Language difficulties. An update.

Hello.

I am in my final year of university and have a lot of coursework to do, so I am a little behind on my Arabic schedule right now. 7 hours behind, to be exact.

 I have this weekend off, so I am going to try hard to catch up. I will be splitting the time between intense studying of my Colloquial book, vocabulary sessions, and relaxed audio lessons.

I am also going to start studying an online Arabic grammar guide for the first time. Grammar is only worth learning if you have the vocabulary to utilise it, and I feel that my vocabulary is growing at an okay rate.

My motivation is still as strong as it ever was, but the demands of university leave me very little time to put any decent hours into studying Arabic.

I am also going to start learning more verbs next week. According to one of my Arabic teachers one of the verbs I have been taught by my audio course is wrong, so I will have to check that out.

My 3 ways of remembering vocabulary.

Personally I don't find memorizing vocabulary very difficult. I have a pretty good memory for foreign words. But having said that, I have had to devote quite a lot of my schedule to memorizing vocabulary with Arabic.

The problem is that the words don't sound like anything in English, so they are almost impossible to remember. But maybe I will do another post on that. Today I am going to explain my 3 ways of remembering vocab.

1 - Repetition.

If you repeat something often enough with the correct spacing, then you will remember it. This is a good method if the word is very foreign and doesn't sound like anything in English.

You hear the word, and try to remember it. Then after 2 minutes you try to recall the word. If you can't, then you look at it again and do the same. If you can remember the word, then wait 5 minutes and try to recall it again. Then keep making the lengths of time between recall longer and longer until it is simply committed to memory.

I am having to use this with a lot of Arabic right now, and it works if you put the time in.

2 - Mnemonics.

This is when you remember a word because of a little story in your head. Then you have more links with the word and you find it much easier to remember.

Here's an example -

بيت (bayt) means 'house' in Arabic.

So to remember this word I am going to imagine myself laying bait for an animal outside my house. I am going to try to remember that image as strongly as I possibly can, with every detail possible. This will make it incredibly easier to remember a word that would other wise be hard to recall.

3 - Context.

Context is a little bit more advanced. This is when you remember a word because of its links with the words around it. An example of this would be song lyrics. You can remember the words much easier if they are strung together in lyrics.

If I taught you the first few lines of a French song then you would have no problem recalling those lines back to me in order. But then if I broke up the order, or asked you to just recall the middle section of the third line, then you would have a much harder time. Because the words are almost dormant in your mind until you sing the lyrics up to that point.

So I hope this post was helpful.

شكرا for reading, and I will try to post again tomorrow.

How I am learning.

I wanted to write a lot about Egyptian Arabic, and Arabic in general today. But, I am back at home, not at university, so I will only do a short post outlining my method of learning.

I need a language schedule. Without it I would get nothing done. I used to put a lot of hours in every day, but now I have relaxed down to an 11-hour a week schedule.

I do an hour every weekday, and 3 hours every Saturday and Sunday.

I have the Colloquial Arabic of Egypt book and CDs, which are very good. I also have the Lonely Planet Egyptian Arabic phrasebook, which has more Arabic Script, more vocabulary and more topics. It is generally a lot more dense than the Colloquial book.

I also have several teachers who voluntarily help me with my Arabic. I have Skype sessions with them as often as I can, and also try to communicate with them in purely Arabic script on Facebook. It helped me get used to reading and recognising words quicker.

Another good resource is the Egyptian movies available on the internet. There are plenty of films in Egyptian Arabic here.

The main problem with learning a dialect of Arabic, as opposed to MSA (Modern Standard Arabic), is that there is remarkably little vocabulary available to memorise. Well, at least that's what I thought until I found this site. This website has vocab in both Egyptian Arabic and MSA, which is really useful. You can actually see the differences you will face when speaking and reading.

I will go into more detail about each resource and stuff like that next week. I will also start posting on both Saturdays and Sundays next week.

Introductions

Hello,

My name is Tom Bailey and I am a 21-year-old British student in my final year of University.

This blog is going to document my journey from only being able to speak English, to hopefully being able to speak a whole bunch of other languages.

My current target language is Egyptian Arabic, and I have been seriously studying it for the last 4 weeks now.

There isn't much behind the scenes access to how people learn languages. People just see polyglots speaking these languages and think they are geniuses. But, as Michelangelo said "If you knew how much work went into it, you would not call it genius."

So I will be posting every Sunday for as long as I can, and the next post will be on the 10th.

مع السلامة
(Goodbye)