Amandine wrote:Good luck with your journey! You may have already explored this but as I didn't see you mention it I just thought I would add, don't ignore YouTube as a tool. For a 'big' language like Arabic I'm sure there are a lot of accounts there putting out quality material. Of course its a procrastination trap too but if you can avoid that, there's a lot of valuable stuff there
There are a couple of Palestinian YouTubers with a large body of videos for teaching the dialect, so it’s definitely something I’ll use in time.
For now, I think I need more of the basics down (at least another 5 or so lessons) with Conversational Eastern Arabic and the corresponding time with Anki reviews before I tackle native content, so I’ve spent less time thinking about YouTube.
Partly, I went with TalkInArabic to start bridging the gap towards native content as it’s designed to be comprehensible to beginners, and avoids quite as much of the talking around a subject as YouTube. I’ve sometimes found a video can take 10 minutes for about 2/3 minutes worth of teaching!
willcouchman wrote:Best of luck on your journey!
I have learned Arabic (with some dawdling and distractions lol) almost exclusively through Elihay's course and I can speak a decent conversational Arabic - I was in Morocco last week and had to use Arabic a couple of times and was very pleased with how smoothly it flowed, despite the inevitable stumbles.
I would say that the transliteration is actually one of the strengths of the course - once I'd taken my time to get to grips with it. Written Arabic script cannot convey the nuances of pronunciation that the latin script can. I can't type it on this keyboard, but the books use two different fonts to transcribe the letter 'a' to show when to use a more "forward" 'a' as in 'bank', and a more "backward" 'a' as in 'father'. It's very hard to do that with Arabic script. So keep going - the course is hard work but it has opened up an entire language to me simply through listening and shadowing
Yeah, since I wrote those initial views, I have been enjoying using it more and more. I’m finding that using the excellent Arabic script Anki deck someone created helps me continue to visualise the words in Arabic, and as you note the transliteration is excellent.
Did you generally work lessons to get as much as you could out - listening / re-listening / reading along with the Arabic / shadowing / translating etc? Or did you go through and then revisit each lesson for review on multiple days in a week before moving on?
I’ve been starting a new lesson while continuing to review previous lessons; less if when going through I can understand everything being said. I haven’t applied a “I can pronounce everything to a standard or correctness I’m happy with”, mostly as I think my overall listening exposure to the language is something I’m keen to get more hours with as the priority. I want to be able to speak the language and so absolutely want to pronounce it as accurately as possible, and shadowing / a bit of practice definitely helps, I just think ultimately the more I hear the language used in natural context by natives, the easier it’ll be to create a mental picture of it in my head… has that been your experience?
Otherwise, I find I can drill certain phrases to death (and still need to on particularly quick / heavily elided / sentences with lots of difficult sounds together), and be relatively happy with my shadowing and pronunciation, to then forget that when I’m trying to recall a particular phrase, or as part of another dialogue.
*
I am quite pleased with my retention of vocabulary and pronunciation overall. Just getting into verb conjugations, which I have a handle on, but will probably drill more extensively initially to get more comfortable with this, given how key it is.