Quick stats if you want to learn Arabic in 5-7 months (roundabout higher B1-lower B2)

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I randomly just thought I’d share my stats with you for learning/aqcuiring Arabic in a few months.
First of all a (1st) disclaimer; this was my journey and this is my opinion and I’m just sharing what worked for me (!)

Anyways, a quick introduction and then to the stats:

First of all I had an introductory phase not really working with LingQ (I worked with Al Arabiya Bayna Yadaik) but rather in general as a soft approach working with the languages patterns and understanding how it works.
Would I do that again? No. Looking back I find it to have been rather a waste of time (bcs on LingQ it would have probably taken me half a month to gain this knowledge even though if would have been the cold approach, just jumping in instead of two months or so) but it did give me some basic but important understanding of how the language works.
But I would advise everybody to have about 2 weeks up to 1 month of getting used to the languages patterns etc…

Anyways, when I started working with LingQ only I began very slowly but surely acquiring the basic knowledge and vocabulary, believe me it wasn’t easy, I doubted ever acquiring the language for the first 3.5 months of my 5-month-long phase of learning it every day.

What I learned in the end in terms of stats (to get to the numbers) is this (what you should aim for daily):

:coin: 2000-2500 coins at least, better aim for 2500

:abc: 250 minimum new words, better is 300-350

:open_book: Read words can differ a lot, so I won’t give too direct numbers here but anywhere between 2500 and 10000 words read per day is good, the higher, the better but as I said this doesn’t necessarily say a lot about your learning, depending on the density of new vocabulary.

Sometimes I exceeded these stats by 500-1500 coins, 100-200 new words or 5000 more words read (but this can be normal) and sometimes I did less.

BUT… (here comes the huge 2nd disclaimer):

  • :watch: this only works if you have 4-6 (or up to 8) hours per day to dedicate to it
  • :white_check_mark: this only applies for people with no background in Arabic
  • :face_with_spiral_eyes: you should know that you have to be mentally sane cos you’re gonna come out the opposite (but having learnt/acquired Arabic to an acceptable degree → you’re gonna be able to understand most of what you read, of course it depends on the vocabulary but in general)
  • :bangbang: this is not an advice or a guideline, rather care about what you do than the stats, bcs you could have the highest stats and not having learned anything
  • :bulb: you have to be ready to let your whole perception of language and what’s normal be changed from the basis on and just accept that some things just aren’t able to be ‘translated’ (like in terms of patterns etc.) and you just have to get used to it, which takes time and patience
  • :arrow_right: in the beginning it will be a lot lower but in the end it will get easier and go faster with less time and work
  • :+1: you are going to learn how learning languages works and will quickly find out that it’s just about reptition in different contexts and in general the conditioning of your brain with sounds, written letters/shapes as well as their meanings and that most of the time you spend on just acquiring new vocabulary roots (especially in Arabic) or vocabulary in general, the patterns just come with the content you consume → I found that to be taking away the spark from learning a new language a bit
  • :robot: you’re gonna ask ChatGPT a lot in terms of certain grammatical things you don’t understand bcs Google won’t tell you so easily and you can ask it regarding you examples, which can be annoying but very helpful though

This took me 150 days ( I did not plan that lol), 14 of which were spent on the Levantine dialect but to be true I really only learnt it with time (after the 150 days). I’m not saying I’m fluent nor will I ever be perfect, but I am able to understand 80-90%, depending on the context and I believe I could talk about most topics acceptably.

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Can I ask whether you simply used resources inside Lingq, or whether you imported any specific resources?

If you had access to Speaking Arabic by J Elihay (its 4 books) you could probably assess which of the four books you would have attained (and you can also import the audio perhaps)

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Thanks for asking, I used neither of those as what goes for the content, because I always (if I haven’t attained a certain amount of vocab) find it hard to just ‘jump right in’ and accept that I don’t understand a lot → which is very demotivating.
So what I had noticed was that I only kept the vocabulary that repeated itself throughout a text (referring to any kind of text material) multiple times (wow, lol) and that I then would be more motivated (which is more important) to read these texts because I was able to understand more. In the beginning I might not understand certain words but if I would see them again (what rarely happens with 100% natural content) I would always be like ‘oh my god, this is the word I looked up, I have learned something’.
Anyways, all that talk just to say that I used tables with certain vocab, then asked ChatGPT to write me either 1 dialogue, 2 dialogues, (and 3, 5 or even up to 10) and then the same with (short) stories. I repeated the reading of these texts until the chapter (of vocab) was done.
This also means that certain vocab is gonna come short and certain is gonna stick in your brain like it’s glued there.
The point here btw is also not necessarily the vocab (because I have also probably ‘forgotten’ half of the words I ‘learned’ lol → and I still understand Arabic to a degree where I can say I understand it (of course, depending on the vocabulary used, I wouldn’t be able to understand a formal contract for example)) itself but also just to keep on reading and gaining experience (and also the verbs bcs the vocab sections are mostly abt nouns) whilst having an easy time because you will understand more, the more you read (per vocab and per chapter and as time goes on).
Btw what goes for the listening which is very important, too: I gave a sh*t abt importing audio and just let the GoogleTranslate voice read me the texts out loud in a secondary tab (it is a very precise and good reading voice, obviously worked very well, you don’t need to care too much abt natural voices).
My daily amount in the end (what I would advise you if you already have some experience) were 10-12 units of ChatGPT requests (1 dialogue = one unit, 5 histories = one unit, 10 dialoges = one unit) but that is only possible if you have a certain amount of time and patience as I explained in the main post.
As a last point: ChatGPT as well as GoogleTranslate are gonna make mistakes, mostly in terms of content (CGPT) and for Google in terms of, for example, spelling the word coral reef in an Egyptian accent (with a g instead of a j → as pronounced in English).

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So many parenthetical comments.

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yeah, sorry, my mind is just like a carousel

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Ah btw what I forgot to mention is that I do have the document with the texts/text files but I am planning on making a real document/ebook out of it thus making it accessible for everyone (I would even offer it for free). But I am not yet ready to release it as I want to read through all of these texts again to correct the errors ChatGPT made and add some more/better content to it as well as maybe some explanatory stuff ( I think abt turning it into an input-based, rather than grammar which goes for most books, teaching book for Arabic.

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And as one last point; if anyone reading this decides to go on the same journey - best would be to take a picture/visual dictionary in the target language, e. g. DK dictionaries because they already are sorted in those categories and you can just copy the words if it is a digitalised version. And they also helped me a lot with visualising the words in Arabic (connecting the words to pictures (which btw is the whole point of how you learn languages - the conditioning of the brain)).

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i know this is an older post but i would live to pick your brain a bit. I am currently learning arabic as well and was wondering if you bothered doing any SRS vocabulary review. Also did you find that you could spontaneously using the vocab you had learned or did you actively have to practice outputting in the languages ‘reverse cards etc’

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No, I did not use any of that. I just read and listened so much that at some point I just had to acquire the words and adapt the way Arabic works. The thing is just that it was such a massive amount of input, so I was able to acquire it so fast. I, personally think that repeating vocabulary or any of that dull repetition stuff is useless but if you like it, just go ahead with it. I, myself have never been able to keep on going with it for longer than one day because it was not in context and I just found it to be dumb (no shame on anyone if they use it).

I, personally, think about like this a lot:

This is just like watching someone knit or fold origami (for the easier examples where you already have the abilities to do it) or code in a programming language or play chess (for the harder examples where your brain hasn’t yet adapted to the way these things work) and you see how the things work and if you do so an enormous amount of times with different videos or not digitally (someone shows you irl) or rather contexts you will, without ever having done so, be able to repeat it. In the long run your brain is simply going to adapt to the constant flow of data and you will notice the little details which you didn’t see in the beginning because it just sounded like gibberish and now you see which case the noun is in (dative, accusative etc.).
I know that was a lot of ands :joy: .

For the contrary, you could technically just go ahead and try to figure things out yourself (and use some help occasionally - use GoogleTranslate or some other translator) but that is just hard in terms of language because there’s so much to learn. You probably would get faster to a conversational level (assuming you use it for chat convos and stuff like that) because you would use fewer words more often and you would have a context, but realistically speaking this is very hard and not really practical, at least what goes for me. Also the amount of input would be quite little. This is basically the level little children are on - converstional, but they don’t know too many advanced words which are mostly used in literature.

As an update to some of the statements I had made earlier: the amount of words read does matter so it is not unimportant to care about them. I do think it’s useless to care about the stats too much or to only try to fulfil a numeric goal (like 2000 words read e. g.) (because then - why do you even learn it?) but the thing is just in the end as longs as you keep on going, read and listen a lot and do it consistently no matter if you feel like you advance or not, you will get there. For me it took about 5 months plus the time before but this was a hardcore marathon which I wouldn’t necessarily advise to anyone else.
And also the first 3,5 months I felt like I was never gonna be able to speak one word or like the effort was useless but I kept on going bcs I trusted my method and I wanted to try it out. And what can I say? - I think now I am more or less able to read & listen (understand) about 85-90 % (depending on the material vocab), write, maybe speak, but that is probably a practice issue and I honestly haven’t tried it so far, pretty fluently. It’s not that I know every word but I have the abilities to express myself mostly without help.
And you shouldn’t stress yourself because that is going to kill your motivation.

Also if you take about 1 month or so to get into a dialect and look how it conceptually deviates from MSA and listen and maybe read (but finding reading resources for it is very hard, so maybe rather listen or watch yt videos and take the captions) you will at least have some understanding. Of course, fluency takes time and another thing I found was that with time passing by and my brain having processed the data, I found myself understanding better than ever before even though I haven’t yet proceeded learning. What I’m saying is that a lot of times data just needs to settle and you will find yourself one month later being like ‘alright now I understand a lot more’ (which probably is also the reason why I felt this way for the first 3,5 months as I described earlier).

So, to sum it up, in the end it is all about repetition and keeping up the repetition but you also have to be realistic - that is the reason I put the words in context (and used fewer words per day with more repetition so it was much easier to learn it from scratch).

Btw, talking about repetition: I found that if I already understand a lot but can’t speak (like in may case with Spanish because I already knew some French) you still have to get in the repetition - there’s no way around it. Because to be able to repeat anything, no matter if you understand it or not, you have to repeat consuming it and its use. The advantage is just that it’s gonna be so much easier and take less repetition to acquire any word so you can move on to harder material like a book.

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Oh gosh, what novel did I write??? :joy: :sob:

Btw I am still working on the book and website I am coding (this is part of the reason I used coding as an example in my previous answer, because I also watched a lot of coding videos and asked ChatGPT a lot of times how to write this and that and what this or that means and now can write in it a bit I’m still in the process of learning it, but I know that it basically works the same way). I will then make it all free for everyone when I’m ready.

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Did you read about 1.8m words?
Number of words read and number of hours are useful measures to me.
Thanks.

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In terms of dialect or MSA (cause u highlighted the dialect part)?

In general, I read, according to my stats, about 800k words, listening is not counted as it was in the Google tab outside of lingq, so I don’t know.
In terms of dialect I can’t tell, lingq doesn’t make a difference there.
Btw regarding the dialects, I would advise anybody who learns them to start first learning MSA and when you’re there to ask an AI to assist you with translations because a whole lot of words are basically untranslatable for most translators.