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):
2000-2500 coins at least, better aim for 2500
250 minimum new words, better is 300-350
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):
this only works if you have 4-6 (or up to 8) hours per day to dedicate to it
this only applies for people with no background in Arabic
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)
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
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
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
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
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.