Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here.
And to talk about language learning, to talk about language learning books. P
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Before I jump into the subject of books,
I just want to quickly review my statistics.
You'll see that
my sort of new words or Known words added is a little below my average.
Inevitably, we're going to have periods where we're a little bit less motivated.
That's why I did the video about Variety.
It's important to vary your activities because after a while,
doing the same thing over and over again is sort of your motivation starts to flag.
So if you look at my statistics,
you'll see this is probably has been my slowest week.
The other thing is that the weather has been good.
The weather is good again today.
So I'm going golfing with my wife.
And I mean, the activity of language learning has to be enjoyable.
So you don't want to push when you're really not that motivated
or sometimes you do push to try to get into it.
And once you get into it,
you're happy that you're there, like getting into a very, very hot bathtub
or a very cold swim, for example, at any rate, books.
OK, so one of the things that happens when I learn a language is I get interested
in the history and the culture that surrounds that language.
And so I like, you know, exploring different aspects of the history.
So I found this book and it's a history of Cairo.
It's very interesting.
It sort of tells the story of this city,
tracing it back to the ancient Egyptians,
to the period when the Greeks were there and the Romans were there and then
various, you know, califate out of Damascus and then.
The Fatimids who came in from Tunis, Tunisia, and who are Shia and there was
a great flowering of culture and science and tolerance of Christians and Jews,
Christians were dominant, I think, up until
at least up until the period
of the Fatimids, the Coptic, the original Christians of Egypt.
And then, of course,
the Mamluks came in and they reestablished Sunni as the dominant religion.
They were less tolerant.
And then you had this period
of the Ottoman Empire and then you had this Albanian interlude with,
I can't remember, Muhammad Ali, Mustafa Ali.
I can't remember anyway.
And then then you have the, you know, Napoleon and increasing sort
of colonialist type pressures from European countries.
And I sort of
call it a flowering at a very top level for,
you know, Italians and French and Brits and people within Cairo society to kind of
interact with them.
And that's about as far as I've come.
But it's an interesting story.
It's a collection of stories.
Now, imagine that this were available in Arabic, a series of 20 minute stories,
different sort of vignettes of people in Cairo over the centuries with audio.
I mean,
if it's just a book, then with the glossary,
but with an extensive glossary or ideally we bring it into LingQ.
We have the audio. We can look words up.
That would be I mean, if this whole book were converted
into Arabic stories, that would keep me busy for months.
And it would be fascinating for me.
Now
I'm a sucker for books.
So when I look for books around Arabic
on the Internet, that was on a number of things obviously
get suggested to me and I end up buying them.
So I bought a thing called, you know, Modern Arabic Short Stories.
The problem is that they don't have really any kind of glossary.
They just have a translation which is very inconvenient to work with.
So I haven't gotten into it yet.
I am hoping that when my Arabic gets good enough that I can read without being
assisted by my my iPad, by being able to look words up or hear
the text to speech or do all the other things that we do at length to be able
to look at each sentence with the natural voice.
And when I really can hit a book, then I'll be reading this.
But for the time being, no, one of my earlier investments was in...
Of course, Assimil,
which is somewhere here, but uh, here we are
yeah. I got so many of these.
So Assimil, it's OK, but it's the same few
voices every every lesson and the lessons, the content is a little silly.
After a while I didn't really find this all that great.
And it's quite expensive for what you get.
On the subject of stories.
I've also bought this The Travels of Ibn Battuta, very famous, I believe,
Moroccan who traveled the known world at that time.
Again, unfortunately, as in many of these books that they do at universities,
they want to fill it with a lot of comprehension questions and other
exercises to turn it into more of a project for them.
All I would really want is the text with audio.
So that's again, something I'll be looking
forward to when I'm better. Here again, I've got Modern Arabic Short Stories
always in the hope that I'll get audio and there is no audio.
But this is at least bilingual.
But bilingual is also awkward because
you're having to switch back and forth from one language to another.
And I prefer glossaries or the way we do it, of course, at length.
Then here's the thing.
I'll focus on contemporary Arabic with online media.
OK, now the problem with this
and the sort of companion piece
this is also I'm a Shukri Abed Spoken
Standard Arabic.
So there we do have glossaries, but again, lots of e
xercises, but the problem is the accompanying media is DVD.
DVD means I got to sit there and watch it.
I don't want to sit there and watch it.
I want to take away take it away and listen to it more of the same.
However, again, these are things that when
I'm more comfortable reading away from the computer, I will get at those.
So then what else did I get myself?
Media Arabic, Media Arabic.
Again, you get into it.
And it's full of all kinds of advice on how to read critically,
make sure you evaluate the sources and what they're saying and all of these,
you know, teaching of critical thinking, which I consider to be a fad.
Basically, when you read,
you should be able to evaluate the text as well as their sources.
What are facts and what are opinions in the news you are reading?
This is supposed to be teaching language.
First of all, I don't believe you can teach critical thinking.
I think the ability to think critically is based on your knowledge.
If you know a lot about a subject, you are able to evaluate it and you can
think critically if you don't know very much th...
There is no sort of theory of teaching critically, theory of making sure you
evaluate the sources knowledge leads to critical evaluation.
So nevertheless, I will have another look at this.
But again, the font is so small, you know,
Arabic is difficult for the beginner like me to read.
So.
Yeah, and of course, the other problem, but I'm a sucker, so I buy these things.
Advanced Media Arabic.
Again, the problem is this one has nice font, by the way.
This one has really nice font,
but has lots of drills and exercises and translations and stuff.
And the other problem is media.
Arabic means that they are taking articles
from the BBC, from France Vingt-Quatre, from Al-Jazeera that are five years old.
Well, I can get up to date articles from those news sources
and I can study them looking up words because it's online.
So really, what do they provide here? Not very much.
A very small glossary for each
for each of these, but it does have the advantage that I have them written out.
And for me to read them in text in a book
as opposed to reading them online introduces an element of variety.
So I don't think it's a great investment, but it's part of my investment
in introducing some variety in what I'm doing.
You know, I did buy this year
Mastering Arabic again from Hippocrene, not very good, lots of drills,
very difficult to read font,
but it's something there that when I get
tired of what I'm doing, I can go in and have a look.
But again, it doesn't cover much ground.
The other thing, of course, is we need so much content.
We need so much content, because after we get past the sort
of original stage, the word frequency declines very quickly.
So we have to be covering so much content, so much content.
There are books that I won't go through them all.
Sometimes I don't mind looking at sort of lists of vocabulary.
This book is quite good
for different sort of subject areas, again, in the i...
In the sense of of doing things that are
a little different so that you introduce variety into what you are doing.
However, for me, the best would be sort of a history of a history of the Levant.
There's so much history there Iraq, Syria,
Lebanon, Egypt, North Africa, the Barbary Coast, all this kind of stuff.
Give us the history in digestible morsels or simply his story
of people or modern short stories, audio and text.
Twenty five, starting with five minutes long, 50 minutes on audio.
That's what I would like to see with far fewer drills, comprehension questions
and all this other stuff teaching you how to think critically.
And and I should say that on a number of them, Georgetown University
in particular, they promise you audio and you go there and there's no audio.
So you have a sense that these very expensive textbooks produced by
universities add very little are quite disorganised and misleading in terms
of what they offer the people who buy these expensive books.
However, I remain a sucker for books.
I like covering the same ground in different ways.
I try, you know, I get in there, I try to read these,
but it's too early for me because I'm just not good enough at reading Arabic.
However, study of Arabic,
the study of the Arab world, it's going to be with me for a long time.
So I'm in no great hurry.
Actually, I'm just enjoying immersing myself in things Arabic.
And of course, at the end of my 90-Day Challenge, I'll swing back to Persian.
And I've already bought some books on Persian history in English.
Plus I have my history of Iran in Persian
prepared by Sahra in Iran, which is on LingQ.
So I'll just continue to wallow in all this stuff and enjoy myself.
So that's what I wanted to say,
that if I ramble on language learning books, bye for now.