Arabic through semi-extensive reading

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thomas_dc
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Re: Arabic through extensive reading (lower intermediate and forward)

Postby thomas_dc » Tue Feb 23, 2016 4:20 pm

Just a quick update!

I've read some 100 pages in Angels and Demons so far, and it's going pretty well. I've been reading intensively for a paragraph here and there, but since yesterday I've been doing my "intensive" reading differently. I used http://lingq.com now and again while learning French. It's basically a site through which you read texts. It then tracks your wordcount as well as the "hours" of listening and so on, if you're using the user-generated lessons that have recordings.
There isn't a lot available for Arabic, so I'm mostly importing my own stuff. With the built in software I mark which words i "know" and which ones I'm learning, and thereby I'm keeping track with my "known words" (Each time something is spelled differently, it's considered a "word") then it has its built-in dictionary and I think that's pretty much it.
I like to be able to "track" my progress. Be it pagecount, percentages of known words, or total known words. I know that this isn't what language learning should be about, but it just seems to work for me.
Since yesterday I've read 9500 words of Arabic (Let's call that 40 pages) in which I looked all words up. During this time, I've changed 104 words from "learning" to "known" which might be more than a little unprecise. But still - it looks good. Whenever I pick up the book I'm reading extensively, I seem to recognize new words here and there, so the "multi track approach" seems to be working smoothly for me.

Edit: I forgot to say that I'm reading mostly short news articles from euronews, global voices, "orient-news" or blogs on travel, the war in Syria. Most of it is really difficult, but I think it helps a lot in gaining vocabulary. The easiest (and most enjoyable) source is probably this travel blog that I found: http://www.sea7htravel.com/
Back when learning French I spent a great deal of time looking at French travel documentaries which was really enjoyable.. I wish I could find a good cache of something similar in Arabic!
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ancient forest
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Re: Arabic through extensive reading (lower intermediate and forward)

Postby ancient forest » Thu Feb 25, 2016 7:26 pm

Reading this log is an inspiration for me to begin extensive reading. Up to this point, I have been avoiding extensive reading in Arabic almost completely because most texts do not have diacritical marks to indicate the vowels, and it is important for me to read the words correctly. That is less of an issue for words with common morphological patterns since those patterns give away the vowels even if they are not written in. I guess that issue could be avoided by using vowelled texts or listening to spoken programs. For now, I will give extensive reading a chance, and hopefully the pronunciation won't be an issue.
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cathrynm
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Re: Arabic through extensive reading (lower intermediate and forward)

Postby cathrynm » Fri Feb 26, 2016 6:17 am

Yeah, thomas_dc is showing us all how to do it. Very encouraging.
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thomas_dc
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Re: Arabic through extensive reading (lower intermediate and forward)

Postby thomas_dc » Fri Feb 26, 2016 6:55 am

cathrynm wrote:Yeah, thomas_dc is showing us all how to do it. Very encouraging.
ancient forest wrote:Reading this log is an inspiration for me to begin extensive reading. Up to this point, I have been avoiding extensive reading in Arabic almost completely because most texts do not have diacritical marks to indicate the vowels, and it is important for me to read the words correctly. That is less of an issue for words with common morphological patterns since those patterns give away the vowels even if they are not written in. I guess that issue could be avoided by using vowelled texts or listening to spoken programs. For now, I will give extensive reading a chance, and hopefully the pronunciation won't be an issue.


Thanks you two!
The vowels and the pronunciation has been a hindrance for me for a long time because like ancient forest, I wanted to get a learn with audio from the start.. What I've found out was that it was frustratingly hard to find useful audio material with its corresponding audio, so now I've decided to try and focus on texts and build a vocabulary that way and then branch over to more audio later on (documentaries, news and a few historic Syrian tv-series)
My greatest worry in all this is that I will have to "unlearn" the way I pronounce the words in my head, or that I pick up the language slower when it's only in its written form, but we'll see.
The last few days, I've been reading intensely on Lingq.com. So far I've read 20.000 words or about 80 book pages, and I think that I'm learning a lot. Combining intensive and extensive reading is definitely en effective method. Intensive reading helps me "notice" the vocabulary or grammar concepts that I seem to skip over in extensive reading, and it helps consolidating new words to see them in different contexts.
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cathrynm
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Re: Arabic through extensive reading (lower intermediate and forward)

Postby cathrynm » Sat Feb 27, 2016 4:13 pm

thomas_dc wrote:My greatest worry in all this is that I will have to "unlearn" the way I pronounce the words in my head, or that I pick up the language slower when it's only in its written form, but we'll see.


And this is why I'm interested. I think this method would be perfect for Finnish. The writing system is completely transparent. It is possible to read this language, and hear in your head how it is supposed to be.
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thomas_dc
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Re: Arabic through extensive reading (lower intermediate and forward)

Postby thomas_dc » Tue Mar 08, 2016 1:06 pm

It's been a while since I've posted anything in here, so I thought I'd give you a quick update:

I've been reading intensively on Lingq very heavily these last two weeks - it has amounted to about 60.000 words read, or about 240 pages.
Reading intensively on Lingq is obviously quite a bit slower than reading extensively between a book and its translation, so my "pagecount" has risen less in the last couple of weeks than it could have, but I think that I've progressed a lot.
I would have thought that intensive reading would be much too boring to stick with, but it actually works out fine, as long as the text is not too difficult. News articles and books are mostly a bit too complicated - I forget the meaning of new words before getting the gist of a sentence, which means that I end up studying individual words "as they come up" rather than work with them in their context. What really works well for me right now, is to read the subtitles of films that i know well. (I download a .srt file and import it in lingq) - These are pretty long and fairly easy to read since they consist only of dialogue. I've discovered that it gets really confusing if they're not from a movie that you've already seen, because a lot of things can't be guessed from only the dialogue.
According to lingq, i "know" 6750 words - where every spelling and grammatical form is counted. I've come across some 11.000 other words that I'm "learning", and about 800 words have changed from "learning" to "known".. Taken into consideration that these numbers count each spelling and grammatical form as a new word, I've probably "learnt" some 300-400 words in two weeks, which is pretty good in my mind. I have to mention that I'm looking for a job and I hardly do anything else than study, though :mrgreen: !

Something that I've learned from studying French, and that I am now witnessing again, is that part of my learning style is to switch method every now and then. I don't know why, but it doesn't suit me very well to do two things at the same time, so these last two weeks, I've ONLY been reading intensively, and nothing else. I know that every sensible person would advise against only doing one thing, but I think that some of the reason for my motivation and progress is that I tend to obsess slightly about my language learning tasks.. When I studied French, I learned that it's a bad idea for me to plan too far ahead. If I'm studying one kind of book right now, it would be a bad idea to "suppose" that I'd still be doing the same thing in three months, and buy a lot of books in advance. I have a lot of French language learning materials that I've never even looked at, because I got on with something else.

All that being said, I'll surely get back to extensive reading again. Right now it's just the intensive kind that seems to get me the best results!

My total page count is around 1575 now.
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A Callidryas
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Re: Arabic through extensive reading (lower intermediate and forward)

Postby A Callidryas » Tue Mar 08, 2016 5:29 pm

Hi Thomas

Since you are mixing up your routine a bit more now, you might be interested in these MSA sites:

http://readarabic.nflc.org/?lang_id=1&lev_id=2&page=0
There are about 50 short dialogues and passages with translation.

https://gloss.dliflc.edu/
Hundreds of dialogues and passages with translation. Several dialects also available, including Egyptian, Levantine and Iraqi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZwh8ig9vdk
Some short biographies on youtube from Iraqi TV. If you search a bit, there are also some short videos on historical sites.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... aAPYasZjMb
This probably isn't what you are looking for, but if you want a change of pace, here are some kids' read-along stories on youtube from the Arabic version of Sesame Street.
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thomas_dc
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Re: Arabic through extensive reading (lower intermediate and forward)

Postby thomas_dc » Tue Mar 08, 2016 6:04 pm

A Callidryas wrote:Hi Thomas

Since you are mixing up your routine a bit more now, you might be interested in these MSA sites:

http://readarabic.nflc.org/?lang_id=1&lev_id=2&page=0
There are about 50 short dialogues and passages with translation.

https://gloss.dliflc.edu/
Hundreds of dialogues and passages with translation. Several dialects also available, including Egyptian, Levantine and Iraqi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZwh8ig9vdk
Some short biographies on youtube from Iraqi TV. If you search a bit, there are also some short videos on historical sites.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... aAPYasZjMb
This probably isn't what you are looking for, but if you want a change of pace, here are some kids' read-along stories on youtube from the Arabic version of Sesame Street.


Thanks, this looks great! I can't open the second link, though - it says something about a security certificate not being in order, but maybe I can add an exception to get it working - has anyone hijacked your computer so far? ;)
Especially the first link seems helpful. I'm especially interested in dialogues with transcripts, since I find it difficult to study the sound without text.
The pink horses with selfie-sticks are sweet but... I just can't ;) Thanks again - I might try and study a few lessons from the first link this evening.
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A Callidryas
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Re: Arabic through extensive reading (lower intermediate and forward)

Postby A Callidryas » Tue Mar 08, 2016 8:18 pm

As far as I know, the second link is safe. I got the same warning once about a year ago, but ignored it. I have virus protection on my computer, and as far as I know nothing has happened. It is a US government site and people from HTLAL seem to use it. It is worth using, as it is the most extensive site for Arabic on the internet.

You might like these stories a bit better than the ones on the Sesame Street site: four traditional fairy tales on youtube with script and very good audio
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWBXetr ... O1&index=1

And here is a pay site that I haven't used, but that looks good:
http://foreigncy.us/
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thomas_dc
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Re: Arabic through extensive reading (lower intermediate and forward)

Postby thomas_dc » Sat Apr 02, 2016 1:50 pm

It's been a while since my last update. Mainly because I'm doing the same thing and maybe because it's going a little bit slow these days. I've read 60.000 more words with lingq which translated to roughly 250 book pages, but they're read intensively. I've read arabic subtitles of the 7 first Harry Potter films, a few other films I've seen before and I've most recently started reading the subtitles for the first og the "lord of the rings" movies. I find subtitles relatively abordable, especially if they're for films that you know well. It's only dialogue which I find is much easier than descriptions and other things you might find in a conventional novel, but on the downside, it can be confusing if you don't remember all the scenes of the film.
According to Lingq's software, I now know some 11000 words in Arabic, and according to their system I should be close to being "advanced 1" or lower advanced. I find this to be very far from the truth. Lingq obviously counts all inflections, gramaticlal mode and time as a different word, which might well bring my known word count very much down. I'd say that I'm closer to 3-4000 word families or what would normally suffice for getting the gist of every day conversation.. There's a long way to go!

As I enjoy studying through lingq these days, I'm at the lookout for good digital text (eg not scanned pdf's, but somethign you can copy and paste).. I'd be especially happy if someone knew where to find longer computerized texts with audio... This is really really hard to find in arabic.

What I'd like to do os be able to thourougly studying a text and its vocabulary in Lingq before getting into the text.. I've never been that comfortable with audio only input, because I have such a low level of understanding that my mind very quickly drifts.. Studying the text beforehand could maybe help remedy that.. I hope...

For the sake of statistics.. My pagecount for reading in Arabic is now 1815, which includes around 120000 words read intensively in lingq (or some 480 pages of 250 words)
My goal is to be reading almost fluently at 10.000 pages - l'm more than positive that this will be doable with intensive reading, but I think I'll be getting back to reading more extensively before that!
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