Well I think my motivation is up to full! I'm excited that there are so many cool things I can watch and for once I'm more excited about the destination than the journey and I find myself wishing I could snap my fingers and understand the Levantine and Egyptian dialects!
TVI was a bit saddened that Disney+ didn't seem to have any Arabic dubs available in the US (which is a shame because the Arabic voice of Elsa in
Frozen has an amazing voice!) and I checked to see what was available on Netflix, and at first it seemed like they had a lot but it was all in Egyptian Arabic, which is an important dialect but not the one I was hoping to tackle first. But then I discovered that they actually have a ton in Levantine dialect as well, their category maintenance just sucks so you need to do a text search to find everything. Unfortunately a lot of shows show up for multiple dialects so you need to do some digging to see what dialect is used in a given show. Sadly there are a lot of false positives. Some of my favorite shows such as
The Legend of Korra and
She-Ra showed up in the "Arabic Audio" category, and since they're YA/children's shows they would probably be dubbed in MSA, not a dialect, but they don't seem to have any children's shows with actual Arabic dubbing.
But I have been watching Spacetoon a little bit. It has cartoons dubbed into MSA. I don't know if you can watch anything on demand but it streams internationally all day so I just watch whatever's on, just like we did in the old days. First I saw some CGI transformer show and then I caught the beginning of a DBZ episode. They said that DBZ was بعد قليل (baʿda qalīl). I had learned from Pimsleur that this meant "a bit later", but since DBZ came on immediately after they said it, I suppose it can also mean "next" or "coming up".
BooksI couldn't find any information about what Arabic children's books might be considered the most classic, but I was able to find one especially prolific author, Taghreed Najjar, through Amazon. I bought a couple of her books and they just arrived today. One of them is called ألبطيخة (al-biṭṭīḫah), meaning
The Watermelon. This sounded a bit similar to the French word pastèque so I checked Wiktionary to see if the Arabic word was a loanword from French, but as it turns out it's the opposite! French got it from Arabic via Portuguese. I read the first sentence and I was surprised that I was able to understand everything! Not 100%, but I knew roughly what each word meant; there were a couple of variations on the root meaning eat, so I think I was able to figure out what they meant from context. Now that I've bought those children's books, Amazon has started recommending more that are originally written in Arabic (not translations), so I had to buy a couple more. One is by Maria Dadouch and is actually bilingual, which is great! It's about Eid and an interfaith friendship, so I'm hoping to learn a bit of culture from it. The author has one many awards and also has a few other monolingual Arabic books available on Kindle. There was also another one that looked cute by Dahlia Al-Mekawi called هذا هو أبي (haḏā huwa abī), meaning
This is My Father. It's from the perspective of a baby girl talking about her father, so I'm preparing myself for some feels. I couldn't find anything else about that author.
Keyboard LayoutI decided it was finally time to make a new Arabic keyboard layout because the standard one is terrible and hurts to type, so I started looking for statistics for Arabic letters and to my surprise I found a paper about an
Arabic keyboard layout that was optimized with a genetic algorithm, so the work was done for me! I couldn't find it available for download, but there was a picture of it in the paper so it was easy enough for me to make it myself using KBDEdit. It was very quick to learn and it's much more comfortable than the standard layout. I have already started using it.
Dialect OrderAs I said earlier, I'm excited to start watching all the Netflix stuff in dialects, so I've been thinking a lot about when to introduce dialects and in which order. I'm considering doing the three levels of Pimsleur Eastern Arabic (based on Syrian speech) before jumping into the DLI Arabic Basic Course. Otherwise I'm not sure exactly where I'll fit it in, because I'm planning on using my car time slot on DLI. The DLI course has 143 lessons, so it will easily take me a year or two even assuming I can finish a lesson every 2-4 days, so by the time I get through it I would have presumably finished the
Ahlan wa Sahlan textbook series by then, so I wouldn't have any other course to do along with Pimsleur. A 90-lesson Pimsleur course will only take me 18 weeks, much much quicker than the DLI course, so I think it makes sense to go through that first.
As I'm typing this, I'm formulating a new plan, which is to ignore the DLI course for now and just get as far as I can in the textbook series before I finish the Pimsleur courses. Then I can take a break from Arabic with hopefully a strong enough level to give me a decisive advantage in Hebrew, and then do a good amount of Biblical Hebrew and then Modern Hebrew. This would revise my timeline from 2 years of Arabic (maybe closer to 3 or more now that I've taken a closer look at the DLI course), 1 year of Biblical Hebrew, and then 1 year of Modern Hebrew (4-5 years total) to around 1 year of Arabic, 1 year of Biblical Hebrew, and then 1 year of Modern Hebrew (3 years total). Then I'll be free to "finish off" Arabic at my own pace without the sense of urgency that it's blocking my Hebrew progress. But I guess I'll have to see how I feel about my level of Arabic in a year, assuming that I can stay on task that long.
ProgressI've been keeping up a pretty good pace, averaging over 10 Duolingo review lessons a day, completing a Pimsleur lesson every day, and trying to catch up with Assimil fairly quickly (I've reviewed the audio for the first 7 lessons and read the text for the first 4; I'll probably do more tonight before I go to sleep). My Duolingo strength has gone from just over 50% to almost 70%, and at this rate I should be able to start learning new material within a week.