When it really comes down to it, learning a foreign language is not hard. I mean after all, we all learnt at least one language so learning an additional one is just as possible. Learning any language really comes down to two simple, but time consuming things. The first thing is simply taking a few thousands words or so and finding a way to remember them. The second thing is remembering how to use them ie. grammar and conversation practice. To help me with the former of those two parts I purchased a course in Dubai called Arabic in a Flash.
Book Description
Arabic in a Flash: Volume I is an excellent new language learning resource for beginning students of Arabic. This unique set of flash cards enables learners to acquire basic Arabic words and their derivatives in an easy-to-use manner at whatever pace the learner prefers.
Each card has Arabic script on one side, with romanized forms and English meanings/derivatives given on the other. Also included is a 32-page reference book with three indexes (an Arabic-English, Arabic, and romanized Arabic listing), as well as useful notes on pronunciation and grammar.
Featuring a convenient, portable size and the 2,240 most common verbs, nouns and adjectives likely to be used in everyday conversations, Arabic in a Flash Volume 1 is the perfect learning tool for anyone interested in Arabic.
Hold on, why buy someone else's flash cards when I can make my own??
There's two good reasons:
- Making your own flash cards takes a lot of time and so does putting them into some sort of useful order. This is all valuable time wasted on manual labour instead of spending time on real objective: getting words stored in your head
- Finding the best order to learn your words in is task best handled by someone who knows which words are most useful. That way after you've learnt the useful words you're likely to start reinforcing them in your memory through conversations and listening.
Personally I wish I could watch and listen to programmes in Arabic and naturally acquire the language with less effort. But for me this method doesn't work. This is because I'm not picking up many, if any, new words to store in my head.
Let's suppose I sit down and watch the news in Arabic. I'm doing well if I hear one new word to store in my head in a considerable period of time, let's say 10 minutes assuming I can stay concentrating that long when I don't understand 70% of the words I hear and hence don't usually understand an interesting meaning of the whole story. If you already have most of the words stored in your head then watching the news is more interesting and more importantly, you are learning how those words are put together. But that's second part of learning a language and that part just won't work without vocabulary stored in your head.
One of my past teachers used to like to get me to talk on an particular topic for 1 hour straight but again, I don't learn too many new words with this technique. I find it difficult to retain new words when I hear them once. I learn better when I can see the word written out and it helps me to feel more confident in the pronunciation.
The writers of the Al-Kitaab book which I study in class know this already because every chapter starts with a vocabulary list and then you listen to an Arabic conversation containing the new words from your list and other words which you're expected to already know.
Let's suppose I sit down and watch the news in Arabic. I'm doing well if I hear one new word to store in my head in a considerable period of time, let's say 10 minutes assuming I can stay concentrating that long when I don't understand 70% of the words I hear and hence don't usually understand an interesting meaning of the whole story. If you already have most of the words stored in your head then watching the news is more interesting and more importantly, you are learning how those words are put together. But that's second part of learning a language and that part just won't work without vocabulary stored in your head.
One of my past teachers used to like to get me to talk on an particular topic for 1 hour straight but again, I don't learn too many new words with this technique. I find it difficult to retain new words when I hear them once. I learn better when I can see the word written out and it helps me to feel more confident in the pronunciation.
The writers of the Al-Kitaab book which I study in class know this already because every chapter starts with a vocabulary list and then you listen to an Arabic conversation containing the new words from your list and other words which you're expected to already know.
In reviewing what I've been learnt in the last 6 months I think one statistic is the most telling. That statistic is how many words have I been learning per day (nw/d). To be brutally honest I think I've learnt on average 2 new words per day if I'm lucky. I have reinforced words I've learnt through conversations, found new ways to reuse the same words and improved pronunciation but at the core of my learning, without gobbling down new words I'm simply not learning fast enough because I haven't been spending learning enough new vocabulary.
Seeking how much Arabic I'll know by the time I leave Yemen, I went looking for the average person's vocabulary size (in English) and found this:
Seeking how much Arabic I'll know by the time I leave Yemen, I went looking for the average person's vocabulary size (in English) and found this:
Stuart Berg Flexner, the noted American lexicographer, suggests that the average well-read person has a vocabulary of about 20,000 words and probably used 1,500 to 2,000 in a normal week's conversation.
So if my present rate of acquisition remains, everyday conversation is 2 years away and the vocabulary of native speaker may elude me for a further 27 years!! However if I can reach
10 nw/d I'll learn 1,825 additional new words by the time I leave Yemen.
Memorising vocabulary is a bit boring at times, I admit that. But as it's the core requirement of learning a language and as it's the core objective of many of the tasks my teacher sets me, I'm going to spend much more time learning this way and improve my nw/d average. My old teacher's favourite task to set me was write 10 or 20 sentences using new vocabulary. This task does help with learning grammar but the main objective was to learn new words and it's not the best task for that. Yeah it can be boring to look at the cards but there's no better way to learn words. For example, after 15 minutes I can learn 10 or 20 new words but after 15 minutes of sentences I'm only likely to have written 3-5 new sentences and learnt 3-5 new words, and I won't have learnt them as strongly as with the cards.
Obviously it's good to keep mixing up your teaching patterns and I'll probably start other methods such as writing out new vocabulary repetitiously.
Another useful flash card resource is Before You Know it Deluxe. The Deluxe version supports writing in Arabic script (unlike the free, Lite version) and stores sounds too. Rather than type out all the Al-Kitaab cards I found this site where the author has already done the hard work for me and posted all the byki cards. They also added sounds on the cards sets of the first couple of chapters. The sound quality isn't the best however, so I've begun to add the sounds myself, including the example sentences for the words.
Here's the first chapter
10 nw/d I'll learn 1,825 additional new words by the time I leave Yemen.
Memorising vocabulary is a bit boring at times, I admit that. But as it's the core requirement of learning a language and as it's the core objective of many of the tasks my teacher sets me, I'm going to spend much more time learning this way and improve my nw/d average. My old teacher's favourite task to set me was write 10 or 20 sentences using new vocabulary. This task does help with learning grammar but the main objective was to learn new words and it's not the best task for that. Yeah it can be boring to look at the cards but there's no better way to learn words. For example, after 15 minutes I can learn 10 or 20 new words but after 15 minutes of sentences I'm only likely to have written 3-5 new sentences and learnt 3-5 new words, and I won't have learnt them as strongly as with the cards.
Obviously it's good to keep mixing up your teaching patterns and I'll probably start other methods such as writing out new vocabulary repetitiously.
Another useful flash card resource is Before You Know it Deluxe. The Deluxe version supports writing in Arabic script (unlike the free, Lite version) and stores sounds too. Rather than type out all the Al-Kitaab cards I found this site where the author has already done the hard work for me and posted all the byki cards. They also added sounds on the cards sets of the first couple of chapters. The sound quality isn't the best however, so I've begun to add the sounds myself, including the example sentences for the words.
Here's the first chapter
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