The Language Journal of Jinx

[Jinx]

As it turns out, I did not continue Japanese after completing my six-week challenge. Once I got to the point of being able to understand a (very small, only three lines) blog post I happened to scroll past one day, I decided that was enough of an accomplishment that I didn’t feel the compulsion to keep going. The Assimil “Le japonais” is so well made, however, that I would like to return to it eventually. Right now, though, I have to admit that I don’t have the interest – and that the Japanese language does not really apply to my life in any way.

You know what language does, though? Arabic. I’ve been living in a primarily Syrian/Lebanese neighborhood for over three years now, and I still can’t speak a word of the language. That’s absurd. I’ve decided to start trying to familiarize myself with it a bit. This is not a language that I ever expected (or indeed expect) to actually “learn” in my life, because I have no illusions about it being easy. But considering that I overhear Arabic conversations in the street every day and constantly walk past shops whose names are written in Arabic, I think I ought to get a clue about the language. At least a small one.

So I started looking at Arabic on Sunday, five days ago. Spent most of the first few days just reading up on various resources. I’m doing Levantine Arabic. Or rather, will be; I guess I really ought to do MSA first. I’ve got access to the DLI and FSI courses – started looking at DLI “Arabic Sound and Script” three days ago but haven’t really dived in yet. I’ve also got Elihay’s “Speaking Arabic” books (and several more resources, but I'm trying to restrain myself for now).

On Monday I worked through a bunch of Youtube videos that teach the alphabet and the pronunciation of the letters. Not gonna lie: I am intimidated. As I wrote in (very tongue-in-cheek) frustration in my journal:

“I already love this language, but the pronunciation is harder than that of any other language I’ve ever studied. Chinese: say a cross between R and Z? No problem. Japanese: something between F and H? You got it, boss. German: a mixture of V and W? Effortless. Welsh: blow air out both sides of your tongue at once? A delightful challenge. But Arabic… Arabic is going to be the one that kills me. And I’m not talking about khaa or ghayn. I’m talking about two different H’s, far too many ‘emphatics’ (will I ever figure out how to say ‘S, but more so?’ probably not!), and my deepest darkest enemy: ‘ayn. I can’t pronounce that letter without sounding like an invisible dude started strangling me while I was trying to talk.”

Tuesday: I looked up a word frequency list of the top 100 most common words in the language, put each of the first 20 into Forvo, and listened to all the recordings of each one. That was a fantastic exercise to kill two birds with one stone and practice both reading and listening at once. I looked at the word, tried to identify each letter and guess how it might be pronounced, and then listened to the audio to see if I’d been right. I actually was, more often than I’d expected to be! I may continue doing that tonight.

Wednesday: I went shopping in the evening and overheard so much spoken Arabic in the streets. This time I actually recognized a few words, for the first time ever! Nothing big, just common words like أنا and يلا, but it made me happy. I also watched an episode of a Jordanian show on Netflix (AR audio, EN subs), “AlRawabi School for Girls”. Getting the audio exposure was great, but the show was so violent and depressing, I don’t know if I’ll stick with it.

I was just reading about Olle Kjellin’s pronunciation theories and am intrigued by the prospect of trying them out. I like the idea of repeated listening to a limited number of phrases in order to learn proper pronunciation, because that’s basically what I did with German (by obsessively listening to the same German music over and over) and it worked pretty well back then. My current challenge is to find a nice batch of sample sentences in high-quality audio recordings and in either MSA or Levantine Arabic, so I can make sure I’m saturating my ears with the right sounds! Tatoeba doesn’t seem to have any audio in Arabic, so I’m wondering what dialect the book2 audio from the Goethe Verlag website is in (I made a separate forum post asking about it just now).

[Sonjaconjota]

My current challenge is to find a nice batch of sample sentences in high-quality audio recordings and in either MSA or Levantine Arabic, so I can make sure I’m saturating my ears with the right sounds!

I don't study Arabic myself, so I can't recommend this based on personal experience, but I wondered if this might be of interest to you:
https://www.talkinarabic.com/

[jackb]

My current challenge is to find a nice batch of sample sentences in high-quality audio recordings and in either MSA or Levantine Arabic, so I can make sure I’m saturating my ears with the right sounds!

This sounds like you are describing Glossika in listen and repeat mode. They have several flavors of Arabic. You might want to give it a try. https://ai.glossika.com/

[Jinx]

Thanks for the suggestions, jackb and Sonjaconjota! For now, I'm going to see how far I can get using only free resources or resources I already have, rather than paying for additional ones, but I will keep these in mind.

Arabic update:

I forgot to mention in my last entry that either three or four days ago (can’t remember) I spent a long time, probably at least an hour, listening to a podcast in Arabic with the un-flashy name of “Learn Arabic - Syrian - Levantine colloquial Arabic”. It’s my ideal type of total-beginner audio material: basically just somebody babytalking you. Well, I can’t be sure that she’s actually babytalking, because of course I can’t understand it yet – but she speaks slowly and clearly and repeats phrases multiple times. Give me alllll the audio like that! I love it.

Yesterday evening, I reviewed the next ten of the top 500 most common words, numbers 20 to 30, with corresponding audio from Forvo. Then I watched this very impressively made video from the channel Arabic Blooms. What a gift this teacher has given us by making her high-quality lessons available for free! (She’s from Egypt, but she teaches MSA.)

Today, I listened to 1.5 hours of Arabic audio (the same Syrian podcast I mentioned earlier) while I was in the bath. That helped me further familiarize myself with the sounds. Also, I'm starting to understand more of how the podcast is structured. It seems that she introduces a phrase in Levantine Arabic, and then tells you how it's said in a few other varieties. For instance, a couple of times I think I heard her say something along the lines of "In Syria, you say it like this: X. But in Iraq, you say it like this: Y." (Disclaimer: I still don't actually theoretically know any Arabic, so I may have misunderstood this!)

[Jinx]

Just dropping in to make a post to save my results from this French passive vocabulary size test that reineke shared here:

Level 2k: 93%
Level 3k: 100%
Level 5k: 100%
Level 10k: 63%

I hate messing up test results by guessing, and was pleased that this test permitted me to leave answers blank if I didn't feel confident about them. I had quite a few blanks, especially toward the end. Overall I did a little better than I was expecting. Of course the cognates with English (and with other languages) helped, but also my passive French has always been miles ahead of my active French.

[Jinx]

General study update: I took a while off from active language study and then returned to it with a vengeance at the start of this year.

I've read 16 books so far in 2022. Most of them were in English, but I've finished one Italian children’s book (Sette Robinson su un'isola matta by Bianca Pitzorno) and one French novella (Un coeur simple by Flaubert), and I am currently reading another Italian fiction book (L'amica geniale by Elena Ferrante), a French non-fiction book (Le deuxième sexe, vol. 1 by Simone de Beauvoir), and an Esperanto short-story collection (Vere aŭ fantazie by Claude Piron).

I've also been journaling a bit in both German and French, and listening to podcasts in German, French, and Italian.

[Jinx]

I've been studying a lot and not posting about it here, oops.

In January I finished 17 books: one French, one Italian, three German, and eleven English. (I had started reading the Italian one last year.)

I'm currently still working my way through L'amica geniale, Le deuxième sexe vol. I, and Vere aŭ fantazie, and in the meantime I've also started several more (I've got more than enough love to go around): Miteinander reden by Friedemann Schulz von Thun, which I'm loving so far; Et si c'était vrai by Marc Levy, not blowing my mind but fun and a comparatively quick read; and my current obsession, Identitti by Mithu Sanyal. This book is absolutely fascinating. I'm hoping for an English translation at some point so I can force all my friends to read it and talk about it with me.

I dip into my beloved vintage Teach Yourself collection whenever the mood strikes me – currently mostly Esperanto and Portuguese. Also listening to a lot of podcasts, in English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Esperanto...

Oh, and I finally learned a trick to help me say 'ayn in Arabic somewhat better: A friend who's studied the language advised me "Take a gulp of water from an imaginary glass, and the moment you finish gulping, say 'ayn." This was the first tip I had heard that helped me isolate the sensation of my closed throat re-opening to let the sound through. I can still tell I'm getting it wrong about four times out of five, but I think the fifth one is getting there!

[Jinx]

I finally made a long-delayed update to my progress bars in the first post in this thread. Now it's got all the foreign-language books I've read or am reading so far this year, plus my Assimil course for European Portuguese. (Yes, I've suddenly started Portuguese, and not the nice comparatively easy to understand Brazilian variety I'd briefly looked at before, but the intimidatingly half-swallowed European variant.)

Other language study I've done recently:
- finished reading Identitti (very interesting book in German)
- lots of podcasts in German, French, and Portuguese
- read lots of news in German
- listened to Olaf Scholz’s speech from 27 February (half an hour of German audio)
- listened to various bits and pieces of Russian and Ukrainian

I've also been feeling a huge amount of admiration for the Ukrainian people and their culture over this past week, and must confess I'm feeling a bit of an urge to take a look at that language. And Russian, too. Although I know either one of those would be an absolutely ridiculous language-learning endeavor, let alone both.

[Aloyse]

`ayn took a long time for me too. It's formed in almost the same place as غ or ح/خ but voiced without friction while pushing the jaw forward, and the back of the tongue follows forward and there, you have the ع.

For the emphatics, I first started recognizing them by their influence on surrounding vowels. Then I tried to mimic the vowel distorsion until I got the hang of expanding the palate and lowering the middle of the tongue (that's what it feels like to me). But I still hesitate when there are several possible emphatic letters in a word I hear, I can recognize there is some emphatic letter in there but I'm never sure which one it is... And I'm never really sure of my pronunciation either.... the emphatics still need some work for me too.

[Jinx]

Well, I couldn't resist any longer. I've started studying the basics of Ukrainian. I'm tackling the alphabet (luckily I already knew Russian Cyrillic) and pronunciation with the resources at the Dropbox link posted here.