Gradual

I love reading other people’s suggestions and blogs on how they are learning languages, and I’ve found through this that the best approach to learning a language is the one that works for your individual personality. Benny (the Irish Polyglot) is a very outgoing young man (sorry, but he makes me feel old!) and his approach to language is very open, conversational, and uninhibited. He is a world traveler first, language learner second, but he enhances his travels by learning local languages and not so much by acting like a tourist, but more like a goof-ball (and I mean that in a good way!) I’m not and have never been this kind of person, so this approach would only get me so far before I died of embarrassment (not at mispronouncing words-I’m really a non-social person, and don’t feel all that comfortable going out of my way to meet new people without a little help from my husband!). Randy (the Yearlyglot) takes a different approach, and it works for him. I’m probably more like him in my current approach.

My language goals are not just speaking, but reading and writing as well, and also understanding the FULL language, not only colloquial or classical Arabic, but both, because they are both essential to the job I’m going to be doing! I’ll need to be able to understand the written language as well as the fast-paced spoken language.

I started thinking about how I’m approaching my learning, and I’ve got two different approaches, I’m kind of taking it from both angles because the speaking part is more difficult for me to hurdle, as someone who embarrasses easily, I need to become comfortable speaking with just my husband, but in the meantime, I don’t want that to slow down my understanding of the language, so I’m learning to read and write using a couple of books (the Bible and Harry Potter-see earlier posts on this!).

Basically, for my written study (I love studying-I’ll write more on this another time), I take some composition notebooks, pencils and extra erasers (very important!) and write out each sentence I read, then transliterate it into English letters to help me with pronunciation, saying the words out loud as I write, and using a good translator (Google Translate is usually good-I have another backup app on my phone-iTranslate, because Google isn’t always great-and if all else fails, I ask my husband!). As I learn more words, my approach may change, but this is really my beginning approach to reading, and it’s working fairly well for me at the moment.

I should mention that I started out very very slowly by learning the Arabic alphabet and committing it to memory. I didn’t quite learn it like “A-B-C,” although I did sometimes write out the letters in order, but I learned how to pronounce each letter. I still have trouble with a few, and no, I don’t know the names of them. Except alif (ا) and 3(a)in (ع). I don’t know why I know alif, but 3in is “eye” so my husband kind of taught me that inadvertently. I don’t really thinking knowing the names of the letters is particularly important at this point, but I’ll try to learn them later, as it may help me with spelling!

It’s also not really important to memorize the pronunciation of every single letter prior to beginning learning to read, because the more words you learn to read, the easier it is to pick out hard letters and remind yourself with some sort of chart what the letter sounds like. This is probably considered a phonetic approach, but I’m not really that interested in what to name it, I’m just going to do it.

Something else I should mention that really helps me is hearing the words spoken by a native speaker. Google translate does this now, but my husband often says words for me if I get mixed up, and I’ve also heard that there are lots of people on the internet who will chat over Skype or whatever to help learners hear the native accent and how to pronounce words properly.

Ultimately, my goal in learning to read/write Arabic is to be able to type easily and to recognize words just as I do with English. This is going to be the toughest part of my learning experience, because I’m finding that my brain is pretty established in the English letters, and even though I can read a lot of Arabic now (without understanding) my mind visualizes the English letters. I know that this will eventually fade, and with continued practice I’ll be able to read without even realizing I’m doing it. In this way, I think native speaking children absolutely have an advantage over adults, because they tend to start reading AFTER knowing some of the language, so their reading is with understanding, whereas adults will almost always approach the language in the opposite way, reading THEN understanding. But just because the kids have the advantage here doesn’t mean there aren’t other places where adult learners have the upper hand. Specifically, I’ve never heard of a child who taught himself to read without outside help. This would really be impossible. Literate adults can self-direct their learning because they have the advantage of already being able to read one language and can use that knowledge to learn another.

What do you think?

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