A language learners’ forum

Systematiker wrote:For the modern stuff, I'll use Duolingo (anyone know if that's any good?)

I like the Duolingo course, but I already knew Biblical Hebrew reasonably well when I started with it (and I had studied the modern language at least a little) so I can't really say how it would be for starting from scratch. I was worried at first because the picture vocabulary doesn't have audio, but nearly every *sentence* does have audio, so it's fine.

I also have Assimil courses from both an English and French base (neither of which I've really worked though yet), and they seem to be of average to above-average quality as Assimil courses go.

All we need to kickstart Team Middle-East are natives or advanced learners willing to act as godparents. Luso and Doitsujin, may I invite you to consider becoming one?

LadyGrey1986 wrote:All we need to kickstart Team Middle-East are natives or advanced learners willing to act as godparents. Luso and Doitsujin, may I invite you to consider becoming one?

Thank you for considering me, but at this point in time, that would be a gross overestimation of my abilities. To be honest, I had entertained the idea of joining the group, but the simple idea of maintaning a log was a bit daunting. If you'll have me without my having to keep one, I'll be happy to join (MSA), but not as a godfather.

You are very welcome Luso. The last thing I want to do is to create more stress and pressure. You leave a comment here when you feel like it .

How is everyone doing?

LadyGrey1986 wrote:How is everyone doing?

Not too bad. What about you?

I decided to drop MSA for the time being and focus just on Levantine due to time constraints and MSA's lofty verbal system, although of course there's a huge vocabulary overlap. I certainly don't want to mix up the conjugations now that the dialectic conjugations are starting to click. MSA is so hard that it makes learning a dialect look like a walk in the park. I got hold of "Course d'Arabe Palestenien" and already worked my way through the first 3 lessons. Seems like a good course so far.

Here's a nice song I found today:

ma fi 'amal (there's no hope)

I am progressing quite nicely. I am focussing mostly on Levantine Arabic as well, at least for now. I am halfway done with Syrian Arabic a Functional Course. Thanks for the song! I really should do some of the pronunciation of FSi Levantine Arabic

I got through three chapters of Syrian Colloquial Arabic (in a month) and have retained most of the vocabulary pretty well (I have a custom Memrise deck with 100 new words from the first three chapters of the book), but I've ended up distracted by Duolingo's Turkish course. I only have the last couple of lessons on the tree left though so hopefully I'll get back on track with Arabic afterwards, although I'm also tempted to take Turkish further with some other resources.

Maintaining Hebrew's been going good. I did a couple of conversation classes through iTalki and was surprised at how much I've retained. I think I have a pretty solid B2 that's probably only marred by some gaps in vocabulary (I'm probably better at talking about politics than describing what's in my living room ) -- I guess that's what I should work on next. I've also been skimming Ynet articles a couple of times a week and adding new vocabulary to Memrise.

A good thing I've noticed is now that I'm reading and listening to the news in Urdu a lot, my new formal Urdu vocabulary has helped tremendously with Arabic.

NIKOLIĆ wrote:
Here's a nice song I found today:

ma fi 'amal (there's no hope)

Haadi ghiniye 7elwe, shukran.

Saim wrote:Haadi ghiniye 7elwe, shukran.

3afwan. sima3tha kull yawm mbare7.

I'm still around, making slow progress - through ch5 in my text, and the vocabulary is coming back (I'm not having to work too hard to remember them, at one point I knew them pretty well). It's a busy time of year for me, so progress won't be anything but slow...