely be correlation?

~~~
mahmud
The development of logic in the Islamic world has little to do with the Arabic
language and everything to do with Islamic jurisprudence (Fiqh), and the
conquest of settled, sedentary peoples in Persia, the Roman occupied Levant
and Anatolia.

Suddenly, Arabs found themselves heirs to great empires and custodians of far
richer cultures than their own. The recent converts had to be immersed in the
culture with something other than eloquent oration and rhetoric, as was the
custom back in Arabia, since few of them spoke Arabic much less appreciated
its word-craft. The converts themselves were running around interpreting Islam
in their old, familiar ways; the Persians, subservient to their God-Kings
would have idolized the new Arabs. Arab families from the inner-circle were
vying for power, and old clan conflicts were beginning to threaten the new
Caliphate.

It was during this period of economic stability, but cultural chaos that
Islamic scholars rediscovered* pockets of philosophical cults: Gnostics,
Neoplatonists, Aristotelians, and various Christian offshoots, all off whom
had highly developed systems of inquiry and exposition. These fringe groups
were learned men who saw wisdom not only in Christian teachings, the state-
sponsored religion, but also in the old teachings of sages and thinkers of
antiquity.

That's when Islam discovered Logic and fell in love. Unlike Rome, logic didn't
threaten their religion because they believed their holly book was infallible;
and the thought of man, once elevated, can only be in agreement with what God
said, and if wrong, the error lay with man.

The Caliphs threw scholarships at researchers and sent them digging in the
books. First, it was a period of translation, followed by active search for
lost Greek sources, and finally, once the attic dried, new research and
development.

Within 30 years of first contact, in Baghdad and Basra, Mecca and Madina;
Logic, Rhetoric, Music, and Geometry were in school curricula, along with
Quran. And the new students, learned in native Arabic and oblivious to
translation, ran with the sciences and developed them, as any of their many
indigenous crafts.

------
ithkuil
"The researchers looked at 40 university students. Some of the students only
spoke Hebrew, while some _also_ spoke and read Arabic well."

Does this mean that all the 40 students had prior knowledge in Hebrew?

Does this mean that the ones which "only spoke Hebrew", only spoke it (but
don't read and write it), or "spoke only Hebrew" (but don't speak Arabic).

(perhaps I have the illusion that the sentence is ambiguous because I'm not a
native English speaker, please correct me)

Anyway, I fail to understand how this scientific experiment is being designed.

I have the feeling that they are only testing the difficulty to learn Arabic
glyphs with no scientifically measurable difficulty to learn Hebrew glyphs
since the tested subjects already know them. But this cannot be true, I cannot
believe that such a blatant experimental error is being performed and the
results being published, so I have to be wrong. Can somebody shed more light
on it?

------
spirulina
Reading Arabic letters means paying attention to detail and where dots are
located, especially when you first learn the language. Not an issue after
that.

I fail to see how that is "hard for the brain", when you know that the Arabic
alphabet is limited to 28 letters.

The OP should have looked at learning languages that have thousands of
ideograms (Japanese Kanji, Chinese, etc...)

Abstract of reference paper here:
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14744200> It s a shame no full text of
this research is freely available.

------
touseefliaqat
Sample size of only 40 students from 1.57 billion people who can read Arabic.
Amazing...

------
sunkencity
it's not that easy to read apl either.

~~~
silentbicycle
Really? It's like reading Chinese, but if it only had about fifty kanji and a
perfectly regular grammar.

I'll grant you that it's pretty intimidating when you start, though.

~~~
sunkencity
Apl looks pretty tough, though I would love to learn it.

I know how to read persian/farsi, which I studied one course in at the
university, I did not find it hard to learn to read that at all. Arabic is a
little bit harder because there's more guesswork involved, but I don't know
arabic. It's not the script, it's the way it's encoded imho, very few wovels
are written down.

~~~
silentbicycle
If you're interested in APL, I'd suggest checking out J
(<http://jsoftware.com/>), a modern and free (though not open source) dialect,
which only uses ascii. _J for C Programmers_ is pretty good. K, another APL
dialect, is also quite amazing, but less free than J. (It's most recent
version is called Q.)

I don't know Farsi or Arabic, though. I studied Spanish and German in college,
but majored in history rather than linguistics.

~~~
silentbicycle
(There's a conspiracy to make cool programming languages hard to google.)

