In Indonesia it is more on learning on recognizing Arabic letters, write it and spell it. For Quran also learning the tajwid (تجويد). I want to say that it is not memorizing the entire dictionary. Off course it raises new problem, they can recite Quran but not understanding much the meaning unless they read the translation.

This true for many Jewish kids as well. We can read, and write in Hebrew but have no idea what it means without a translation.

True, but less so.

I've learned a couple alphabets, Hebrew among them, just for fun. I'm pretty confident I could learn to recite the Quran with a month of steady practice.

But memorize the whole thing? Like, name a sura, and I'm off to the races? That's very impressive.

And without any understanding of the underlying words! That's even more impressive, but my heart sinks a little at the waste of human potential which it represents.

Perhaps they're right, and they earn a lifetime in Paradise for their trouble. I can't help but thinking there are better ways to spend ones youth.

Couldn’t help but think about Jesus words when reading your comment about the waste of potential: “they are ever hearing, but never understanding”

I think in his case he was criticizing the scribes who memorized the scriptures, yet had no mercy for others.

It’s certainly an amazing feat of perseverance to memorize anything, but without understanding and transformation for good, it might as well be a million digits of pi.

I mean, if they’re right it seems like a pretty good trade.

Just do it when you're old. More efficient that way.

Essentially Pascal's wager. Let's be honest, it's just dumb.

> We can read, and write in Hebrew but have no idea what it means

I don't think that matches the definition of "can read" of most people. Maybe you can pronounce Hebrew, but "being able to read a given lamguage" implies some level of understanding.

So how would you describe the ability to open a Hebrew bible/prayerbook and recite recite verses or liturgy that you have never seen before and don't have memorized? I think that's "reading", albeit without comprehension. This is common among religious folk.

Note: most religious schools I know of do try to teach the kids to understand what they're reading as well, but that's a more advanced phase - first the kids learn to read Hebrew, which is the bare minimum requirement to be a functioning member of religious society, and then they're taught to understand what they're reading.

My experience was that some kids learned enough to translate a passage of average difficulty by high school, while others never quite got past the very basic vocabulary. But no one in my school got past second grade without being able to read and transcribe a text. (This was at a religious day school in the US).

Sorry you feel that way.

What do you mean, how can you read Hebrew without nikudot unless you knew the words?

One can recognize the words without understanding their meaning

Well GP didn't specify "without nikkud". Most modern prayerbooks and bibles come with nikkud. Being able to read without nikkud does often require familiarity with the words but there are a limited number of constructions in Hebrew, especially when you remove loanwords in modern Hebrew (presumably GP was referring to religious literature, which doesn't include aberrations such as ווידאו (video) or אמברקס ("ambreks" - a vehicle handbrake)). It's not 100% phonetic but it's a whole lot easier than English, so while a you might mispronounce unfamiliar words you will be able to guess correctly quite a bit, or at least be close.

Yeah, this lack of knowledge in what exactly we're reading (except for a few oft-occurring words here and there) can be seen in the inability to read, say, an Arabic newspaper. Written Arabic heavily omits the equivalent of vowels in Arabic (fathah, kasra, lamma, sukoon) since those can be figured out with context.

So, even if I can fluently read the Quraan, I wouldn't be able to figure out the right way to read a simple poster.

I don’t think speaking Arabic natively would make that much of a difference. Quranic Arabic is roughly as close to the various Arabic “dialects” as Latin is to the Romance languages. I’d new very impressed with someone who spoke Italian memorizing the Aeneid and figuring out what was going on purely from that.

Any native speaker of an Arabic dialect (except for perhaps some really peripheral countries like Mauritania or Chad) brought up on television is going to know some Modern Standard Arabic, because it is used in newsreading and other posh broadcasting. MSA is not identical with Quranic Arabic, but it is conservative and close enough that Arabic speakers will understand the older Quranic language based on their understanding of MSA. Of course, Arabic speakers will still misunderstand things here and there from the Quran (just like native English speakers sometimes misunderstand a word or expression used in the King James Bible), but they will understand most of it.

What about a native maltese speakers?

Wikipedia says:

> A 2016 study shows that, in terms of basic everyday language, speakers of Maltese are able to understand around a third of what is said to them in Tunisian Arabic, which is a Maghrebi Arabic related to Siculo-Arabic, whereas speakers of Tunisian Arabic are able to understand about 40% of what is said to them in Maltese. This reported level of asymmetric intelligibility is considerably lower than the mutual intelligibility found between other varieties of Arabic.

Arabic-origin words make up a minority of Maltese vocabulary, and I assume Maltese speakers are much more likely to watch English or Italian television than MSA, and most don't have Quranic education.

> Arabic-origin words make up a minority of Maltese vocabulary.

What would the rest of the vocabulary be based on?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_language#Vocabulary : "The historical source of modern Maltese vocabulary is 52% Italian/Sicilian, 32% Siculo-Arabic, and 6% English, with some of the remainder being French"

AFAIK the most common words are more likely to be of Arabic origin, though.

Sorry for the late answer, but thanks!

This doesn't take into account that the vast majority of Arabs are Muslim and learn the intricacies of Quran and Quranic Arabic as kids, so they will understand it quite well.

Speaking Arabic natively makes a huge difference in that the resources for understanding Quran are all available to you easily, both linguistically and culturally.

Or foreign song lyrics. During the international “Celtic music” fad of the 1990s – when bands like Clannad, Altan and Capercaillie were briefly much bigger outside their native countries than within them – I listened to a lot of these songs and memorized the Irish- or Scottish Gaelic-language lyrics just through pure exposure. In spite of not actually speaking Irish/Scottish Gaelic (I know just a handful of isolated words), I could reproduce those lyrics now with probably a high degree of fidelity.