Breeda's Log

[breeda1]

I might as well start a log of my language learning journey so that I can better chart my progress and maybe receive some good community tips.

Anyways, the language I'm primarily trying to learn is Arabic. Right now I'm focusing on the Egyptian dialect. I hope to master MSA, the Levantine dialect, and the Gulf dialect someday, but all things in good time.
I have some experience with learning Arabic, but I've been mostly meandering around and not fully putting time into my study. That changes now.

As for my current progress, I'm currently watching an Egyptian show called Riesh Na3am (which means Ostrich Feathers or Soft Life depending on the translation) which is about a rich girl named Farida learning to go through her life without her father's wealth. So far I'm only at the 2nd episode and not much has happened plotwise (from what I can tell), but I have noticed some improvement to my listening ability.
I've been trying out Iversen's Bloodhound method to listen for words that I know or to listen for words that I'm pretty confident that I can isolate through implicit knowledge of Arabic's phonotactics and morphology. Right now I'm at the point where I'm starting to get better at hearing the possessive endings on certain nouns, even on nouns I know nothing about. Unfortunately, I have not gained this ability to analyze verbs.
Another difficulty I'm having is that some of the actors (especially the older ones) have a tendency to mumble (from my perspective) instead of actually talking. I assume that the reason I have a hard time parsing their speech is because I have not familiarized myself with how Arabic speakers elide their words when talking. Thankfully, yesterday I found a book on Egyptian Arabic that has a section on this very topic.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Hello, Breeda1, and welcome to the forum. Good luck with your studies of this difficult language.

[breeda1]

This week at work was quite busy, so I wasn't able to study as much as I wanted to. Despite that, I still made some good progress.

My listening skills have improved since my last post. I was able to isolate and learn 13 more words, a new record! One barrier I noticed is that spoken Arabic has a lot of assimilation (I think that's the word) in it. This can make it harder to segment words when I'm doing my listening practice. To rectify this, I'm going to study how assimilation works more in-depth than I did previously.

Another milestone is that I understood the longest sentence ever so far. It was "Yes, I'm tired of being his daughter." So far I can only pick out a few words every so often, but I'm starting to get the gist of more and more sentences.

I think I'm gonna start reading some of Daniel Everett's work, as he may have some good tips on how to understand a language through listening.

[breeda1]

Work has settled down for me and the next two weeks should be easy enough for me to practice whenever I want. The tiredness I felt last week has also seemed to disappear.

Anyways, my listening practice has been going well. I'm noticing that my segmentation skills are getting slightly better, but I'm having trouble finding the words when I hear them. Unfortunately, one of the downsides of learning Arabic dialects is that there is no standardized spelling, so dictionaries tend to be wildly inconsistent when it comes to words. It makes searching up words a pain. It's especially bad when certain words sound soo similar to English words. The remedy to this, I think, is just to increase my vocabulary. I've been noticing that I hear words I've learned previously out in the wild at unexpected times. I'm also going to invest in an Arabic frequency book as well to supercharge my listening.

I've never been a fan of repetitious listening, but some research I've read has convinced me to try it again. About a week ago I finished a book called Listening Myths, and it made me realize that my problem was that I was trying to understand each and every word when I should have been doing Iversen's Bloodhound. The research also suggested that you probably shouldn't listen to something more than three times, lest fatigue set in. The book also introduced the concept of "narrow listening" to me, which I definitely think will be a massive boon to me.

I've reached the stage where I can analyze some phrases more effortlessly than previously. I also find that meditating on how phrases work on a grammatical and semantic level helps me to better understand and memorize the language as a whole. Like even when using mnemonics, memorizing the phrase "qabl-i-shwayya" (a little while ago) is a lot harder than understanding that qabl-before, that "i" is just a phonotactic rule, and that shwayya-a little bit.

I found some papers on Egyptian Arabic's phonology, but they're too high level for me. Instead, I'm going to build my phonetics skill from the ground up so that I can understand the papers in the future.

I started reading some of Daniel Everett's work. I haven't reached the part where he talks about how to go about doing research, but I'm enjoying the parts about the brief history of linguistic fieldwork in the Americas.

[breeda1]

Much has happened since my last update, and many things have changed.

For one, I'm transitioning more towards learning Levantine Arabic instead of Egyptian Arabic. For two, I found a language exchange group for Arabic in my local area (hence the dialect change).

Thankfully, the Levantine and Egyptian dialects are pretty similar, so most of the grammatical structures that I used in Egyptian Arabic are still viable in Levantine Arabic.

I've also upgraded my grammar as well. I understand the verbal system much better, though there are still many missing gaps. It's true when people say that learning that verbal system is the key to learning Arabic. So many new grammatical doors are opened when you understand the verbal system and I find that it's soo much easier to express myself.

My first language exchange went better than I thought and I really surprised myself. My listening is still poor, but I understand enough to get what they're getting at most of the time. I'm also surprised how slowly people in real life talk as compared to TV or video recordings. I'm the weakest one there in terms of Arabic skills, but that'll change with practice I'm sure. What took me for a loop really is how calm I was and how easy it is to express yourself with very little grammar.

I'm going to continue going to the meetups, but first I want to increase my grammar a bit more. I'm also taking the Glossika lessons for Egyptian Arabic to train my listening comprehension (Levantine and Egyptian Arabic are pretty similar). So far I'm an hour into Glossika and I can say that my listening skills have slightly improved.

[breeda1]

It's been a while. Despite this, much has been learned.

I learned about Olle Kjellin's chorusing method and decided to test it out. Even after doing about 100 reps with a 2-second piece of dialogue, I feel like my listening skills have once again evolved. I can now distinguish a "long a" from a "short a" and that has been very useful for looking up words in a dictionary and later spelling them.

For the time being, I'm going to focus mainly on trying to chorus and see how that affects my overall skill in the language.