… and Part 4
As happens so often, in refining my goals I have changed my practices. I see this as a good thing, although it sometimes get quite chaotic doing new things all of the time.
In my last entry I said I wanted to get a handle on the pronunciation of the Arabic vocabulary. To be precise, I want to use a language slot in LingQ to learn Arabic.
But to use LingQ you need to be able to listen for words. You have to be able to feel the flow of words as you listen to the audio without transcript. It is essential to me because I consider listening only fruitful for learning if you have that “word” awareness. It is helpful to think of listening as a kind of super fast flashcarding, where all you get is the sound of the word, and you either know or you don’t, and you don’t get any feedback other than that sense of “knowing”.
To listen for words, you have to be able to think in terms of “words” when you are listening. One way is to follow along the transcript while you are listening and recognise when words start and finish. It also helps to be able to recall the sound of the word by looking at the written form when you study flashcards.
I was on my way to achieving that goal using the painstaking method of chopping up sound bytes from the audio and making audio flashcards in Anki. But, soon after my last entry, while looking around the naturalarabic.com website, I found the quiz function. Basically it is like a built in audio flashcard function that covers every word in the article. It starts with the word and its audio, and you have to choose from among 4 possible answers for its English meaning. WOOOHOO… I immediately stopped reinventing the wheel, and just went through the quiz.
In addition to guessing the English meaning, I would try to break up the written form of the words in to letters and check myself on http://www.searchtruth.com/arabic/lessons/unit1writing.php
I also would copy/paste the target word into Google translate to compare the machine pronunciation to the human one.
This practice was an extremely good way to familiarize myself with the sounds of the alphabet in connected speech, But it also raised many questions about how the alphabet worked. How do you know the vowels? Why are there so many seemingly unpronounced letters? Why do some letters (final TAA for example) have more than one pronunciation? etc
These questions led me to the following webpage:
which is a tutorial for the Arabic alphabet. I am now in the middle of it, while still listening to the same audio while commuting, and doing and redoing the quiz.
While I am happy to use this tutorial, I am relieved that I had a chance to immerse myself in the sounds first. I can already see that it has some limitations— its explanation of “stacking” and the word “Laam”, to just name 2. But it is still a good explanation to supplement my direct experience of the sounds.
I am also getting familiar enough to get something out of the Wikipedia entry for the Arabic alphabet.
So, I just need to get to the point of “listening for words” when I am listening. To do that within the naturalarabic.com website should be relatively easy. But to be able to sound out all unfamiliar words with 70% accuracy is my next sub-goal. This should be achievable within the next few weeks if I am able to take time to study….
Since the last entry, there has been a huge disaster in Japan. I am indirectly affected as I am married to a Japanese national, and I have in-laws living in the affected areas. Luckily they are all ok and not gravely injured like so many others. I am amazed at the positive and energetic response of the Japanese people. I hope… no… I KNOW the country will survive this and continue to be a great culture, as well as an inspiration to the rest of the world.
Now back to studying another great culture…