Language Learning plan over the next few years

General discussion about learning languages
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leosmith
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Re: Language Learning plan over the next few years

Postby leosmith » Sun Jun 20, 2021 11:43 pm

Deinonysus wrote:I don't think it's helpful to set goals of "I'd like to be at X level by Y time".

It's certainly helpful to me, and I doubt I'm that unusual in this regard. It's a matter of personal preference. His goals may be excessive in your opinion, but that doesn't make goal setting a bad choice for him.
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Lycopersicon
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Re: Language Learning plan over the next few years

Postby Lycopersicon » Mon Jun 21, 2021 7:44 am

Walinator wrote:
Lycopersicon wrote:As far as Arabic is concerned, I’ve moved from zero knowledge to reading regular news articles online with 95% comprehension in about 8 months of not so intensive study and I’m not even a native Persian speaker. Arabic simply isn’t that behemoth of a language coming from Persian :twisted: and yes, the vocabulary discount is of epic proportion. I'd even argue that from a learner’s perspective, Persian and Arabic actually reinforce each other. The time you spend on Arabic helps strengthen your Persian and vice versa.


Could you possibly describe the steps and journey you took to reach that level of comprehensions, if you dont mind? What was your daily routine, the material you used, and the amount of time you spent a day?

Btw, thank you for the response.


Well, I have to say I’m not a very organized person so I’m terrible at following learning plans and maintaining daily routines :P I started my Arabic journey by working through a two-volume French textbook called Manuel d’Arabe Moderne. You’ve already studied with al Kitab so I guess you don’t really need to go through another introductory text at this point. It would probably be much more beneficial to seal the deal with the grammar, and Haywood & Nahmad is particularly appropriate for this purpose.

There’s also another book called All The Arabic You Never Learned The First Time Around, which is a free resource you can find on the internet. You should have a look at it too, the explanations of the author are super clear. I’ve used it and I can say it really helped me notice key patterns in the morphology.

What I did was to make sure I quiz myself on irregular verbs every day. I would simply write down from memory the fully vocalized conjugations of لقي‌, نجا, جری, سعی, باع, نام and قام on a sheet of paper and check for mistakes. You can also add a regular verb like فعل to the list if you want. I did this for several weeks. Old-school learning, I know - and not always very fun at that! But as they say you have to do what you have to do :)

While there are certainly other tricky grammatical concepts, I tend to think that the irregular verbs can be singled out as the most important part of the grammar. Once you know these inside out it all sort of gets much easier. Then you can get your hands on a reader. I personally focused on Arabic Stories for Learners, copying the whole book using Prof Arguelles’ scriptorium technique and reading each story a couple times. You don’t need to do that as meticulously though, it was more of a rite of passage for me. I’ve also had a look at the سهلوية series and thought it looked brilliant, so that can definitely be an option too.

Anyway, I’d say the best thing you can do is just practice reading in general. It can be anything: the news, social media, blogs etc. I like practicing with news articles because the word spectrum is actually fairly limited. Talking about which, here’s a superb general media vocab list which you might want to check for reference: https://arabic.desert-sky.net/vocab.html

With that said, I honestly can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent on the language. I’m certainly not a person that can study for more than 4 hours a day and I start feeling like a mad scientist after just 3 hours :D
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