Some Progress on Reading Arabic

About two weeks ago, I bought a book, Your First 100 Words in Arabic, that would help me learn to write and understand the arabic script. It's not a bad book and it takes a practical approach. The carry cards in the back are worth the $12 or so for the book. But I just was struggling a bit with the first few letters because I couldn't keep straight some of the letters that are similarly shaped but differently diacritically marked. Like the letters 'sheen' and 'seen'. Just couldn't keep them straight. Then, I was returning from Qatar on Qatar Airways and I watched the in-flight map for a bit before landing as it switched from showing place names and shipwrecks in English to Arabic. Invaluable! Since most of the place names were cities around Washington DC, I could easily start putting together the sounds with the letters and figuring out the right sounds for the letters that were most confusing. From that 20 - 30 minutes of staring at the screen and sounding them out, I picked up the usage of about 12 - 14 letters (maybe 6 root letters but I'm counting the medial and ending variants as well). It wasn't too long before I was able to figure out a couple of letter sounds I wasn't sure of like the final 'n' sound. The word Washington in Arabic is now imprinted on my mind. Also, the shipwrecks were similarly phonetisized so that I was able to pick up most of the sounds of Titanic as well and worked out the 'taa' and the 'thaa'. As an aside, does it make sense for an airline to mark out where transportation had gone horribly wrong in the vicinity of the passengers?

Also, I watched a fair number of movies on the way back. I should point out first that I was able to have dinner with a couple of Lebanese people (Thanks, Tamara and Kamal) who live and work in Qatar and the UAE. Listening very careully to them ordering for me in Arabic, I figured out that 'wa' is the Arabic word for 'and'. Excellent word to know. I usually concentrate on pronouns and prepositions first in a language because they are easy demarcations in speech that are easy to use to figure out what came before and after in a sentence. So, now armed with 'wa', I watched the movies on the way back home. Every movie had Arabic subtitles. Every one of them. It was kind of wierd listening to a movie in Cantonese and seeing Arabic subtitles. Anyway, the word 'and' pops up a lot in langauge and it's often used by itself as a prompt for someone to continue. 'Your sister's been shot.' 'And?' That means that 'and' will show up in subtitles separate and distinct. A great help to anyone learning the language. So, that's how I figured out the Arabic letter 'waaw'. 'Waaw' is a single letter that is used to write 'and' much like in Spanish 'and' is 'y'.

So, all in all, a pretty good day for my Arabic. Now, I just need to get some focus on the rest of the alphabet so I can start using the Arabic dictionary I bought while I was in Beirut last November.

So, What Languages?

The next step is to pick my list of languages to learn. Keeping in mind that I need to pick 10 languages from four families turns out to be much harder than I thought. I didn't know so many languages were in the Indo-European family. Just look at the list from Wikipedia. Who knew that Punjabi and German were considered part of the same language family?? I mean, I knew they all descended from PIE but I didn't know that they were still considered part of the same family.

I've decided on Chinese and Arabic for sure. So, there are 8 slots left. I'd like to get a Slavic language in like Russian. But that's an IE language and I need to be sure of it before I definitely commit to it.

I'd love to get some suggestions from people as to what might go on the list and why. Anyone?

I'm Going To Become a SuperGlot

So, I have a new goal. My goal is to learn and be daily proficient in 10 languages. It's a lofty goal but one I think I can achieve with a bit of work. It's not just learning the languages that is part of the goal. I have some specific requirements for this goal.

1. The languages must represent at least four distinct language families.
2. Dialects of a language don't count.
3. I have until September 14th, 2015 to finish.
4. I must be tested and approved by 2 native speakers of the language I learn.
5. Only one dead or dying language. All others must be living languages.
6. At the end of the period, I must be able to still have daily proficiency in all languages.
7. Any languages I already speak in daily proficiency, don't count.

Those are the only rules I've set out for myself. They don't seem too difficult but I've picked them for very specific reasons. I know I can do it. I've already learned German and French so I know the mechanics of learning a language. The challenge is going to be putting away the time to learn them. I also suspect it's going to be difficult to find the right resources for learning them.

I've already discovered with the other languages that I've learned is that the usual books for learning a foreign language are very often geared for people who don't know much about language and the constructs of langauge. That makes the first 4 chapters very boring, not to mention the fact that they tend to cover things very slowly and laboriously making it a tedium to read through the first half. Still, you have to read them all or they will invariable spring something on you in the middle that you don't know about and then, well, you're screwed.

So, there will hopefully be a couple of things that will come of this. First, I hope to be able to come up with a system specifically for superglots that will speed the third and higher language acquisition. Second, I hope to be able to make tools for superglots that will help them streamline the early stages of language acquisition without making them feel like they are back in third grade starting completely from scratch.

I encourage you to join me in my goal. Learning a foreign langauge is a crucial skill and one that everyone can do. Your brain is hardwired to use language and to learn new language all the time. The only obstacle is your conception of language and the reward is incredibly high.