Judith's language learning blog

Vowelled vs. non-vowelled Arabic was actually a huge issue for me when I started out. I started on and stopped using a lot of textbooks because they did not indicate vowels in crucial places. Finally I found that “Ultimate Arabic” uses vowelled texts throughout (except in Review sections), but as a textbook it’s much worse than Teach Yourself for example. The solution came in the form of Langenscheidt Praktisches Lehrbuch Arabisch (2007 edition), which gradually makes the shift towards less vowels and I was able to follow along. The system I now use for my cards is also taken from this book:
1. assume that each Arabic consonant is followed by a short A; the only exception is if it’s the last consonant in a word (i. e. words tend to end in consonants)
2. if the vowel sound is something else, which doesn’t happen all that often, then the other vowel will be indicated with a vowel diacritic, yaa or waaw.
3. if there’s no vowel, i. e. if there’s a consonant cluster, sukoon is on the letter, as usual
4. before long vowels, it is superfluous to indicate the same vowel using a diacritic.

Essentially, it treats Arabic like Devanagari, and with very good results. Arabic texts written this way really have a minimum of diacritics, so it’s easier to get used to not having the vowels. Rule 1 in particular helped me a lot in becoming less dependent on vowellisation. It’s strange that nobody else came up with this suggestion.

Sample text (randomly taken from a children’s book) with full vowellisation:
يَزُولُ خَوْفِي حِينَ يُشْعِلُ بَابَا النُّورَ الصَّفِيرَ فِي غُرْفَتِي

Same text with this system:
يزولُ خَوْفي حينَ يُشْعِلُ بابا النّورَ الصّفيرَ في غُرْفني

Same text non-vowelled:
يزول خوفي حين يشعل بابا النّور الصّفير في غرفني

More posts related to learning Arabic

I had a lot of trouble with the distinction between dark and non-dark consonants, like Saad vs. Siin. At first, I only heard the difference in the following “aah” sound and no difference at all in the consonant. I sensitized my hearing by requesting Arabic native speakers on Rhinospike.com to record minimal pairs for me: each dark consonant combined with each of the vowels, and each non-dark equivalent consonant combined with each of the vowels, allowing a direct comparison. Audio here

The remaining problem was of course how to produce this distinction myself. My textbooks were supremely unhelpful, just talking about ‘darker’, ‘emphatic’ or ‘pharyngealized’ sounds without telling me how to produce this effect. Finally I came across Michel Thomas’ Arabic course and it had good advice: the distinction between non-dark and dark S is close to the difference between the S in “see” or “sorry” in English. If you keep the tongue position from “sorry” and combine it with different vowel (like “ee”), you wind up with the Arabic dark S, or something very close to it. The other dark consonants can be acquired by assuming the same unusual tongue position.

More posts related to learning Arabic

A personal blog post – and what happens if you set your goals too low.

After spending several hours trying to get this nifty plugin to run and scouring the internet for solutions, I’ve decided to publish what I found, even if it doesn’t fit with the general theme of this blog.

First off, let me state that Paperclip, contrary to expectations, only needs ImageMagick, not RMagick, though you’re better off installing ImageMagick from the RMagick installer for Windows so that you don’t have version conflicts later if you need RMagick for something else. Furthermore, ImageMagick does NOT need to be referenced in your Gemfile, or required in application.rb .

You DO however need to refer to the ImageMagick directory in order to get Paperclip to run. This is done by putting
Paperclip.options[:command_path] = 'E:/Ruby192/ImageMagick' (or similar) into your development.rb, otherwise you will get the usual “is not recognized by the ‘identify’ command” error. It appears to be vital that the path to ImageMagick does NOT contain spaces.

Obviously this is going to be annoying if you’re part of a team of developers using different operating systems. I saw one post advocating the use of
if RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /mswin/
in order to be able to specify a different path for Windows users, but this does not work for me.

The Tadoku “Read more or die” Challenge is working out really well… I’m reading a lot more than I otherwise would in Chinese, Dutch and Greek, already more than 900 pages when normally I may have reached 100. Most of my reading is …

I don’t often rant on here, but this topic is not letting me go. Skip this if you’re only interested in the language posts.

“From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs.” I’m the first to point out the flaws of this basic tenet of Communism – I certainly want to be paid more if I can do a job better than the next guy, or if I’m ready to work longer hours. However, in the case of health care, the spirit of Communism is the way to go. There are several issues…

Okay, so it has been way too long since I updated. I spent several weeks battling a nasty flu, and then scrambling to get some Dutch studying in, in order not to make a fool of myself at the Leuven language festival. On the down side, because of that flu I only managed 70 hours. On the bright side, Dutch is so freaking easy for a German speaker that even putting in 70 hours was enough to be able to have any everyday conversation in Dutch, to understand 95% of Dutch books or Dutch TV news and 90% of Dutch soap operas or movies. The language festival finally did go well, feedback for my lecture was good, I attended lectures on Sinhala, Tshiluba and Czech and I had some nice conversations in Dutch with people on the side. I also took the chance to buy Dutch, French and Chinese books.

After the festival, I got sucked into the new 三国 TV Series, which is loosely based on the “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”. It’s not a romance at all, it’s about history and chivalry, and it’s considered one of the “four great classics” of Chinese literature. Considering how much literature has come from China, making it into eternal memory as one of the uncontested top 4 has to count for something, so I recommend anyone to have a look. Either way I’ve been watching a lot of Chinese video with Chinese subtitles and it’s helping. About a week ago, while hosting a Couchsurfer from France (yay French practise!), I first noticed a Chinese voice in my head. That is, whenever I was mentally phrasing something, the Chinese translation would pop into my head without any effort of mine. Before, I always had to translate and carefully plan anything I wanted to say in Chinese. This is a major milestone!

I believe I may have overdosed on vocabulary study for Chinese. Following my success bringing my character level up to 3000 in a single year, I’ve been religiously using Anki for Chinese, and I’ve taken weekly classes online with a private teacher. During class, we spent half an hour working with the Boya Chinese textbook and half an hour in free conversation. I do not think that I’m presently getting enough exposure though, especially when it comes to things modern people might say (as opposed to phrases that can only be used by time travellers, which I’m learning from 三国).

This is why I’ve decided to participate in the “Read More or Die” aka Tadoku challenge this April. It’s very simple: read as much text in your target language(s) as possible for one month and try to outdo the other participants in number of pages read. You can participate even if you know that you won’t place near the top; this is just a way to utilize your competitive streak for motivation. Time is running out to register – if you think you can out-read me, sign up quickly!

My stats from January 1st until March 31st:
49 hours of French
109 hours of Mandarin
2 1/2 hours of Greek (hope to remedy that)
8 hours of Swahili (need to work on that too)
70 hours of Dutch
1/2 an hour each on Italian and Arabic

Good news: I’ve already almost reached half of last year’s time spent on Mandarin and 1/3 of last year’s time spent on French. Very happy with that. Bad news: I really wanted to spend more time on Dutch and on my maintenance languages.

In April, I will focus on reading Chinese, Dutch and Greek. I may start dabbling in Spanish, because Spanish is next on my list of beginner languages to learn. I also absolutely have to squeeze in at least one month of Listening-Reading for Russian before July because I’ll be going to the IJK in Kiev and I want to see how far Listening-Reading can get me.

My goals for the year – and a handy tool for you.

A personal blog post – no language-learning wisdom, just a report of what I did and where I stand now.

Yesterday I finished reading my first novel in Modern Greek, without the help of any translations, without even looking at a dictionary once! Actually, I had underlined some words and was planning to look them up, but didn’t get around to it and most of them explained themselves over the course of the read.

This was fun! I had chosen Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone as my first novel because it was a Christmas gift and because I already knew the story. Also, with its popularity among kids, I was hoping to find a somewhat easier language than in other novels. It worked! After working through Assimil Greek, I was immediately able to pick up this book and read it for pleasure. Okay, my initial reading speed was possibly too slow for a true leisure read, but I was nevertheless drawn in by the book time and time again because it was exhilarating being able to read something enjoyable in a language that I know less than 2500 words in (rough estimate).

So my advice is: If you’d like to be able to read something in your target language, just go ahead and read it! Maybe start with 100 pages of easy readers to make sure you have the vocabulary, but after that you don’t have a valid excuse anymore, just jump in!