Today, I want to talk about Arabic and I want to talk about why it is important
that if you want to stay the course, you have to change what you're doing.
You can't keep doing the same thing over and over again, if it's not working.
Now, I'm going to talk about my experience.
There may be other people who have learned Arabic very quickly.
I haven't, and I'm going to go through sort of the stages of my approach
to Arabic, the things that I have changed in order to stay the course.
And I'll show you sort of where I'm at right now.
My initial motivation was a visit to Jordan, to Petra, the sudden
realization that there are 400 million people in the world who speak Arabic.
So I got very interested in the Middle East.
Uh, I bought books on the history of the Arabs, two books in
particular, one by Albert Hourani.
And another one by somebody McIntosh, something around the Arabs, but it gives
you a perspective on the Arabs that starts before Islam that deals with Yemen and
the Fertile Crescent and Egypt and North Africa and all these different Iraq and
the relationship with Persia, with the, uh, you know, Byzantine empire, with the
Greeks, with there's a whole bunch of stuff there that's very, very interesting.
I was motivated and so I said, you know what, I'm going to learn Arabic
and I'm going to learn Persian and I'm going to learn Turkish so that I
can really get into the Middle East.
Well, what I discovered, of course, language learning is all about
motivation minus the obstacles.
Like there are obstacles, so you need a lot of motivation to overcome
the obstacles and you need time.
Back in November of 2017, I was very motivated.
Then I started hitting the obstacles.
So the biggest obstacle initially.
is the writing system.
They don't use the Latin alphabet.
What do you know?
They use the Arabic alphabet.
Now the Arabic alphabet has the same origin as the Latin alphabet.
You know, that's the Phoenician alphabet, but the Latin alphabet evolved via
the, from the Phoenician, Phoenician alphabet to the Greek alphabet, to the
Roman or Latin alphabet, the Arabic writing system, which is the same as
the Persian writing system, essentially, you know, evolved differently.
I did all kinds of things.
You know, I bought this little disc.
I think I was at the.
American, whatever it's called, Conference of Language Teachers in San Diego.
They were handing out this disc.
So I bought it.
I never used it.
Useless for me, not that it isn't good for other people, but it
shows you the equivalence between Latin letters and Arabic letters.
I got apps for my, for my iPhone.
Which I hardly used and I just struggled.
Most of all, I just had to continue reading, reading.
I started to get a sense of, of what the words meant.
The problem in Arabic is that the form of the word is different depending
on whether it's at the beginning, the middle, or at the end of a word.
Some of the words still look very similar to each other in, to me,
because I'm not used to them.
So it has remained a major obstacle.
Another obstacle is that it seemed to me, and I'm, I still think it's the
case that a lot of the beginner books that I bought, this one happens to be
in French, but the font is so small.
Like I can't even make out these characters when they're larger, but so
small and a lot of the books were like that and they cluttered up in Arabic.
They had this thing called the Harakat, which is sort of their way
of showing vowels because there are no vowels in the writing system and
this makes the whole page messy.
And then when you go on the internet and look up, you know, content on
Al Jazeera or wherever it might be, they don't have the harakat there.
So given that most of my reading is online where I can click and hear text to
speech, I decided to ignore the harakat.
Although over time I get used to what those little signs mean,
those little slashes, but in fact, they just mess up the page.
I have enough trouble trying to figure out what letters those are.
So that was kind of sort of my evolution.
Oh, and I decided that I have so much trouble with the Arabic
script that I dropped Turkish.
If you see my timeline of when I started these languages, you'll see
that there's a great amount of activity here on LingQ around 2018, 2019.
In Persian, Arabic, and Turkish, and then I dropped Turkish and I
continue with Persian and Arabic.
Now, another thing is Persian is easier.
So I ended up doing more in Persian.
Plus we had a, uh, uh, uh, collaborator in Iran, Sahra, who was creating
phenomenal content for me in Persian.
And she was my tutor.
And so I ended up spending more time where I had good content available.
And I had help from her and the Arab, Arabic kept on sort of bumping along.
But obviously the writing system is a major obstacle and one that really it
is only with time that you get better at reading in a different script.
Also, because it was so difficult for me, I found that I couldn't.
I found it very difficult to read away from the computer.
I became quite dependent on reading online where I could hear it.
I could either hear the audio from LingQ or I could be clicking on the
word to hear the text to speech.
I found it very difficult to read on paper.
So that was the first obstacle was the writing system.
The second obstacle is grammar.
Arabic grammar is actually quite complicated.
Unlike Persian grammar, which is similar to Arabic grammar.
Other sort of Indo European languages, Arabic has a
completely different structure.
So modern standard Arabic verbs.
It's one of the many books that I bought.
Like I've got books down here in Palm Springs.
I've got other books up in Vancouver.
Does your turn off a 4A1, assimilated measure four, Hamza
assimilated measure four, uh, Hamza did defective measure three.
Defective measure one, like all these different descriptions of the verbs.
And they're all with this very unsatisfactory Arabic, uh, transliteration
where they use the letter or the, the numeral three and seven or question
mark to represent different sounds, which don't really click because you're
not used to seeing those symbols being used to represent sort of meaning.
Things that you have to pronounce.
So my approach to the grammar was to largely ignore it and just to get used to
the patterns of how people say things in Arabic, but here again, I have changed.
A little bit, and I will get to that later on.
Another obstacle in Arabic is content.
Initially, when I started back in 2018, 2019, so I did our many stories.
So I totally focused on the many stories and that's okay because
it's high frequency verbs.
I listened to it many, many times.
And again, if you look at my statistics, you'll see that there's a tremendous
amount of listening taking place there.
And then, okay, I've done the many stories.
Now I'm going to venture out.
So I go and find what's available online, Al Jazeera.
Okay. I'm interested in the news.
I'm interested in history.
And, uh, I find Happy Scribe where I can automatically create a transcript,
which is more or less accurate.
It actually has improved over the years.
I'm paying for this, of course, but still it's giving me content that I can consume.
But after a while, it's all the same.
It's all the same news stories.
So I'm using this stuff and I'm kind of starting to kind of get a, uh, toehold
on the language, but still this lack of content and, and the content that I get
from Al Jazeera is all in standard Arabic.
So I'm focused on standard Arabic and that's what's available.
That's what books are written in.
That's what, you know, political discussions online are
predominantly, uh, but it's not when people speak to each other.
And particularly if I go to movies, Egyptian movies, or Levantine movies.
However much I understood of my Al Jazeera political podcast or news item, I
couldn't understand the movies, neither in Egyptian, nor in Levantine, like Lebanese.
So, whereas in other languages, you can just go find stuff and start learning
from it, bring it into LingQ or whatever you do, in Arabic, it was more difficult.
Even when you get to sort of content in say Levantine Arabic, the transcript
is in Fussai, in standard Arabic.
You know, it's as if the, what you're listening to is in Spanish,
but the transcript is in Latin.
So it's not very helpful.
So that was another problem with, with, uh, content.
But again, you, you can't just keep doing the same thing.
So I used many stories.
Then I did Assimil.
I did a number of these books, whatever I was able to find.
The content in these learner books like Assimil is not very interesting.
Again, the script is full of these harakat that makes it
more difficult for me to read.
I ended up actually importing the Assimil into LingQ so that I could look up
words because the word list they provide is not necessary, doesn't necessarily
cover all the words you don't know.
Uh, but I was doing all these things and I just found it a real uphill
battle all the way in my Arabic.
Now, I've touched on this, but, uh, another obstacle in learning Arabic,
of course, is the regional variations of Arabic, you know, a hundred million
people speak Egyptian Arabic, maybe 40 million people speak Levantine Arabic.
Nobody naturally speaks standard Arabic.
But then if you go to sources of these regional variations, uh,
which I started to do after a while.
Then if they have a transcript, it'll be Tafusfa.
If you use, uh, you know, a whisper AI to transcribe it, as I do when I
bring them into LingQ to learn from them, either they don't understand
the word that was used, so you give you something totally unrelated.
That is the, the AI doesn't quite know that word.
Uh, if you're listening to, uh, something from Lebanon, they use
so much French and English, which totally confuses, you So you end up
with transcripts of sort of Lebanese content, which are not that satisfying.
Now, I should point out that I decided after a while to move to Levantine Arabic.
So I don't know just how, what the experience is with Egyptian Arabic,
but for Levantine Arabic, it's not ideal, but it's still workable.
It's still workable.
So, but the range of sort of the variety of regional forms
of Arabic is an obstacle, right?
To learning Arabic, but I decided to stop focusing just on Al Jazeera and
the sort of Fusab because I realized that I would be forever trying to learn
all the vocabulary that's there because The vocabulary, and this is another
point I'll get to in Arabic is massive.
So I said, no, no, we're going to focus in on Levantine.
It's going to be real people talking about real things.
So there, again, I changed what I was doing.
And that brings me to the sort of other big problem that I had in Arabic
is that the vocabulary is so massive.
With half the vocabulary in Persian that I have in Arabic.
I'm, I understand far more in Persian and I can express myself
better in Persian than in Arabic.
Although now I've spent the last two months on Levantine Arabic, I've
maybe dropped a bit in my Persian.
But in fact, I'm better at Persian than Arabic because of the
massive size of the vocabulary.
But nevertheless, I stayed with it.
And, uh, I will tell you sort of at the end here, how I have changed
my strategy because you can't keep running, you know, pushing on a rope.
But first I'll go through my sort of, um, milestones in my Arabic learning.
So more or less a year after I decided to learn Arabic and I'd been working
on it together with, uh, with Persian, I went to Morocco, the Moroccans
were quite happy to humor me and, uh, standard Arabic, although they all
spoke French better than I spoke Arabic.
so that's sort of the start of my sort of Arabic adventure,
immersing myself in the language.
Then you'll see a snippet here of me speaking with my
tutor Mohammed from Cairo.
And he was a great guy and he was very motivating and he also got me going
or interested in Egyptian Arabic.
He gave me the names of some Egyptian movies and of course I couldn't understand
them, uh, but that's kind of a next stage.
And that's three years ago.
And I have the feeling, or I had the feeling until recently that I hadn't
really progressed much since then.
Where am I now?
I have decided to reassess some of my strategies.
So I discovered a website called Yalla Arabi through some of the
content that they put out on YouTube.
And I got in touch with them initially to ask them if we could
use their material at LingQ.
It turns out they all have, all of their material has a lengthy
English introduction, which makes it less useful for LingQ, but
it's still very good content.
Yalla Arabi.
I definitely recommend it.
And then they proposed that, uh, I work with one of their tutors.
So I said, you know, I have had success working with tutors when
the tutor is sort of motivating and, and, uh, flexible and so forth.
And that can be a source of inspiration, a source of motivation.
And so I've started working with Samer at Yala Arabi.
Yala Arabi has a grammar book, but it's a very good grammar book.
It's somehow hits on all the things that I have come across and working with Samer
in our sessions, he explains things and he gets me to say things in a way that's
So, I'm just reinforcing and also, you know, clarify some issues that were not
clear to me about the grammar, but he does it in a way that's not complicated.
That's very straightforward and very effective.
So I've been working with him and also, uh, I've been reading with
him, just, just started to do this because I'm so bad at reading.
And that, then I read some stuff and then he asked me questions and I answer.
So that gets me speaking.
And all of that has been very enjoyable and very effective.
And partly as a result of that, I have taken the position.
I have to be able to read on paper.
I can't be totally dependent.
On reading in digital format, where I can listen to things and I can look things up.
And so I went back to a source that I had used before, which is Lingualism,
who has it, and you can find him online.
And he's got an enormous treasure trove of material for learning Arabic, but
I found that reading some of these materials, see, I don't like to be on my
trusty iPad, which is where I do all my.
Work on LingQ and so forth just before going to bed, because apparently it's
not good for you, it keeps you awake.
So by my bedside, I have things that I can read on paper.
It's relaxing and it forces me to read, you know, the word.
No training wheels.
I can't look it up.
I can't hear it.
And so that's kind of where I am right now.
So what I wanted to say in this lengthy diatribe is, um, You know,
I wanted to stay with Arabic.
I hit a plateau, there were all these obstacles, but I wanted to continue.
I felt that if I were to continue just trying to stay with Fusha and
be able to learn every possible word in this humongous library, or
excuse me, vocabulary, I would not be able to communicate with people.
And so I said, okay, I'm going to focus on Levantine and that's where I am.
I'm enjoying it.
Uh, I'm listening to podcasts from Lebanon.
There was one very nice podcast with, uh, uh, this woman who is a former
runner up, Miss Lebanon, attractive lady.
And she is a content creator, uh, and so forth.
I mentioned earlier, there was one with an entrepreneur again from Lebanon
who lives in the United Arab Emirates.
So I'm sort of discovering Lebanon, which is this fascinating country.
It's so fascinating.
So many different, you know, cultures.
Uh, cultures and history and different, uh, you know, religions or sects.
And, and they're also fluent in different languages.
And so it's been a wonderful, uh, experience for me.
And it comes alive in a way that the Fusha, uh, wasn't alive.
So I would say if you want to stay the course, change what you're doing, try
different things in order to keep going.
I think your brain and your language learning will thank you for it.
Thank you.
Bye.