Today, I want to talk about Arabic and I
want to talk about why it is important that if you want to stay the course, you
have to change what you're doing. You can't keep doing the same thing over
and over again, if it's not working. Now, I'm going to talk
about my experience. There may be other people who
have learned Arabic very quickly. I haven't, and I'm going to go through
sort of the stages of my approach to Arabic, the things that I have
changed in order to stay the course. And I'll show you sort of
where I'm at right now. My initial motivation was a visit
to Jordan, to Petra, the sudden realization that there are 400 million
people in the world who speak Arabic. So I got very interested
in the Middle East. Uh, I bought books on the history
of the Arabs, two books in particular, one by Albert Hourani. And another one by somebody McIntosh,
something around the Arabs, but it gives you a perspective on the Arabs that starts
before Islam that deals with Yemen and the Fertile Crescent and Egypt and North
Africa and all these different Iraq and the relationship with Persia, with the,
uh, you know, Byzantine empire, with the Greeks, with there's a whole bunch of
stuff there that's very, very interesting. I was motivated and so I said, you
know what, I'm going to learn Arabic and I'm going to learn Persian and
I'm going to learn Turkish so that I can really get into the Middle East. Well, what I discovered, of course,
language learning is all about motivation minus the obstacles. Like there are obstacles, so you
need a lot of motivation to overcome the obstacles and you need time. Back in November of 2017,
I was very motivated. Then I started hitting the obstacles. So the biggest obstacle initially. is the writing system. They don't use the Latin alphabet. What do you know? They use the Arabic alphabet. Now the Arabic alphabet has the
same origin as the Latin alphabet. You know, that's the Phoenician alphabet,
but the Latin alphabet evolved via the, from the Phoenician, Phoenician
alphabet to the Greek alphabet, to the Roman or Latin alphabet, the Arabic
writing system, which is the same as the Persian writing system, essentially,
you know, evolved differently. I did all kinds of things. You know, I bought this little disc. I think I was at the. American, whatever it's called, Conference
of Language Teachers in San Diego. They were handing out this disc. So I bought it. I never used it. Useless for me, not that it isn't
good for other people, but it shows you the equivalence between
Latin letters and Arabic letters. I got apps for my, for my iPhone. Which I hardly used and I just struggled. Most of all, I just had to
continue reading, reading. I started to get a sense
of, of what the words meant. The problem in Arabic is that the form
of the word is different depending on whether it's at the beginning,
the middle, or at the end of a word. Some of the words still look very
similar to each other in, to me, because I'm not used to them. So it has remained a major obstacle. Another obstacle is that it seemed to
me, and I'm, I still think it's the case that a lot of the beginner books
that I bought, this one happens to be in French, but the font is so small. Like I can't even make out these
characters when they're larger, but so small and a lot of the books were like
that and they cluttered up in Arabic. They had this thing called the
Harakat, which is sort of their way of showing vowels because there are
no vowels in the writing system and this makes the whole page messy. And then when you go on the internet
and look up, you know, content on Al Jazeera or wherever it might be,
they don't have the harakat there. So given that most of my reading is
online where I can click and hear text to speech, I decided to ignore the harakat. Although over time I get used
to what those little signs mean, those little slashes, but in
fact, they just mess up the page. I have enough trouble trying to
figure out what letters those are. So that was kind of sort of my evolution. Oh, and I decided that I have
so much trouble with the Arabic script that I dropped Turkish. If you see my timeline of when I
started these languages, you'll see that there's a great amount of activity
here on LingQ around 2018, 2019. In Persian, Arabic, and Turkish,
and then I dropped Turkish and I continue with Persian and Arabic. Now, another thing is Persian is easier. So I ended up doing more in Persian. Plus we had a, uh, uh, uh, collaborator
in Iran, Sahra, who was creating phenomenal content for me in Persian. And she was my tutor. And so I ended up spending more time
where I had good content available. And I had help from her and the Arab,
Arabic kept on sort of bumping along. But obviously the writing system is a
major obstacle and one that really it is only with time that you get better
at reading in a different script. Also, because it was so difficult
for me, I found that I couldn't. I found it very difficult to
read away from the computer. I became quite dependent on reading
online where I could hear it. I could either hear the audio from
LingQ or I could be clicking on the word to hear the text to speech. I found it very difficult
to read on paper. So that was the first obstacle
was the writing system. The second obstacle is grammar. Arabic grammar is actually
quite complicated. Unlike Persian grammar, which
is similar to Arabic grammar. Other sort of Indo European
languages, Arabic has a completely different structure. So modern standard Arabic verbs. It's one of the many books that I bought. Like I've got books down
here in Palm Springs. I've got other books up in Vancouver. Does your turn off a 4A1,
assimilated measure four, Hamza assimilated measure four, uh,
Hamza did defective measure three. Defective measure one, like all these
different descriptions of the verbs. And they're all with this very
unsatisfactory Arabic, uh, transliteration where they use the letter or the, the
numeral three and seven or question mark to represent different sounds,
which don't really click because you're not used to seeing those symbols being
used to represent sort of meaning. Things that you have to pronounce. So my approach to the grammar was to
largely ignore it and just to get used to the patterns of how people say things in
Arabic, but here again, I have changed. A little bit, and I will
get to that later on. Another obstacle in Arabic is content. Initially, when I started back in
2018, 2019, so I did our many stories. So I totally focused on the many
stories and that's okay because it's high frequency verbs. I listened to it many, many times. And again, if you look at my statistics,
you'll see that there's a tremendous amount of listening taking place there. And then, okay, I've
done the many stories. Now I'm going to venture out. So I go and find what's
available online, Al Jazeera. Okay.
I'm interested in the news. I'm interested in history. And, uh, I find Happy Scribe where I
can automatically create a transcript, which is more or less accurate. It actually has improved over the years. I'm paying for this, of course, but still
it's giving me content that I can consume. But after a while, it's all the same. It's all the same news stories. So I'm using this stuff and I'm kind of
starting to kind of get a, uh, toehold on the language, but still this lack of
content and, and the content that I get from Al Jazeera is all in standard Arabic. So I'm focused on standard Arabic
and that's what's available. That's what books are written in. That's what, you know,
political discussions online are predominantly, uh, but it's not
when people speak to each other. And particularly if I go to movies,
Egyptian movies, or Levantine movies. However much I understood of my Al
Jazeera political podcast or news item, I couldn't understand the movies, neither in
Egyptian, nor in Levantine, like Lebanese. So, whereas in other languages, you can
just go find stuff and start learning from it, bring it into LingQ or whatever
you do, in Arabic, it was more difficult. Even when you get to sort of content
in say Levantine Arabic, the transcript is in Fussai, in standard Arabic. You know, it's as if the, what
you're listening to is in Spanish, but the transcript is in Latin. So it's not very helpful. So that was another problem
with, with, uh, content. But again, you, you can't just
keep doing the same thing. So I used many stories. Then I did Assimil. I did a number of these books,
whatever I was able to find. The content in these learner books
like Assimil is not very interesting. Again, the script is full of
these harakat that makes it more difficult for me to read. I ended up actually importing the Assimil
into LingQ so that I could look up words because the word list they provide
is not necessary, doesn't necessarily cover all the words you don't know. Uh, but I was doing all these things
and I just found it a real uphill battle all the way in my Arabic. Now, I've touched on this, but, uh,
another obstacle in learning Arabic, of course, is the regional variations
of Arabic, you know, a hundred million people speak Egyptian Arabic, maybe 40
million people speak Levantine Arabic. Nobody naturally speaks standard Arabic. But then if you go to sources of
these regional variations, uh, which I started to do after a while. Then if they have a
transcript, it'll be Tafusfa. If you use, uh, you know, a whisper
AI to transcribe it, as I do when I bring them into LingQ to learn from
them, either they don't understand the word that was used, so you give
you something totally unrelated. That is the, the AI doesn't
quite know that word. Uh, if you're listening to, uh,
something from Lebanon, they use so much French and English, which
totally confuses, you So you end up with transcripts of sort of Lebanese
content, which are not that satisfying. Now, I should point out that I decided
after a while to move to Levantine Arabic. So I don't know just how, what the
experience is with Egyptian Arabic, but for Levantine Arabic, it's not
ideal, but it's still workable. It's still workable. So, but the range of sort of
the variety of regional forms of Arabic is an obstacle, right? To learning Arabic, but I decided to
stop focusing just on Al Jazeera and the sort of Fusab because I realized
that I would be forever trying to learn all the vocabulary that's there because
The vocabulary, and this is another point I'll get to in Arabic is massive. So I said, no, no, we're going
to focus in on Levantine. It's going to be real people
talking about real things. So there, again, I
changed what I was doing. And that brings me to the sort of
other big problem that I had in Arabic is that the vocabulary is so massive. With half the vocabulary in
Persian that I have in Arabic. I'm, I understand far more in
Persian and I can express myself better in Persian than in Arabic. Although now I've spent the last
two months on Levantine Arabic, I've maybe dropped a bit in my Persian. But in fact, I'm better at
Persian than Arabic because of the massive size of the vocabulary. But nevertheless, I stayed with it. And, uh, I will tell you sort of
at the end here, how I have changed my strategy because you can't keep
running, you know, pushing on a rope. But first I'll go through my sort of,
um, milestones in my Arabic learning. So more or less a year after I decided
to learn Arabic and I'd been working on it together with, uh, with Persian,
I went to Morocco, the Moroccans were quite happy to humor me and, uh,
standard Arabic, although they all spoke French better than I spoke Arabic. so that's sort of the start of
my sort of Arabic adventure, immersing myself in the language. Then you'll see a snippet
here of me speaking with my tutor Mohammed from Cairo. And he was a great guy and he was very
motivating and he also got me going or interested in Egyptian Arabic. He gave me the names of some Egyptian
movies and of course I couldn't understand them, uh, but that's kind of a next stage. And that's three years ago. And I have the feeling, or I had the
feeling until recently that I hadn't really progressed much since then. Where am I now? I have decided to reassess
some of my strategies. So I discovered a website called
Yalla Arabi through some of the content that they put out on YouTube. And I got in touch with them
initially to ask them if we could use their material at LingQ. It turns out they all have, all
of their material has a lengthy English introduction, which makes
it less useful for LingQ, but it's still very good content. Yalla Arabi. I definitely recommend it. And then they proposed that, uh,
I work with one of their tutors. So I said, you know, I have had
success working with tutors when the tutor is sort of motivating
and, and, uh, flexible and so forth. And that can be a source of
inspiration, a source of motivation. And so I've started working
with Samer at Yala Arabi. Yala Arabi has a grammar book,
but it's a very good grammar book. It's somehow hits on all the things that
I have come across and working with Samer in our sessions, he explains things and
he gets me to say things in a way that's So, I'm just reinforcing and also, you
know, clarify some issues that were not clear to me about the grammar, but he
does it in a way that's not complicated. That's very straightforward
and very effective. So I've been working with him and
also, uh, I've been reading with him, just, just started to do this
because I'm so bad at reading. And that, then I read some stuff and
then he asked me questions and I answer. So that gets me speaking. And all of that has been very
enjoyable and very effective. And partly as a result of that,
I have taken the position. I have to be able to read on paper. I can't be totally dependent. On reading in digital format, where I can
listen to things and I can look things up. And so I went back to a source that I
had used before, which is Lingualism, who has it, and you can find him online. And he's got an enormous treasure trove
of material for learning Arabic, but I found that reading some of these
materials, see, I don't like to be on my trusty iPad, which is where I do all my. Work on LingQ and so forth just before
going to bed, because apparently it's not good for you, it keeps you awake. So by my bedside, I have things
that I can read on paper. It's relaxing and it forces me
to read, you know, the word. No training wheels. I can't look it up. I can't hear it. And so that's kind of
where I am right now. So what I wanted to say in this
lengthy diatribe is, um, You know, I wanted to stay with Arabic. I hit a plateau, there were all these
obstacles, but I wanted to continue. I felt that if I were to continue
just trying to stay with Fusha and be able to learn every possible
word in this humongous library, or excuse me, vocabulary, I would not
be able to communicate with people. And so I said, okay, I'm going to focus
on Levantine and that's where I am. I'm enjoying it. Uh, I'm listening to
podcasts from Lebanon. There was one very nice podcast with,
uh, uh, this woman who is a former runner up, Miss Lebanon, attractive lady. And she is a content
creator, uh, and so forth. I mentioned earlier, there was one
with an entrepreneur again from Lebanon who lives in the United Arab Emirates. So I'm sort of discovering Lebanon,
which is this fascinating country. It's so fascinating. So many different, you know, cultures. Uh, cultures and history and different,
uh, you know, religions or sects. And, and they're also fluent
in different languages. And so it's been a wonderful,
uh, experience for me. And it comes alive in a way that
the Fusha, uh, wasn't alive. So I would say if you want to stay the
course, change what you're doing, try different things in order to keep going. I think your brain and your language
learning will thank you for it. Thank you. Bye.
