The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I can literally hear my students whining “When am I gonna use this?” right now.
Also, Duolingo, I think it’s fair to suggest that an American English speaker will never say “Ghassan a is very hungry,” and while I admit that that would be a genuine PEBKAC* error, it would be super cool if you could just fix it and move on.
*we may need a more phone-appropriate version of this acronym.
… now Lingodeer is my best friend.
(My life has just changed; while checking to make sure that I was using the right color to cross out the Busuu app, I discovered that new friend Salman in that famous picture is the guy on the left, not the guy on the right, and for some reason I can’t handle that.)
But anyway. The last time I rattled on about Arabic apps on here I was already starting to sour on Busuu, but things have gotten rather worse since then, and since I’ve also found a decent third Arabic-language app (I will never stop collecting them) I figured it was worth another post. Now, it’s worth pointing out: I’m only discussing the app’s approach to Arabic, as I’ve not tried it with any other language, and Arabic is fucking hard, so I can imagine writing an app about how to teach it is also pretty fucking hard.
But nonetheless. I’m not actually giving up on the app, because the (effectively) dictation sections are genuinely useful, but I don’t think it’s teaching me anything any longer. For example, yesterday’s unit was called “Making Plans.” It taught me the words for:
It breaks these down into groups of three or so, and after each few words it’ll repeat one and I need to click on the definition. After a couple of groups will be one of the listening exercises I mentioned in the post above, and then it’ll go through all the words and I’ll have to pick the translation from three possibilities. A lot of the time a good test-taker with no Arabic could get these right; for example, if a phrase ends in a question mark, and only one of the answer choices is a question, that’s the right one.
And I figured out the other day that this last flurry of multiple-choice questions will be in the order the words were presented, which … makes the whole exercise useless, frankly. And then there’s the social media functions, which I’ve abandoned entirely, because no one who has been using this app could possibly complete these exercises, particularly the written ones. You can record a few seconds of silence to get past the “record yourself talking about making plans with a friend” prompt, but if you write something it wants several sentences, which I am incapable of without literally typing them into Google Translate and copy-pasting what it gives me back.
Oh, and the community feedback had potential to be super useful, except for one little thing: the helpful people out there who want to work with me on improving my Arabic largely don’t speak English. Giving me pronunciation tips or correcting my grammar in Arabic isn’t actually helpful!
So, yeah. I’ll keep fucking with it because I paid for it, but fifty days into Round III of Learn Arabic I’m no longer stressing about this app.
That said, let’s talk about Lingodeer, which sounds dumb but which is the current big winner among my Arabic apps. Wanna know why? Here’s why:
You know what that is? That’s a fucking spelling test. Wanna know the best way to get me to learn to read this language? It turns out that it’s spelling tests. Every letter and vowel and pronunciation mark in that group needs to be used– as of right now, they haven’t started throwing distractors at me yet– and Lingodeer deliberately overpoints everything, focusing on teaching pronunciation much more than any of the other apps would. Many of those characters don’t even appear in standard (?) Arabic– I’m still not a hundred percent certain how the dialect differences work, and this app really wants lots of -un endings on words, but when I type “My sister” into Google Translate I get أختى, which has a few less vowels than they give me up there.
You might have to stare at it for a moment to figure out my mistake here; the Arabic masculine word for “British” is, roughly, biriitaaniyyun. That squiggle that looks like a W above the letter on the left indicates a doubled letter, and I put it in the wrong place– I wrote it as biriitaanniyun.
(Why the doubled vowels? Because there are three long vowels in there. In most cases a long vowel is represented as a doubled vowel when transliterated. Where Lingodeer gets weird is insisting on also including a short vowel every single time a long vowel appears, which it does several times here.)
Anyway, there are thirteen individual characters that needed to be put in the right order to get that right, and I only missed one of them, which felt awesome. And then it hit me with the feminine version, which is even longer, and I got it right:
I give you biriitaaniyyatun.
More hotness? I want lots more of this. Rub it on my face:
Every single section has stuff like this, that gets way into the weeds, and is fucking awesome. Even if I don’t look at it on every unit, the fact that it’s there is magnificent.
This is, slowly but surely, actually teaching me to read. I’m making progress here. Which is awesome. And is why Lingodeer is my new best friend.
Go ahead. Ask me questions. I might be able to answer them.
ETA: I just jumped back in and did some more spelling exercises. I’m proud of this, dammit:
I pulled this from my post the other day about the conversation quizzes. Remember, the way this works is I get sentences one at a time, spoken by what sure sounds like a native speaker, and some of the words are blanked out. I get a word bank to choose from to fill in those blanks.
Let’s get into a few explanations, and I’m not looking any of this up right now— I’m typing this on my iPad while watching John Wick 3, so I’m not going to take the time to nail down the details. Basically any of the dots on those letters are for differentiation between different letters. So the difference between a d and a z or an s versus a sh might be how many dots are on the word. Some base letters have as many as three variants. I don’t think there are any with four (no dots, one, two, and three) but I might be wrong.
The little circles that show up here and there indicate a letter that does not have a vowel after it. This was never explained in Duolingo and has never been mentioned in Busuu; I had to look it up.
Dashes indicate short vowels. A dash under a letter indicates a short I, a dash above a letter indicates a short a, and there’s a little curlicue-lookin’ thing that appears above the letters that indicates a short u. I don’t see any of those in this sentence but that might be a font thing.
Here’s the problem: there are a bunch of symbols in those words that haven’t been explained in either of the apps, and I have no idea what they mean. The double-line above the vertical letter on the far left? No idea. The double line underneath the leftmost letter of the second word from the left? No idea. The symbol on the rightmost letter of the leftmost word? No idea.
I can’t read these words if you don’t explain what these symbols mean, guys, and while some of them are vowels, occasionally I feel like maybe some of them represent multiple letters together, or are maybe a contraction of some kind? I can’t just figure this out. Stop fucking with me.
I think it’s probably time to admit that if I want to take a serious shot at learning Arabic I’m going to have to 1) spend time with textbooks and 2) probably suck it up and take a class. I was pleased with the way Busuu introduced the alphabet, but it went from that directly to “Okay, you know this now, and you’re ready for entire sentences in this tiny-ass font, right? Plus a bunch of symbols that we never really discussed in the alphabet section? You won’t be able to make half of them out anyway so don’t worry about learning them.”
Like, guys, language learning apps should explain shit, and I don’t understand why they don’t. Busuu’s approach to anything that isn’t the alphabet has been to give a handful of examples that may or may not generalize, not explain them, and then just … move on. Like, my last unit was on comparatives and superlatives? It gave me bad/worse/the worst and, I dunno, maybe good/better/best and that was it. I liked the “pull words out of this conversation” feature the first time I saw it, but I just don’t know enough to be able to do that easily and I can’t read well enough to go from spoken word to one of four different words that may not differ from each other all that much. Especially when, again, I don’t know all of the vowels and diacritics. Every so often it will show me a picture and ask me to say something about it for one of the social media features, and, Christ, I don’t even know where to start.
There also might be a dialect difference between it and Duolingo, and I can’t figure that out either. Lots of the nouns end differently (-atun seems to get added to a lot of them, and sometimes just -a) and I can’t figure out what the ending means, or why Duolingo’s vocabulary never bothered with it, and gendered endings seem inconsistent, and … gah. I’m smart enough to learn this shit, but I’m not smart enough to figure it out, especially given limited examples and the weird fact that that ending doesn’t seem to be properly represented by the actual letters at the end of the word, which is probably a function of one of those symbols I never got an explanation for.
And, for the record, if you happen to understand Arabic, don’t worry about explaining how all of this works. Like, I have access to other sources of information, and to a certain extent this is a function of my own laziness. I want there to be an app that explains this at the depth and quality that a textbook would, because I want to learn Arabic five minutes at a time while sitting in a comfortable chair in my living room or my library, and not hunched over a textbook or sitting in a classroom that I have to pay tuition for. I shouldn’t be surprised when I can’t find that.
I’m starting to think that I have an unreasonable number of Things I’m Supposed to Do Every Day. I didn’t post last night because I got home from work, had dinner, and collapsed; I was in bed by 8:00 and dead to the world by nine, and at around 8:40 it occurred to me that I hadn’t blogged yet and I almost got out of bed to write a quick post. The thing is, I don’t know how many different things is a reasonable number of things that I do every day, or at least do so often that I notice if I don’t do them on any particular day. Shall we list them? Why not!
The weird thing is looking at that right now, I feel like it’s not that much? But I also feel like I spend way too much of every day thinking about whether I’ve finished xxx yet or not, and that might be a sign that it’s time to cut some stuff. How can I do all this and still spend six hours fucking around on TikTok every night? I gotta keep my priorities straight, people!
I asked a few days ago if anyone had any recommendations for language-learning apps, and while I didn’t actually receive any (you bastards) I did manage to find an app called Busuu all on my own. I’ve been going back and forth between it and Duolingo all week, and while I’m only five days in, I already like it a lot more than Duolingo, if only because 1) it’s explicitly teaching me how the alphabet works, or at least trying, and 2) in the bits in between talking about different sets of letters, it’s approaching language-learning in a way that makes a lot more sense to me than Duolingo’s style, which is … idiosyncratic.
(What do I mean by “idiosyncratic”? Duolingo did not tell me how to say hello to someone and ask them their name in half a year of study. It did, however, tell me how to comparatively rank my feelings about my lion vs. my neighbor’s lion.)
The other cool thing Busuu does, beyond, y’know, teaching things in a reasonable order, is that it allows you to record yourself speaking or writing short sentences and then builds a social media site on top of that, where you can listen to people trying to say sentences in English and help them out, or vice versa. I’m not completely sold on this, especially since the last time I really interacted with it it told me to “describe myself or someone else,” a feat completely beyond my abilities, and then wouldn’t let me move on without entering something. I wrote “I don’t know how to do this” in the box, and have received a handful of corrections entirely in Arabic, which, of course, I can’t read, nor do I actually know how to type Arabic letters on my phone in the first place. (And, to be clear, they wanted Latin transliterations, so “Marhaba, asmi Luther,” not مرحبا، اسمي لوثر )
Also, I’m most of the way through a seven-day trial period, and the premium version is a year for $84. Which I’m willing to pay, don’t get me wrong, but is probably too steep for quite a lot of people. And the font is too Goddamn small, but that’s true of damn near every Arabic app I’ve ever encountered. I need Arabic to be about twice as big as Latin letters to be comprehensible. That size in that little bit of Arabic up there? Too fucking small.
Anyway, despite all that, early signs are definitely positive on this one. I’ll report back once I get further in and let you know if my feelings change.
I’ve jumped back into Duolingo again, trying to regain what little Arabic I had learned on the first run, and … man, the way this software works just isn’t going to do it for me. I know how to learn from books, but software still eludes me; has anyone out there actually had any luck learning a language (use whatever definition you want for “learning”) using software of any kind, whether desktop or phone app or whatever? Particularly when the language in question was written in something other than Latin script? Let me know.
ليس لدي فكرة عما يقوله هذا
According to Duolingo, I have been studying Arabic daily for one hundred and forty-seven days. And Duolingo does a lot of things, but one of the things that Duolingo has not managed to do in 147 days of daily practice is teach me to read Arabic. One would think that would be an early priority! It is not. Duolingo teaches almost exclusively through word recognition– what teachers used to call the “whole language” method of teaching reading, and for the most part genuinely seems uninterested in actually providing explanations for things unless absolutely necessary. Even then it kind of hides them in corners of the app and finds ways to make them useless anyway. There is actually a “Learn the letters” section! I have been doing lessons in there for months and it still hasn’t gotten to half the letters.
Whole language is bullshit, y’all. Even as an interested adult it’s an insanely rough way to learn a new language. It means that in-context I can recognize words but if you throw a sentence at me with no context I may not even be able to figure out all the letters. After five months. Keep in mind I already read Hebrew and once taught myself to read German from essentially scratch over a weekend so that I could pass a mandatory translation exam for my degree. I’m good at languages! But this isn’t it. And I also take issue with some of Duolingo’s choices for the sentences and phrases they’re throwing at us. For example:
تلفازي داخل أسدي
Which means “My television is inside my lion” and I swear to God is a sentence that has shown up in my exercises, I believe in a unit called “Express a problem.” That’s not a joke. It’s a real thing. Or this one, during the unit on prepositions, which consisted exclusively of things being in front of or behind things:
هناك زوجتك مع رجل خلف المطعم
That means “There is your wife with a man behind the restaurant,” and … okay! Sure! That’s a thing that has probably happened. But I don’t know how to say “hello” or introduce myself yet. They have literally not taught “Hi, my name is _____, how are you?” but I can express trepidation about the eating habits of my lion.
Anyway, over the last few days– because there is no problem so minor that I won’t try to solve it by throwing money at it– I have acquired both a fine set of Arabic alphabet flash cards and a new textbook dedicated specifically to teaching reading. I have learned more about the alphabet in an hour of perusing that book between today and yesterday than I have in five months of Duolingo. Sadly, I have not received further instructions about how to express my feelings about my lion:
أنا أحب أسدي لكني لا أحب أسد جاري.
That’s “I love my lion but I do not love my neighbor’s lion,” and again, no, that’s not a joke.
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