Meandering Arabic journey

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ArabicAmateur
White Belt
Posts: 19
Joined: Fri Nov 11, 2022 3:03 pm
Languages: English (N)
Arabic - MSA (A1), Levantine (A0)
Dabbled in Dari, some schooling in German and Latin
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Re: Meandering Arabic journey

Postby ArabicAmateur » Wed Nov 23, 2022 12:26 am

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.
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ArabicAmateur
White Belt
Posts: 19
Joined: Fri Nov 11, 2022 3:03 pm
Languages: English (N)
Arabic - MSA (A1), Levantine (A0)
Dabbled in Dari, some schooling in German and Latin
x 36

Re: Meandering Arabic journey

Postby ArabicAmateur » Tue Nov 29, 2022 10:49 pm

I’ve been travelling over the weekend, so time spent on Arabic has been more limited, and I’ve not updated this log.

I’m finding the Anki production deck less useful at the minute, but that may be that Anki has been more of my focus than exposure to the language itself. Definitely a few terms I need to internalise more.

As well as needing to spend some proper time going through lessons again meticulously, I may introduce going through common words and vocab in a deck of sentences from Lingualism (Black Friday deal), to see how I do with recall Anki decks.

The production deck definitely helps solidify certain things but can make more complex sentences harder, particularly where Conversational Eastern Arabic presents alternative forms of words but the Anki deck is asking for a particular answer (as it follows the dialogue in question). While I let myself off if the word is correct and just not used in the dialogue, it’s definitely harder to feel as confident - and I’m not trying to rehearse the dialogues to deliver them as they stand!
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ArabicAmateur
White Belt
Posts: 19
Joined: Fri Nov 11, 2022 3:03 pm
Languages: English (N)
Arabic - MSA (A1), Levantine (A0)
Dabbled in Dari, some schooling in German and Latin
x 36

Re: Meandering Arabic journey

Postby ArabicAmateur » Thu Dec 01, 2022 8:32 pm

With full concentration, the production deck for Conversational Eastern Arabic is definitely starting to show I am internalising words and basic structures.

[NB - for context, by “production deck”, I mean an Anki deck where I’m given an English sentence and required to produce the Levantine Arabic]

I do think the Conversational Arabic course is one of very few resources that could probably make good on a claim to take a learner from beginner to intermediate, due to its size and depth.

With this in mind, I’m going to try using the book as written for a week. In other words, focusing on one lesson - in this case 6 - for the next 2-3 days; treating it as a “unit” to be spread out. The instructions in the book don’t give suggested time to put into each chapter during that week and this week is one I should have more time to dedicate, so I may find myself at the point I can start lesson 7 - but I’ll be quite strict on myself in really getting a handle on the vocab, conjugation, and grammar concepts presented in the chapter.
2 x

ArabicAmateur
White Belt
Posts: 19
Joined: Fri Nov 11, 2022 3:03 pm
Languages: English (N)
Arabic - MSA (A1), Levantine (A0)
Dabbled in Dari, some schooling in German and Latin
x 36

Re: Meandering Arabic journey

Postby ArabicAmateur » Sat Dec 03, 2022 5:53 pm

So, having finished the Kaleela app’s Jordanian/Palestinian course…

Positives
- Good UI, like Duolingo
- Clear audio
- Some vocabulary and grammar, and some reading, listening, writing and speaking practice
- Very few dialect alternatives

Cons
- Very short. Took me 4 hours to complete all that’s currently on offer - giving the impression the course is only half-finished
- Expensive, given the length
- Only covers a limited range of words, simple sentences and very little grammar

Overall, a nice introduction if you’ve not done any before and must have an app, but there’s much better options out there in terms of courses. This, I suppose like Duolingo, will take you almost nowhere. Some additional vocab and writing / listening / pronunciation practice, but not worth the money as it stands unless you want a very gentle introduction to the dialect!
1 x

ArabicAmateur
White Belt
Posts: 19
Joined: Fri Nov 11, 2022 3:03 pm
Languages: English (N)
Arabic - MSA (A1), Levantine (A0)
Dabbled in Dari, some schooling in German and Latin
x 36

Re: Meandering Arabic journey

Postby ArabicAmateur » Sat Dec 03, 2022 6:50 pm

As the above post was more of a review of Kaleela, a brief update on the rest of my time with Levantine:

You’ll have noticed (I certainly have!) that my views can see-saw a bit on my progress etc, but having a positive day where I got almost all of my Anki production deck correct, allowing for minor errors. Only a couple of cards where I struggled enough to fail the cards.

Similar with the review exercise at the end of lesson 6 of Conversational Eastern Arabic: while there remain some errors (word order, knowing whether a sentence to translate asking for “for” wants the direct “for”, “necessary that” etc), I am producing the sentences needed with correct conjugations and possessional suffixes! I’ll go over lesson 6 a few more times to focus on listening and nailing down some of the newer words, then will move onto lesson 7.
1 x

ArabicAmateur
White Belt
Posts: 19
Joined: Fri Nov 11, 2022 3:03 pm
Languages: English (N)
Arabic - MSA (A1), Levantine (A0)
Dabbled in Dari, some schooling in German and Latin
x 36

Re: Meandering Arabic journey

Postby ArabicAmateur » Sun Dec 04, 2022 5:45 pm

Had a quick go at listening to / following along with a couple of the beginner videos on TalkInArabic. I was pleased to understand most of a couple of sentences and the broad gist of the video on travel, but didn’t get much on things around the house. I could pick out vocabulary and conjugations I understood, and was correct (for the first video, where I actually checked the translation) on what it meant.

What I expected really - it’s a lot harder to listen without the crutch of the text, and the grammar of the language isn’t cemented yet; I’ll need to really do so to parse what’s being said without pausing content (admittedly a fair way off). My vocabulary is also fairly limited, though there was a couple of words I should have known but didn’t pick out as distinct terms.

I’m onto lesson 7 of Conversational Eastern Arabic and it feels like it’ll take extra time compared to the previous lessons. There are four dialogues in the chapter (compared to the usual two or three), and with a fair bit of new vocabulary and a couple of new bits of grammar introduced (adding the object of the subject), it’ll take more time to properly get my head around it.

It’s promising that I can hear the dialogue for previous sections and read along and know all of what’s being said. I’ll need to also test pure listening more, as there’s certain elisions where words disappear completely that I’ll need to get used to (and which aren’t necessarily explained - the notes and pronunciation guides are thorough, but don’t always track exactly with the dialogue).

I’m still new enough in the language that when I’m being asked to conjugate a verb for who’s doing the action and the subject of the action, alongside selecting the correct words - as per my Anki production deck - I’m doing it slowly. Albeit mostly accurately. This becomes very clear when trying to listen without a transcript, as I’m parsing as much as a sentence behind!
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