!مرحبا
Hey, I know how to say some words now!
I updated the title of this thread and the original post to reflect that this log is being used for Arabic now as well as Spanish. I decided to keep it in the Spanish learning log section (rather than moving it to all languages) because it’s currently the only learning log in this section.
Arabic
Our first lesson went well! We started out learning some basic greetings and simple questions and answers, like how to ask someone for their name or where they’re from, etc.
Our instructor sent some really detailed notes after the lesson, which I tried my best to turn into an Anki deck. I encountered a few obstacles, the main one being that my Yomitan Arabic coverage is a bit limited, so even for common greetings, I couldn’t really automate the flash card creation process.
Forvo seems to have decent coverage with regards to audio recordings, though. However, often Yomitan wouldn’t have an entry (and thus wouldn’t pull the audio automatically), and Anki also struggled to automatically pull the audio for a lot of terms, so I had to manually retrieve it on many occasions.
Here’s how to manually get a Forvo audio link for your Anki cards (instructions are for Firefox):
- On Forvo, right click in the window and select Inspect (Q)
- Go to Network
- Reload the page
- Play the audio clip that you want
- Look on the list for the mp3 file URL for the audio clip under the File column
- Right click and select Open in New Tab
- Copy that URL and stick it into the audio field on your flashcard in Anki
- You’re done! The Forvo audio should now play whenever you view the flashcard
Some modifications that I had to make to my Japanese card layout to get it to work for Arabic:
- Arabic doesn’t need furigana, so I set it to stop pulling the reading from Yomitan. I’ve been manually putting the romanization that my instructor gave us in that field instead.
- Initially, I was all set to have just the Arabic without the romanization on the front of the card, but I decided to wait until we’ve formally learned the alphabet in our lessons, and then I’ll remove the romanization crutch from the front of the card and will use my deck to also practice reading each word until I have the alphabet down and can just include the audio without the romanization.
- It no longer pulls the context sentence in addition to the word (since most of the words I’m adding are just standalone).
- Added a “notes” section that contains all of the material the instructor gave us for each term, which shows on the back side of both recollection and recall cards.
- Kept the blue and red font colors from our instructor’s notes which indicate whether a saying is initiating an interaction or whether it’s a response. I went back and forth on this before deciding that I’ll try it out for now. I might eventually remove the colors to take away that clue and force myself to remember just from reading/listening to the phrase, but for learning them initially, it seemed like the best choice.
Here are what my cards look like currently (the HTML/CSS is a bit messy because there's some vestigial stuff left over from my Japanese cards, but at least on the surface they look okay):
Here’s the front:
Here’s the back:
It would probably be a good idea for them to look more substantially different from my Japanese cards so that I’m less likely to get the two languages confused, but I’m really happy with the aesthetic and don’t want to change it…
Here’s what I’m focusing on right now:
- Memorizing the common phrases/sentences we learned in the first lesson.
- Piecing together the letters and their sounds and learning how to read whole words by practicing with the initial set of vocabulary we learned.
- Practicing pronouncing the sounds we don’t have in English.
What I’m working toward:
- Getting comfortable enough with the alphabet that I can remove the romanization from the front of my flashcards, and eventually from the back of them as well.
- Being able to have simple spoken exchanges.
Our instructor also recommended we check out the song Habibi ya nour alaa’in and watch the film 3000 Nights (it’s on Netflix). I actually tried using Language Reactor for it, but I don’t think it had Arabic subtitles as an option, so that didn’t really work out, and I ended up watching it with only English subs (not that I’m really in a position to get a whole lot out of Arabic subtitles anyway).
I actually did catch a few words that I knew in 3000 Nights! Very simple ones, though, haha. I caught all of one sentence that I understood (“My name is ___”). I heard اسمِك and اسمي and مرحب and I recognized the name Nour from the word النور, and of course حبيبي (which I had to look up to confirm how to write haha).
I thought 3000 Nights was very good! Though also very sad. But it still managed to somehow maintain a tone of hope, despite everything.
Spanish
Not a whole lot of exciting happenings to report! I finished the week 10 reading for La Ciudad de las Bestias, and I’ve been listening to Radio Ambulante, though a bit less than usual because it’s been so hot out, it has been a lot harder to go on walks…
Something kind of funny is that I listened to the episode Soy marrón, and some of the stuff started to feel a bit familiar. A guy moving from Peru to a small, mostly white city in Maine and living there and working as a cook during the 2016 Trump election—how common could this experience be?? And then I realized part of the way in that the reason why it sounded familiar was that I’d heard the exact same guy interviewed on the Duolingo podcast (Episode 14: Piji y yo) 
.
The Duolingo episode focused on him and his dog Piji. Meanwhile, in Radio Ambulante, I think the dog gets mentioned in all of one sentence.
Well, there’s an easy and a hard version of his story out there if anyone wants to test their listening comprehension, haha.
