Just wanted to say that I’ve been following your progress on the periphery in Discord, but wanted to say formally how impressed I am with your efforts. I really hope Hyper Misao sees all your hard work!
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I love that twitter picture! So you cebar mate, I wonder if that will come in our book club book.
Your work ethic with the translation is really inspiring. I hope you’re not burning yourself out!
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Finished my tanka project (and my first Real Book™ in Japanese) successfully!
Also picked up some more real life responsibilities, so language learning has had to take a bit of a backseat lately 
.
I’ve been catching up on La Ciudad de las Bestias book club, but not as fast as I would like to be catching up. I feel like I’m more not falling further behind rather than catching up… 
Here are my week 2 thoughts, and my week 3 thoughts.
Besides that, pretty much all of the rest of my exposure to Spanish lately has been through listening to Radio Ambulante. There were a couple episodes I just listened to about Venezuela: Adiós, bolívar and El apagón. It got me thinking about Venezuela and the economic situation there.
Ten years ago, the thing that introduced me to the concept of hyperinflation was this Atlantic article called My Hyperinflation Vacation. The piece left an impression on me because it seemed like such a scummy rich person thing to do, basically exploiting another country’s misfortune and taking advantage of extreme economic inequality to get a cheap vacation for yourself without meaningfully helping the other country in any way…
I doubt Venezuela is a popular vacation spot even for the greediest and most callous of tourists, but I couldn’t help but think about that piece when reading about Venezuela off and on in the years that followed, just the weird things that hyperinflation can do to an economy.
My brother is a big Old School RunesScape player, and he’s how I found out that apparently the economic crisis in Venezuela has driven a lot of people to make a living by (illegally) gold farming in RuneScape (here’s an article about that).
So I thought about that a lot when listening to the Radio Ambulante episode on Venezuela and cryptocurrency. I wonder if I’ll eventually hear one about RuneScape, too…
I guess that’s all I have to say for this update! Hopefully I’ll be able to un-backburner Spanish at some point and get back to doing more reading again!
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Dang, they’ve got it paywalled. I need to see if I can find an archived version or something.
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Give this a shot 
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Oooh, very interesting. 
Thank you!
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Had an extremely stressful weekend last week and am still sort of recovering from that by taking it a bit easier this week. But I seriously am trying to get back to reading in Spanish more regularly now!
I only managed one chapter of La Ciudad de las Bestias over the past two weeks.
Besides that, I have listened to a bit more Radio Ambulante! The most recent episode I listened to was El conteo, which was about the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and the question of how to determine the number of people killed in a natural disaster like that.
Depressing episode!
It reminded me of a few things, the first being covid death counts and how the official count seems to be a massive under-representation of the actual numbers, because excess deaths have remained much higher than they were pre-covid, which suggests that covid is also contributing to other deaths that it might not be directly considered the cause of.
The other thing it reminded me of was the way that death counts can be politicized and minimized by politicians who don’t want to be responsible for them. There’s a certain current conflict in the world with death counts that appear to be way lower than they likely are in reality due to a certain government’s suppression of the process of acquiring those death counts…
But anyway, the podcast is still going pretty well, and it’s a good way to keep up my Spanish practice when I’m able to go out for a few walks each week but can’t keep up much else.
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death count
There were a lot of things that contributed to the death count at the height of the pandemic. Covid-19 infections, of course, but also the state of the hospitals, that were unable to do routine operations due to how many patients they had to deal with (and scheduled operations being delayed as well, because they couldn’t operate patients while they had Covid).
The following article from the WHO has a lot of interesting stats about the excess death toll during the pandemic, if you want to learn more about this.
Global excess deaths associated with COVID-19, January 2020 - December 2021
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death count
Interestingly, this study suggests that this is likely not the main reason:
If the primary explanation for these deaths were healthcare interruptions and delays in care, the non-COVID excess deaths would likely occur after a peak in reported COVID-19 deaths and subsequent interruptions in care, says study lead author Eugenio Paglino, a PhD student studying demography and sociology at UPenn. “However, this pattern was not observed nationally or in any of the geographic subregions we assessed,” Paglino says.
It’s actually surprisingly (maybe not surprisingly, haha, after that whole episode I listened to) a complicated and contentious subject, and there are multiple models of the data which sometimes come to different conclusions. Here’s The Economist’s model (if that link doesn’t work, try this) based on more recent data, which suggests that excess deaths remain 5% above pre-covid forecasts.
I think they actually just changed the methodology for estimating excess mortality in the wake of the pandemic, though I don’t really understand it enough to weigh in, haha.
My own guess as to what is happening is that it’s the cumulative effect of covid damaging people’s bodies (including immune dysregulation). So you get an increased risk for diabetes, heart attack, stroke, etc., as well as possible activation of latent tuberculosis and that sort of thing, and just a general increased susceptibility to a lot of stuff (or an increased chance of having more severe sickness). And covid wouldn’t be credited as the direct cause of those extra deaths, but is nonetheless surely a contributing factor…
The same article linked at the top of this post has come to the conclusion that many of the deaths are just covid deaths that went uncounted for various reasons:
Many of these geographical differences in death patterns are likely explained by differences in state policies, COVID death protocols, or political biases by local officials that influenced COVID policies, the researchers say. In rural areas, for example, COVID-19 testing was more limited, and political biases or stigma around COVID may have affected whether COVID-19 was listed on a death certificate. Conversely, reported COVID-19 deaths may have exceeded non-COVID excess deaths due to successful mitigation policies that encouraged physical distancing and masking, and likely lowered cases of other respiratory diseases. Certain state protocols, such as in Massachusetts, also enabled death investigators to list COVID-19 as an official cause of death within 60 days of a diagnosis (until March 2022), rather than the 30-day limit in other states.
I find it fascinating how something we tend to view as very hard set in stone objective data is actually entirely subject to local cultural practices and politics.
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death count
That’s one thing that at least I’m not surprised about at all. The pandemic has just been a bunch of conflicting opinions and conclusions one after the other from the start. Because this topic was heavily broadcasted, it turned into a political matter, and that’s where the science and the truth tend to get lost. Not all of the data is released, and researchers may already have a biased opinion from the start, so you end up with opposing conclusions.
(Just taking an example of that, last year my biology university teachers couldn’t agree on the whole cause of the start of the pandemic. There were basically three groups, two opposing groups that both had research supporting their opinion, and the third one that was less biased and thought that there was no certain answer.)
I definitely agree with you on that. A lot of people (me included) still have a messed up immune system from COVID-19 infection. There’s also an increased risk of new-onset asthma and the severity of the asthma and subsequently mortality rates are also increased. And like you said there are other risk increases, for diabetes (1, 2), strokes (3). That bit about latent tuberculosis reactivation is super interesting, somehow I’d never come across it, here’s an interesting paper describing just that.
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Long time, no update! Mostly I’ve been too busy to spend a lot of time on Spanish, so I haven’t really had much to update on, beyond some scattered thoughts on a few Radio Ambulante episodes, and my comments on the book club book (which I’m trying to keep to the actual threads).
Since my last update, I have finished the week 5, week 6, and week 7 book club readings for La Ciudad de las Bestias!
I also have a new tool:
Finally!! A popup dictionary for Spanish! I installed all the es-en dictionaries and all monolingual Spanish dictionaries available. I’m really pumped to have them; this’ll make it way easier to browse Spanish-language wikipedia and Amazon listings and such.
I also set up a third Yomitan profile, which is for… Arabic!
Long story short: I saw this post on twitter, and I forwarded it to a few of my local Palestinian friends, and we decided to try taking some lessons of Palestinian Arabic as a group because we could get a discount on them with 3-4 people. The others all know a bit of the language, so I’m at a slight disadvantage, but I’m pretty confident in my ability to figure out how to learn a language!
I had sort of toyed with the idea of learning Arabic at some point because I felt like it would balance nicely with English-Spanish-Japanese. But knowing how much time and work it takes to learn a language to any degree of real proficiency, I thought I would probably end up stopping after Spanish and Japanese, so I didn’t really consider it seriously (and Arabic isn’t a huge help for pro wrestling like the other languages are, so I had less of an incentive to want to learn…).
However, circumstances have changed, and now I know several Palestinians who live in my area, including at least one person who isn’t super proficient in English, and I also see a lot of Palestinian Arabic on my social media feed and in the news and such.
So my goal is to make it to A1 level with Palestinian Arabic. Specifically, I want to:
- Be able to read Arabic
- Understand basic grammar and sentence structure and know some core vocabulary
- Be able to have very basic conversations
(I’ll reevaluate at that point whether I want to continue sinking time into learning it.)
It’ll be honestly a totally different focus from my Spanish/Japanese studies because I’ll be taking classes with an actual teacher (assuming we’re able to get the scheduling worked out for that), and presumably will be getting speaking practice and all of that. I don’t know if I’ll even make it to a point where I can really read books.
In preparation for the classes, I’ve been trying to familiarize myself with the alphabet, using my old friend Anki to learn the letters, just how I taught myself hiragana and katakana initially. Here’s the deck I found. I’ve been adding new cards at a rate of about 2-3 letters a day.
The other thing I want to do before the first class is familiarize myself with the pronunciation for all of the sounds. I’d love to find a youtube series or something for that, but haven’t gone looking yet.
I don’t really know what kind of time frame to expect for this. It’ll depend heavily on the schedules of my friends and everyone’s budgets. We might only be able to do the classes during the summer. I’m planning on making the most of the time that we have, but still keeping it on the backburner.
I do actually own an ebook with some Arabic (and a (print) Japanese book with a works cited page that cites some Arabic works, haha). But I anticipate both of those (poetry and primary source research) being quite a bit beyond the level of Arabic proficiency I’m likely to ever reach…
I guess you never know, though!
I certainly never thought I’d reach the point where I’m comfortably intermediate/advanced in Japanese/Spanish!
I’m torn on where exactly to put updates for Arabic (whether here or in my WaniKani Japanese study log). I suppose Natively is probably a better choice, haha, so I’m leaning toward using this study log for Palestinian Arabic as well.
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I really hoped this next paragraph was going to describe the growth of Palestinian pro wrestling but sadly that wasn’t where this was heading!
Seriously though good luck with the Arabic. Even if you just learn the basics of how the language works and the how the writing system works that’s going to be an interesting journey. I have a couple of Arabic speakers in my English book club. When we read Before the coffee gets cold one of them picked up a copy in Arabic to read and it was really interesting looking through the book with her.
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I’m looking forward to reading your updates and your journey! I know very little about any flavor of Arabic, so it’ll be fun to learn something new!
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Small update! I’m about to have a busy and somewhat stressful week, so I’m not sure I’ll get much language study done in the next few days.
Spanish
I finished the week 8 reading for La Ciudad de las Bestias! I’d hoped to catch up a little more, but… well, I’ll take what I can get, at this point.
I’ve been listening to Radio Ambulante as usual! Definitely doing more listening than reading, as of late.
Arabic
We met with Ahmed, the Palestinian Arabic instructor that I mentioned in my last post! We now have a time and date scheduled for our lessons, so it is officially Happening!!
It’ll still be a while yet before we start, though, as one of my friends will be going on vacation soon, so we decided to start in early July. But I’m excited! I think probably the class will focus a bit more on speaking than the other skills, as that’s what one of my friends is most interested in learning, but we’re all pretty open to learn whatever.
Ahmed seems really nice, and he says he teaches the culture along with the language, which I’m especially looking forward to. He worked with Project Hope before the war, but his old job is sort of indefinitely on hold, which is why he’s teaching Arabic online now.
I’m really glad I saw that tweet and decided to ask my friends if they wanted to do this with me, because I feel like it’s an opportunity we might never get again. Despite the awful circumstances that led to this happening, I’m glad we can get something positive and restorative out of it.
Ahmed said that with Palestinian Arabic, we should be able to communicate pretty easily with people from Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, but it’s apparently pretty different from Egyptian Arabic. He said Palestinians can understand most of Egyptian Arabic (largely just due to having more exposure to it through like movies and such), but it’s often harder for Egyptians to understand Palestinian Arabic.
I actually have an Egyptian friend, and she commented “شكراً يا أمورة” after something I commented today, and I was about to be like “I haven’t learned enough to meaningfully read that 
” but then I remembered I had Arabic on Yomitan now, so I was able to read the first two words, but not the last.
My friend said it’s Egyptian slang (“amoora”), and it comes from “amore” (Italian for love) and also sounds like “amar” (Arabic for moon). It’s a pet name, haha.
I’ll probably end up asking her “do you say this in Egypt?” about random things I learn in my class 
.
In any case, to sum up my progress so far:
I’ve (tentatively) learned the alphabet through Anki! I have all the cards in circulation, at least; I still make plenty of mistakes on the reviews .
I also watched this video on Arabic alphabet pronunciation. I’m going to keep trying to work on that (and the alphabet itself) before our first class.
Ahmed said that he’ll give us homework after each lesson, haha, including vocab to memorize, so I’ll be putting that into Anki (and will try to teach my local friends how to use Anki, probably, lol). I’m unsure if I’ll have to reduce my Japanese flash card load to make up for this or not. I suppose it’ll depend on how many Arabic words I get given each week to memorize.
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I’ve been extremely depressed and also stressed, so I’m trying to return to a more normal study schedule, but it’s been taking a bit of time.
I tinkered around with Yomitan a bit more because I wanted to see if I could get it set up to pull Forvo audio for other languages in addition to Japanese. And the answer is YES!
See here for more info. This worked perfectly for me for both Spanish and Arabic.
I think I’m going to add the Yomitan info to the first post in this log just to keep things a bit more organized.
Spanish
Finished the week 9 reading for La Ciudad de las Bestias! Not a lot of thoughts to share on that one.
I also had a small language victory while tabling at the local Pride festival. A man came up to our table speaking Spanish, and I wasn’t able to really say anything back (the subject concerned foreign politics that were way too complicated for my limited speaking ability anyway), but I was able to understand pretty much the entire conversation between him and the person at our table who was fluent.
The last time I heard someone have a conversation in Spanish near me, my listening ability was a lot worse, and I was only able to catch some of it, so it felt pretty good being able to more or less follow a conversation.
Not that that does me much good if I can’t talk, though…
Arabic
Just a small update, as we haven’t started our classes yet (we’re starting them next week).
Our teacher recommended we watch the documentary 5 Broken Cameras (2011), which is on youtube for free, for some exposure to the language, and it took me two days to actually finish it, but it was incredible, albeit very harrowing. If you can stomach it, I really recommend it.
Everything the filmmaker included had so much obvious care and thought put into it. It’s phenomenal. I can’t even imagine thinking of things like framing your shots and such when filming some of the stuff he filmed in this. Just an incredible dedication to the task of documenting this.
Language-wise, I mostly just tried to focus on the overall sound and rhythm of it. Unlike with Japanese and Spanish, I’ve had relatively little exposure to spoken Arabic in general, much less specifically the Palestinian dialect.
Our teacher says he likes to assign films, so I’ll try to share some of the ones that I can!
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!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.
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Still having a rough time mentally and emotionally, so my language study has been down overall these past few weeks, but I’m still going.
Spanish
Not much to report on. I finished the week 11 reading for La Ciudad de las Bestias, and listened to a little more Radio Ambulante.
(I’m forcing myself to wait until I’ve made progress in the book club before I can update this log, haha)
Arabic
I think I’ve had three lessons since my last update? So far, in addition to some basic greetings and simple exchanges, we’ve covered masculine and feminine nouns (singular, dual, and plural), including a few broken plurals (irregular plural), personal pronouns, numbers 0-19, and most of the alphabet.
My Anki deck is still trucking along, though I have to add quite a few words manually, and it’s not always easy to find audio for them. My teacher actually sent an audio recording of him pronouncing the words for 0-10, so I chopped that up in Audacity and inserted those clips on my Anki cards for the numbers instead of fetching the audio from Forvo.
Unfortunately the Arabic decks I have for Yomitan right now aren’t a whole lot of use, so I don’t think the decks that are currently available provide much support for Levantine dialects specifically.
I’d like to at some point find a better dictionary that I can reference, but I’m not sure what kinds of options are available to me in terms of quick lookups. But that’s a “down the line” problem, haha, as right now I’m just focusing on learning the words that are being taught to me directly.
Some interesting stuff I’ve learned: Palestinian Arabic doesn’t really use the “th” sounds that are in the Arabic alphabet (ث and ذ). This is convenient for me haha because I was having trouble differentiating them.
Also, unfortunately, there is currently no way in Palestinian Arabic to refer to an individual who uses they/them pronouns. I asked my Egyptian friend if the same was true of Egyptian Arabic, and she said unfortunately yes. None of her fellow queer Arab friends are nonbinary, so she’s not sure what people use in that situation.
During that conversation, another friend linked The Queer Arab Glossary, which is a book that just came out! I’m planning on getting a copy at some point, because it looks super cool! It has over 300 words from a variety of dialects, including Levantine dialects.
Learning Arabic is already paying off! I watched Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi’s Palestine course, and when I tuned in for the last session, I realized I was able to understand all of the greetings Dr. Rabab said at the beginning, and was also able to understand a tiny bit of Arabic spoken later in the video (for this session, several of the panelists did their portion in Arabic, which Dr. Rabab translated afterward) when Sana’ Daqqa’s daughter Milad joined her for a bit haha and Dr. Rabab asked the child “كيفِك؟” (“How are you?”).
I’m honestly really glad that I started learning Arabic despite everything else I have going on. Learning a language is very grounding, and it helps me stay connected to parts of the world that I am geographically distant from.
I guess I’ll end today with a couple songs that my teacher recommended we listen to! One of them is Ana Dammi Falastini (My blood is Palestinian) by Mohammad Assaf, a famous Palestinian singer from Gaza. The other is Kifak Inta by Fairoz, one of the most famous Arab singers.
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Hi!!
Sorry for spamming your learning log but I was recommended something I feel like will be useful to you as well!!
This is a Jordanian YouTuber making videos from his travels
Since he’s speaking the Jordanian dialect it’s super close to the west bank Palestinian dialect!
You can hear him speaking super clearly so even when you don’t understand well you can still catch phrases and stuff you learned, plus his videos are fun so it’s worth a recommendation
Downside - no subs for translation nor Arabic subs to learn from what he’s saying that is less clear or unfamiliar
I used to use playaling for this kind of things but they’re 
now
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Thank you for the recommendation!! Without subtitles, it might be a while yet before I can get a whole lot of use out of audio content like this, but I’ll put it on my list of resources for sure!
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Here’s a slightly overdue study log update:
Spanish
I finished the week 12 reading for La Ciudad de las Bestias, and I’m not sure I got any podcast listening time in? It’s just been too hot, and I’ve been either asleep or too busy during the slightly cooler parts of the day…
Arabic
We’ve had two more lessons since my last update! I can now say numbers 0-99 and have learned attached pronouns! We’ve been practicing super basic sentences using some of the vocabulary we’ve learned.
I’m still not very good at reading—the class so far has been pretty speaking-based (so maybe listening practice will actually be more accessible to me than reading practice, haha).
Here are a couple songs our instructor shared with us: Talat Daqat (Three Heartbeats) (lyric translation here), and this song by famous Lebanese singer Ziad Rahbani (lyric translation here). I really liked this one! I thought the discussion in the comments of the translation was interesting.
Also, my Egyptian friend looked into Egypt’s indie pro wrestling scene and found two promotions with any sort of digital footprint. One is PWO - Pro Wrestling Organisation, and the other is EWR - Egypt Wrestling.
EWR has VODs available on youtube, apparently. Here’s a recent one, with amazing 360p quality.
For a hot second, I considered using these as eventual listening practice haha (they have Arabic commentary), but I think expanding beyond Levantine dialects might have to be a far future goal for me…
The search for a Palestinian pro wrestling scene remains. Maybe if there isn’t any pro wrestling there, I’d have luck finding some from Jordan or from somewhere else that speaks a dialect I might have a slight hope of understanding .
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