Tag: language learning

On Arabic, pedagogy and my new life goal

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching4 Comments

Something happened at work today that rarely happens in a middle school: I, the teacher, was bored. This is dangerous. I’d finished my grades, my kids were all quietly working on something or another, and other than randomly wandering around and talking to people, I didn’t have anything in particular that needed doing. Somehow I got thinking about Arabic again, and that led to me downloading a book called All The Arabic You Never Learned The First Time Around. This book is by James Price, but you’ll never know that from looking at the .pdf I downloaded, which never mentions the author’s name.

Y’all.

I need a print copy of this book, and I think I’m probably going to have to make one by going to Kinko’s (does Kinko’s still exist?) and printing all 564 pages and then binding the damned thing myself. Amazon wants over seven hundred dollars for the sole used copy they have, which also looks home-printed, and if there’s another copy out there on a legit site I can’t find it.

I have never encountered a bitchier textbook in my life, and I love it.

There will be a lot of images in the rest of this post. They are all from the first two chapters of, again, a .pdf that is five hundred and sixty-four pages long.

In general, this man despises all human life. It’s glorious.

Who does he despise the most? American journalists. Oh my God does James Price hate journalists.

You know how most language textbooks pick a few basic words and use them for examples over and over? And how lots of times those are simple, easy words that everyone uses all the time? You will never guess the first three sample words this guy picks. Not if you try for a thousand years.

I’m not kidding. This is going to happen over and over again:

Any hint of confusion is met with immediate scorn, which is something all good teachers do:

This is the last paragraph of the first chapter:

Chapter Two starts getting into case endings and something called “Idaafa,” which I cannot explain just yet. I can tell you that James Price thinks idaafa is very simple and easy and does not have a whole lot of patience for people who do not understand it, to the point where this chapter starts using typesetting for emphasis along with the usual heavy doses of sarcasm:

I am going to start modeling all of my teaching after the last two sentences in this paragraph, including the use of all-caps, underlined bold text:

Shit, is that what it means? I understand now!

Toward the end of the chapter, we get this gem, where he makes fun of the reader for studying the text he wrote:

I’ve only read two chapters, remember, and I haven’t really thoroughly studied them, but I think I’m starting to detect a theme here, as this is how he ends chapter two:

This is the best textbook I have ever seen, and James Price is my new educational idol. Please, please, let someone find me a print copy of this, or I swear to God I’m making a leather-bound copy myself.

FRIENDSHIP ENDED WITH BUSUU

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, TeachingLeave a comment

… 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:

  • Plans;
  • To Be Free (one verb form);
  • “do you fancy”…
  • “let me know”
  • “give me a call”
  • “How about…”
  • Shall
  • “I’d love to,”
  • “Do you mind,” and
  • “Sorry, I can’t.”

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:

Calm down, Busuu

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy6 Comments

Those three lines of Arabic are what you get when you click “Show Hint.” They are not what you need the hint for. Needless to say, I can’t translate a word of that. I can’t even sight-read it. That is not a hint, Goddammit.

I am just destined to fail at this shit.

Screw it, let’s give some examples

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

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.

Just shoot me, ctd.

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I did something today that I’ve never done in twenty years of teaching– I would estimate, without a shred of exaggeration, that 2/3 of the teaching I did during my fourth hour was in Spanish. It was time to sit down with my newcomers and see where they were at, and the only way to do that was to communicate with them in their own language. To wit, I generated this for them:

And then I banished about half of the class from the room, sending them with my co-teacher to her classroom, mostly to cut down on the number of other kids who might want to talk to me and also to prevent a certain student from getting Valentine’s Day-related harassment, and sat down with the kids and went through a bunch of problems with them. I’m hoping that document is translated well from what I typed; based on my meager Spanish it looked okay, and the kids didn’t have questions. The boy read through it, smiled at me, and proceeded to get nearly a perfect score on his assignment with only a small number of questions, all of which, I’m proud to say, I understood; the girls are a little bit behind for 8th grade but not enough that I’m terribly concerned about it. I have English-speaking kids who, based on this one assignment, have bigger problems than they do. One of them does seem to rely kind of heavily on the other, who did most of the talking and also appeared to do the lion’s share of the work, but we’ll see how that shakes out in a couple of weeks.

You may notice, even if you don’t read Spanish, that the actual Pythagorean Theorem doesn’t appear anywhere in that document. That’s entirely intentional; I generally deemphasize the formula itself in favor of the process of figuring out a missing leg or a missing hypotenuse. They know the formula, but I treat this as mostly calculator work, and I drill the phrases “square-square-add-square root” and “square-square-subtract-square root” into their heads until they’re repeating them in their sleep. Since I didn’t have any real idea where these kids might have been in terms of their math skills I decided I’d leave it out entirely for now.

We are taking it easy tomorrow, across the board. I kinda feel like I’ve worked the kids (all of them, not just the new ones) like dogs this week, and between talking a lot more than usual and the added stress of teaching in a foreign language today, I’m ready for a day where I can wave them vaguely in the direction of a Quizizz or something else that has a chance of being fun rather than being at the board or hunched over someone’s shoulders all day. They’re picking this up pretty well so far so I think if I have a calm Thursday before a four-day weekend God will forgive me.

In which my throat is sore and my brain is melted

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I saw a post earlier about how Taylor Swift’s boyfriend won a trophy at the Usher concert, and I gotta admit: I LOLed. Quite a bit.

Today at work I talked for roughly seven straight hours, and in accordance with prophecy I am tired as hell. Tomorrow’s highlights will include three new students, all in the same class, all directly from Mexico, and two of them are twins. I already can’t remember anybody’s Goddamn name; it is, in fact, the clearest evidence that having Covid two or three times really has taken a toll on my mental faculties. I do not know for sure if they are twins, but even as fraternals they’re gonna look close enough, and when you combine that with the fact that they don’t speak any English … I’m in trouble. The third kid is a boy and (I assume) unrelated to the other two, and I’ve already started Duolingoing in Spanish in addition to the Arabic, so you can add that to the Streaks post from the other day. I have got to improve my Spanish. It’s barely functional, which isn’t nothing, but I need a lot better than “barely functional.” 

The other problem is that with the addition of these three I now have five Level One Spanish kids in there; Level One meaning they speak little to no English. We are reaching a point, and I’m at that point in at least one other class, where there are enough Spanish speakers in the room that they start interacting solely with each other and stop interacting with me, which isn’t good for any of us. Fully half of my third hour is fluent in Spanish, although most of them speak perfectly serviceable English. That’s not a problem in and of itself except for the part where the kids who only speak Spanish don’t have any reason to stretch their English, and they’ll ask the other kids for help on stuff and they don’t always get good explanations. Plus my “quit talking and do your work” filter isn’t as good in Spanish as it is in English, for obvious reasons, and so it’s a lot harder to monitor wildly off-topic conversations. 

Anyway, point is, I gotta come up with a first day project of some sort for these kids; I don’t have any idea what their educational background is like and they probably won’t have devices yet to do their assignments, so I gotta write a quick introductory letter for them. Then maybe I’ll go hang out with my son for ten minutes, before we both go to bed.

Oh, so you wanna fight now

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Busuu threw this at me just now, out of nowhere:

There were another couple of sentences beyond this, but you get the idea. This induced panic at first– I am nowhere near being able to translate any of this shit, but after a second what I realized is that this is actually a drill at parsing individual words out of a sentence. The underlined ones– for some reason Paul didn’t have one in his last sentence– were blank, and I was given five or six options for the word the person said to choose from. I managed to 100% it, then did it again when I decided I was going to make a blog post out of it, so … yay me.

Also, this is much bigger than the screen of my actual phone, and Christ, I’m going to need to start doing this on my iPad or something just to be able to read the letters. This font is a bitch.

I spent the rest of the evening writing practice tests for tomorrow. My day is set for the next couple of days of school, then easy intro to Pythagoras on Wednesday and Thursday. This should be an easy week. He said. 

A tentative endorsement

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

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.