languages

Language Learning Crash Course: from slightly more than zero to slightly less than advanced

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A colleague at work asked me for some tips on learning German and her situation and goals were fairly common so I thought I'd write up some notes here.

For the specific scenario under consideration, and to ground what follows: my colleague's mother tongue is not English, but she wants to learn German since she now lives there. She's interested in all the skills and wants to be able to read complex literature and philosophy, for example, but in the short-term building up spoken abilities is the main focus and intention. She knows a few words / phrases here and there but not too much more than that.

🪨 Context / Foundations

I'll start with some general context and foundations that I think should form the basis for what follows:

  • If you're about to invest a bunch of time / effort (and probably money, either in the form of your time or for books/teachers) into learning a language you should make the investment in a spaced repetition system like Anki. It'll repay the effort you put in and is anyway a more efficient way to learn.
  • Use focused feedback of various kinds to improve your ability to do things with your target language. This can take many forms, but it's a core principle that you should keep returning to. For example, this might mean feedback on pronunciation, or sentences you're writing, or even words that you're studying (in the form of active recall with Anki).
  • Pick good quality materials to support your study. For some languages (popular / commonly-spoken languages) these will probably be cheap. For lower-resourced languages these are often eye-waveringly expensive. Bit the bullet. Good materials make a big difference, though it's worth taking advice from someone who's studied the same language as to whether a particular book is good or not.
  • Stay laser focused in what you do / apply the 80:20 principle. With language learning, especially at the early stages, there's a fair amount of boilerplate work that just needs to be done (see most of the things in the first 'True Basics' section below) and there are strong reasons why you should do those things etc. Basically: stick with these things and don't deviate too much. (This only applies if you're trying to be as efficient as possible in your language learning. It's entirely within reason that you'd not need to be efficient, in which case many options open up!)
  • Related: Be clear about what it means to level up. There are a million and one things that you could do at any single point during your language learning and it helps to be clear about what you're doing and why, then work on it, complete it and then reflect and move onto the next thing.
  • Ingest comprehensible input where possible. This is a deep topic, but the basic idea here is that you should try as much as possible to read authentic materials that are almost completely within your capacity/level to understand. Ideally they should be interesting materials and you should be motivated to understand their contents. (Note that spoken conversations can be comprehensible input as well!)

These are the core foundations that I (with a half-dozen languages under my belt and experience learning bits of quite a few more, plus lots of time spent reading about and trying out language learning methods) believe are at the core of any efforts you should take. If any of the above are unclear, it can be useful to clarify (with me, or with some other source) but don't get too lost down the (deep) rabbit-hole of methodology as it will detract from your original goal.

All of what follows assumes that you're serious about your language studies and are willing to invest some time into it. To my mind, this means something like 30-60 minutes every day minimum, six days per week. You'll see the most progress early on and it can actually help to invest a little more time early on since seeing your fast progress will increase your motivation in turn, but only you know your circumstances and what works.

🍼 True Basics

This is the phase where you start from nothing and no knowledge to where you have learnt some of the most commonly used words and phrases as well as have a good understanding of the pronunciation and basic grammar. Depending on how much time you put in, this phase should take somewhere on the order of 2-5 weeks.

The things you should work your way to accomplish here include:

  • learning some basic spoken phrases that you'll use frequently (think 'thank you', 'good bye', 'how much is …', counting from 0-100, 'what does … mean' and so on). You can get these (and the pronunciation for them) from many places on line or in a basic phrasebook.
  • learn roughly 600 of the most frequently-used words for your target language. Many languages have something called a 'frequency dictionary' (or an equivalent list published online) which orders the words of that language in order of how common those words are. There are different approaches to exactly which list to pick (go with a Gabe Wyner 625 list if it exists (here's an extract/preview for German), otherwise go with the Routledge frequency lists, otherwise try to find something else!), but basically you are aiming to bootstrap your language abilities. The 'why' behind this is that first 500-100 words make up a really high % of the words that you'll see in any text (80+% depending on the difficulty of the language) so if you invest in those common words earlier you'll be in a good place to progress forward.

You'll want these materials to end up into Anki so you can continue to be tested on them so you don't forget them. Here, for example is a card I created for a word that means 'ripped / torn' in Arabic.

 
 

I get shown the picture and then need to come up with the word in Arabic for that concept. Note that I chose a quirky image on purpose.

  • Learn the alphabet: (I'm thinking of languages like Russian / Arabic etc here, and not something like Japanese / Chinese). You're in this for the long-haul, and most comprehensible input that is efficient for you to ingest is in the form of written texts so you should just bite the bullet and learn the alphabet and how to pronounce it. It's not that hard! Even an alphabet with a bad reputation like Arabic can be learned in a weekend.
  • Get a basic understanding of some core grammar. Good phrasebooks will usually have a section where they spend a few pages outlining how the language works with some basic grammar. (i.e. things like 'verbs always go at the end of sentences' or 'nouns take a bunch of different endings depending on the role a word has in the sentence', and so on.) You're not trying to master any of this, but you are trying to bootstrap your awareness of some of the core structures of how a language works.
  • Try to listen to the language being used / spoken. If possible, try to make whatever you're listening to also something that you can mostly understand. (For some people this might be family or friends conversations, for others this might be other audio materials at a beginner level.) The goal here is to start to get the sound and feel for the rhythms of the language to bury its way into your ear.

How / What?: Basics

There are many (many) options at the total beginner level. My go-to sources / methods are some combination or selection of the following. It's really hard to give generic advice here so YMMV, but all these are suitable for this level:

  • Michel Thomas course (if it exists for your language, do all courses / extensions that exist (usually 2 levels plus a vocab extension pack)). These are audio courses that will give you a solid basic foundation. As an alternative or sometimes additional option, you might want to try Pimsleur courses (again, if they exist). These are not cheap, but they're a good way to get going.
  • Frequency dictionary and/or lists: Gabe Wyner's Fluent Forever app is based around the concept of frequency dictionary lists so if it supports your language then you can either use that app or just get the raw word list and create your own flashcards + study those basic words.
  • Something like a Duolingo / Drops / Language Transfer course if it exists for your language. These are a double-edge sword since Duolingo by now has quite extensive courses available for popular languages. I wouldn't recommend using it as your core source of studies because the likelihood is that you'll drop away from your studies before completing it. That said, they do have mostly solid materials and they have spaced repetition (of some kind) built in so if you're someone who lives to complete things and can invest a bit of time into moving through the materials quickly, then these kinds of courses aren't the worst idea. (But definitely see them as a means to the wider end and not the core of what you do.) If you're someone who where possible prefers to study / learn away from technology / apps, try the excellent 'Assimil' books / course as the equivalent for this. (Note that this section potentially takes you very far off from the 2-5 weeks estimate I mentioned above. Only you know the extent to which you can afford to really invest in foundations.)
  • Very easy readers. Again, if your language is popular then you might have access to these kinds of readers. Sometimes they're developed for children, but other times they're also available for adult students too. You're looking for something (it'll often be advertised as such) with a small / limited vocabulary size of words used. This is on the border with the next phase of study, so this can and will also be part of what you do next.

📚 Invest in sentences and your comprehensible input

At this point, somewhere in the middle of the basic phase and on your way to the next phase, you'll want to start investing into generating your own sentence-level comprehensible input. One way is to take the 600+ word frequency list and use those words as the basis of making basic sentences. Note that these can and will be really basic. You will likely want to do this in collaboration either with a teacher, or a friend or someone who can correct the things you're writing / producing. All these sentences and materials should then be fed into your spaced repetition system / Anki. For example, here's the back of a card where I'm being tested to produce a particular phrase that was missing (where the ... is in the sentence).

 
 

There's a picture above it to jog my memory if the sentence doesn't. And you can't hear it here, but there's also audio for the missing word / phrase. You'll want to be generating a lot of these kind of cards, not only because vocabulary learning in the context of actual sentences / real language is extremely powerful but also because it solidifies the root grammar structures, syntax and common ways of building language in your mind.

🚘 Middle Earth: Getting Independent

Some people actually stop here. If you're just going on holiday and you want to be able to be active using the language, understand some basic things and have some simple conversations, you actually don't need too much more. Everything you do from here on is because you are interested in levelling up and (eventually) reaching greater comprehension of a wider variety and level of materials.

This middle stage is where a lot of people get stuck. It's important to know that the intermediate plateau is a real thing and you will need strategies to not end up here forever (or quit, which will also eventually happen if you stay here for too long). (I wrote a whole book about strategies to get out of the intermediate plateau for Arabic, but the first section of the book applies to any other language as well. The book is available for free along with a bunch of audio interviews with language learning experts.)

The specifics of what you do in this middle stage is also heavily dependent on what your interests / motivations are for studying this language. In other words, are you mostly interested in getting really good at spoken conversations + listening, or do you actually not care about spoken language at all and mainly want to be able to read authentic materials without ever needing to to speak to anyone?

Core parts of this stage:

  • continuing down the road of the frequency dictionary. Probably at the end of this stage you want to have mastered at least the 2000 most frequently used words, but ideally you'd get through most of the top 5000 most frequently used words. There are lots of ways that you can accomplish this, and it shouldn't just be a case of you rote memorising the words. Everything you do in this phase should be intertwined with comprehensible input of some kind, and vocabulary should always be learned within the context of authentic language but there are lots of ways of doing that so you'll have to figure out what applies best for your situation and needs.
  • collocations / context: at this stage you want to be maximising your input to the core structures and ways your target language is used. Most words don't exist in a vacuum, and the further you get down the frequency list (or the more advanced your language source materials get) the more small bits of context and shifts in how individual words are used will make more difference. All of this is just me repeating that you should be reading and exposing yourself to lots of pieces of language.
  • skill-dependent exercises and approaches: this is unfortunately vague, but depending on your interests and motivation you'll want to do one thing or another. For speaking, to give some examples, usually what I recommend is that you tackle a series of 'islands' that are defined by your interests. This means starting with a situation or a kind of conversation that you know you want to be really comfortable having. Perhaps you want to be able to talk about your daily routine, or maybe you want to be able to talk about food and the things you eat or cook. Then there are a series of things you'd do to prepare for mastering this 'island': gathering relevant vocabulary, thinking through the kinds of questions and/or answers that would come up during the conversation, generating some possible options or prepared answers or questions, practicing those with yourself and then later others, and so on. But really there are a million different ways to slice this depending on your interests and specific circumstances.

How / What?

What does this mean in specific? Some variation or combination of the following would be common:

  • reading a lot in graded readers (hopefully these exist for your target language)
  • graded listening: again, these hopefully exist for your language
  • italki lessons or targeted spoken practice with a teacher (depending on what specific approaches you take)
  • Clozemaster or Glossika: these are two tools that allow you to work your way through the most frequently used words using spaced repetition and context-rich language selections. Both also offer some kind of audio component. You might not need this if you have a solid method / rhythm already going with your use of Anki, but it's worth trying out at least to see if it clicks.
  • writing sentences / paragraphs, then having them corrected, and then using the corrected versions of the language in Anki along with cloze deletion (a variation of what I showed above with the sentence and then a word or phrase missing that you have to guess) to practice the language used in a particular sentence.

😎 Onwards: Independent Study Land

At this point in your journey, you're at the B2 level and maybe soon to be C1. Your goal and process at this point is independent study: you're choosing materials and areas motivated by your interests. If you're still going + studying and you reached this level, the process never ends from here on out. It's just an ongoing set of little deep-dives into lots of different areas depending on your needs and interests.

Everything at this level is dependent on the skills you're working on, and your needs in terms of vocabulary / topic areas. Your vocabulary goals will be to move from the 5000 most frequent words on out into the next 5000-10,000 words after that, but usually it doesn't make sense to look at a literal frequency list for the words beyond 5000. For starters, they often don't exist, and your 'next words' will differ from person to person. You'll likely have a bunch of sub-areas that you get good at beyond the core 5000. For example, for me, I got really good at medical vocabulary (cardiology + neurology) in Dutch but I'm much weaker in other areas. The specific areas you spend time on will be driven by your needs and interests.

How / What?

Almost everything here is driven by specific needs, but it will involve and include:

  • lots of learner-driven comprehensible input
  • needs-driven activities (whether you're still focused on spoken prowess vs reading vs listening vs writing)
  • open-ended practice like the kinds of tasks recommended by my (free) CoachBot self-study tool.

Going deeper

Most of what I wrote above was some concrete thoughts on paper that would serve as the basis for a conversation and I'm fully aware that lots of details were buried within or barely mentioned. Usually what I'd do after sketching out this overview is drill down into your individual situation and start to sketch out a more specific / precise plan, but this is a blog and I don't do coaching professionally any more!

Nevertheless, it's useful to be aware of the bigger picture and I hope that this blog served as a highly general overview that can drive further exploration and experiments in your own language-learning journey!

Getting Out of the Intermediate Language Plateau: Arabic Edition / Principles

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[This is part of a series on getting out of a language-learning plateau at the intermediate-advanced level. Check out the other parts here.]

Seasoned language learners are familiar with the concept of the 'language plateau'. If you're learning a second language for the first time, you will inevitably reach a point in your studies where your progress seems to flatten. You will find this place and period extremely frustrating.

When you are in your plateau, it's hard to improve because you're already at a point of (some kind of) self-sufficiency. You can express yourself. You understand most of what is going on in a conversation or TV series you watch. You can write things and people will understand what you're saying. You could (and many do) stop your studies at this point and still be 'functional' in the language.

Getting out of this flat, dead zone is what I want to talk about today. It's hard, but it's by no means impossible, and making this kind of progress is possibly the most valuable work you'll do in your language studies, because all of it will be specifically tailored to your needs.

The starting point, though, is to identify your current status. What can you do? You don't (necessarily) need to take a formal language certification test to get a grade, though that can sometimes be useful. The kind of measurements you want to take are more subjective. You want to take stock of your capacity in certain situations, what level you are able to achieve in different contexts (your skills in reading will be different from writing vs listening or speaking, for example) and you want also to assess your experience on the cultural level as well -- i.e. how much experience do you have navigating all the unspoken parts of culture, whether that is body language, or behaviours and so on.

Principles of Skill Acquisition

Now a slight detour into some more general principles of skill acquisition. Some of this is derived from my own personal experience, other parts from interviews with experts in this field (such as my conversation with K. Anders Ericsson, who more or less invented the field of expert performance studies), and other parts still from reading a bunch of books on the subject.

Three things are relevant here:

1) Stretch

When you're learning a new skill, you want to step outside your comfort zone. This is usually difficult work, and work that is mentally (and possibly emotionally) taxing. Thus, if you want to get better at speaking in Arabic, you'll need to speak more, but at the beginning this practice (i.e. talking with other people) will feel pretty horrible, simply because you're not used to doing it. It's a paradox that you need to do the thing to get better at doing the thing. It is this difficulty, pushing yourself a little past what you're capable of doing, that allows for personal growth. (I wrote about this in an entirely different context a few weeks ago with respect to my attempts to get better at climbing.)

2) Lots of practice coupled with speedy feedback

These two parts (practice and feedback) go together. It isn't practice alone that will allow you to improve, but rather the combination of making efforts to use new skills alongside getting some kind of feedback that tells you when you're getting it wrong vs when you're not. An implication of this, too, is the reality that this kind of practice is going to involve you making lots of mistakes. This can feel crappy, especially when you're getting immediate feedback on exactly when this is happening. You need to adopt a flexible mindset, if possible, in which you see the mistakes as indicators of growth rather than as any kind of personal or intellectual failures on your part.

3) Know what you're practicing and focus on that

This is basically Ericsson's principle of "deliberate practice":

"Rather than chilling out in the comfort of skills you've already acquired, as an expert-to-be, you're relentless about heading to the frontier of your abilities. The practice shouldn't be so difficult that it overwhelms you—that would be depressingly demotivating, but not so easy that you're unconsciously languishing. In other words, you're arranging for flow, that space where you're right at the boundary of your abilities."

See also this summary of the routines that 'experts' tend to have around deliberate practice:

They can only engage in practice without rest for around an hour.
They practice in the morning with a fresh mind.
They practice the same amount every day, including on weekends.
They only have four to five hours of deliberate practice a day.
If they don't get enough rest, they can get overtraining injuries or burnout.

If you're hoping that 'using the language' in a general and non-specific way will get you out of your plateau, you'll be disappointed. It's perfectly possible to exist in the plateau zone without improvement ad infinitum. If you want to improve at a certain skill, you'll need to isolate that element and focus on it in a targeted way. This can be vocabulary, or speaking about a certain topic, or even something as small as 'using conditional sentences'. Whatever it is, you'll only get better if you concentrate your efforts.

Customisation & Your Individual Needs

Learning languages at the post-intermediate level will be a different experience from what you are used to in the early stages. Early on, you're doing a great deal of necessary-but-boring work to learn basic patterns, vocabulary and grammar.

Once you have mastered that, and you can explain yourself in most basic contexts, you reach the point where you have to customise. There's a great deal of science and research behind this claim. Check out this talk, by the always stimulating Alexander Arguelles, for an overview of some of that research.

You'll need to pick which areas you're most interested in. This is the hard work of advanced language studies -- you pick one area or context, conquer it, and then pick another area and repeat. This fulfils the princicle of focus that I mentioned above.

To give an example from my own studies. My current big push for Arabic is to be able to read serious fiction (i.e. short stories and novels written for native speakers). I've written previously that this was a personal goal, but various realities of how modern literature is written really make it hard to take the leap into complex native-reader-level fiction (especially novels). Arab writers like to use many synonyms (for poetic effect, or perhaps as an attempt at pretension?) for words, so when reading I often find myself stuck referring to dictionaries the whole time. Fortunately, a new textbook offering graded literature at just that 'stretch' level was released recently, which is allowing me an entry point into that world. None of the texts are simplified, and the language is hard and the number of unknown words is pretty large, but it's not too far down the scale of difficulty.

On Making a Self-Study Plan

My next post will cover and offer a host of suggestions for resources you can use to get out of this plateau / dead zone. Before you start reading through and diving into things that seem interesting, I'd strongly advise you take the time to figure out your specific goals. "Improve my Arabic" is not a useful goal. It's too unspecific. Even "improve my spoken Arabic" may not be particularly useful at the intermediate-advanced level. Once you figure out your goal, write it down somewhere. Maybe stick it to your wall or on the inside of your notebook. It's good to be reminded why we're doing the work.

Once you have your goal, then you want to set yourself small targeted bursts or challenges to push out into your stretch zone. You don't want these challenges to feel like you're straining against the limits of what you are capable. You want it to be just challenging enough that you feel uncomfortable, but not so much that you are constantly questioning yourself and your abilities in any kind of fundamental sense.

The scale of these challenges will be pretty variable, so examples will span a range of tasks from taking a week to learn and read deeply in a niche topic, to something more longer-term (over six months, perhaps) like my modern literature challenge. The characteristic that you need to look for, however, is that you'll be able to tell when you're finished with the challenge. Part of defining the goal is finding a specific (and somewhat measurable) definition of what it means to have achieved what you want.

Then the rest of the trick is basically keeping moving, tracking your progress and achievements along the way. There are various ways of doing this, some of which will depend on what else you have done in this regard. You can add in things like Beeminder to encourage compliance and regularity, or you can do that in other ways.

When I work with people 1-on-1 to learn a language, a lot of what we do is figuring out this kind of ongoing goal setting and progress assessment. (If you want to learn more about this, click here and read through what I offer).

The next posts will offer a roadmap to the different resources available to the intermediate student of Arabic and some of the ways you can utilise these resources. It won't be exhaustive, but I'm pretty sure that most will find something of use in them. Feel free to get in touch if you have specific things you want me to tackle in terms of skill development in Arabic.

Language Learner's Journal: Meaningful Leisure

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[This is a continuation of Taylor's blog series where she details some of the week-in-week-out lessons that she learns through her Arabic studies and coaching work together with me. For other posts in the series, click here.] 

If the first phase of my Arabic study in Jordan was intensive textbook fusha and the second was track-switching ammiya classes, this third and current could be called meaningful leisure, or, hanging out around town a lot and making friends. 

When I went to Bombay for an extended stay in 2010, a journalism colleague gave me a piece of advice: "Take everyone up on their offer to hang out with you." It may sound "duh," but over the years living abroad, I've seen how foreigners spend their free time in ways that often diverge from how residents in a given city do so. When we, as gringos in Rio, may have wanted to go to foreign film festivals or paragilding over the beach, many of our Brazilian peers would be going to baby showers, a classmate's thesis defense, or Outback Steakhouse. All of those activities are great ones, and I think the spirit of my colleague's advice was: If you want to get to know a culture, let your host take the lead and show you how they spend their free time.

That means over the past few weeks, I've sat on the sidewalk in front of a gift shop with a delightful young sculptor and a store clerk, my partners in very unstructured language exchanges that break when one of them needs to pop into the shop to attend a client. I went for a 6:30 a.m. workout with two of the fastest runners in Amman, a pair of brothers I met at a sunset race in Wadi Rum as we waited in the dunes watching for headlamps of other runners finishing. I went to a capoeira performance at Jadal cafe that was held in commemoration of the nakba; I was pleased with how accessible the discussion after the performance was for me, particularly when an older man in the audience vigorously questioned the capoeristas as to why they needed to do someone else's sport when they could do dabke.

Alex often talks about "islands" of vocabulary, and I thought about that as I spent more time with the same people and can make good guesses about the words they're using. (As I crossed the finished line at the race, other runners asked me ايش كان مركزك؟ though I certainly hadn't run fast enough to place. It was satisfying, though, to deduce what they were saying.) The store clerk and I talk often about money and salaries, since she hustles to work two jobs to help her family out.

I could be more purist; I speak plenty of English in these interactions. I'm still searching for the point of equilibrium between taking advantage of each opportunity I get to speak in Arabic while (of course!) having genuine friendships with peers with whom I share interests (running, yoga, current events, feminism, vegetarianism, pets). Plenty of the vocabulary and references regarding those topics are in English, not to mention the people who are interested in them often read and speak in English about them. I don't believe every friendship needs to be instrumentalized for one's language-learning goals (though I believe even more strongly that such an attitude should not be a lofty cover for native English speakers kicking back and relaxing). When I told Alex about my happy sidewalk sessions, which qualify more as bilingual shooting-the-shit than a proper language exchange, he said: You're doing the real thing, rather than practicing for it.

Some working notes, now, on practice:

I've been happy with my second time around testing out language exchanges; I've used the website Conversation Exchange, which I had suspected could be out of use by its retro web design but is actually popping. I'm pretty strict about where I meet the person, i.e., it needs to be as quiet as possible (a first exchange at Indoor cafe across from the University of Jordan was really hard to decipher and, from my point of view, turned into disjointed monologues rather than a conversation because I couldn't hear her well).

I think the exchanges, for my current level, are less experimental zones and more consolidation ones. That is to say, I don't risk and try to reach for vocabulary I'm shaky on but work with what I know decently. That's why I like coupling the exchanges with private classes, which I go to twice a week and are a better place for reaching and experimenting. I also think that in a language exchange it is useful to ask my partner "is the way I said that correct?" but not productive to ask "why?" I save those questions for my teacher.

Alex encouraged me to discover certain transition phrases (على فكرة... على كل حال... بالرغم من) and put them into practice in my speech, which give the impression of being more fluent and conversant than I am. This has been a fun exercise with my private teacher, since I take the English phrases I want and try to describe to her a situation that I might use them.

I'm on board with the many lines of criticism telling us that we need to make an active effort to start unplugging our lives before we turn into cyborgs; that said, having a round of friends here I chat with on Facebook or Whatsapp has indeed been great practice for seeing spelled out how people are saying what I hear each day. In conversations, I still feel like I rarely could repeat back word-for-word what someone has said to me, even if I usually get the message through key words and context.

I bought Diwan Baladna, an ammiya vocabulary book organized by subject matter. I really like it – my hope is that it will help me turn a lot of passive vocabulary into active vocabulary. I have a quibble with the audio component (read too fast in long audio files that make it tedious to isolate the word I want. And having sample sentences is far better than English translations!).

And finally, as per Alex's encouragement, I continue to avoid dictionaries and translation apps. I make ample use of Reverso Context, but only after I've read a message or passage several times through, and usually I'm using it to confirm my guess of a word's meaning is true. Especially when it comes to Whatsapp and chatting, the majority of messages I am receiving are ones that involve words I know well (Want to meet at this time? How far did you run today? I have foul and rice my mom made, want some? It's veg.)

On Reading in Arabic: The Evidence

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[This is the second post in a series on the importance of reading when studying Arabic (or any other language). Read the first post here.]

It is notoriously difficult to study and show which are the most efficient methods to study second languages. For starters, everyone is slightly different, so it's hard to compare between individuals. Learning a language is also such an involved pursuit (taking place over all hours of the day, and in the mind, where microscope or dictaphone can't usefully reach) that it is impractical to follow the student for all twenty-four hours of the day.

Having given the pitch for why I think reading is so important for students of Arabic, today I wanted to summarise a study that was carried out from 1970-1977. This study, by ElSaid Badawi, is entitled "In the quest for the Level 4+ in Arabic: training Level 2–3 learners in independent reading" and can be found as an article in Betty Lou Leaver and Boris Shekhtman's fascinating (and underrated / underred) edited volume, Developing Professional-Level Language Proficiency. Given its somewhat obscure provenance, it's unlikely you'd come across this fascinating article in the normal course of your day, hence my interest in summarising it for you here.

Badawi offers an overview of his experience running the CASA (Center for Arabic Study Abroad) programme between 1970-1977. This programme was originally started in 1967 for advanced-level students and the idea of it was to give a year of intensive study in order to really catapult students into real competency in being able to read, speak and use Arabic in a professional capacity. (Badawi begins his article with a justification for reading, but I'll skip those details since their is a great deal of overlap with what I've already written).

The original CASA curriculum in the 1967-era programme was established around a 3000-word vocabulary list, reading of some short passages using those words in context, a grammar book and two long 'authentic' texts that would be covered over the course of the year. The students found this dull and unrewarding, however, so CASA's administrators decided to design a new course based around familiarising students with a 'language domain of their interests'. In other words: allowing them to read things that were related to their interests and professional trajectory.

Students taking part in the programme were assessed (prior to joining) as being at a high level, but their vocabulary was generally limited to political subjects. They had a poor understanding of morphology and little to no facility with semantics. They had, Badawi writes, bad reading habits in Arabic: too much focus on sentence structure, engaged in 'parsing-based reading' and with only a minimal grasp of the "semantic role of punctuation". In that last case, this is the way Arabic uses words, phrasing and sentence constructions to signify the meaning of a sentence, whereas in English a lot of those meaning structures are conveyed through punctuation. Most of all, students suffered from an 'excessive / crippling' use of the Arabic-English dictionary, which was identified as an obstacle to spontaneous and contextualised language learning; words were quickly forgotten.

The programme sought to encourage a switch in its students: "a change of attitude toward Arabic from that of a language they are being taught to one which they should start learning". The responsibility, at this level, generally should switch from the teacher to the students.

The programme was split up into three semesters / terms:

  • Semester 1: 8-week summer programme

This was made up of introductory cultural classes (based around Cairo, Egypt, where students were living. It offered classes to bring students up to a competent level in functional colloquial Arabic. (Students could solve all their problems and interact with Egyptians in a functional way, following the course). There was also a component of media Arabic where students would become familiar with the formalised language used in printed and spoken contexts.

  • Semester 2: 14-week autumn programme

This semester was for allowing students to gain a higher competence in MSA. Reading was one of the core elements here (news reading became effortless and there was some inclusion of classical language as well). Colloquial Arabic was encouraged through the reading of plays (which often used colloquial/dialect expressions and language). An intensive reading programme was added alongside this to boost confidence.

  • Semester 3: 14-week spring programme

The final semester included three graduate-level courses in subjects of the students' interest / choice. There was also some training in 'Educated Spoken Arabic' (i.e. the discussion of high-culture topics).

The Intensive Reading Course

The core belief behind the programme was that reading was important to the students' knowledge of Arabic in a fundamental way. All the other skills would benefit and develop alongside the reading done as part of the programme. There were different kinds of texts available and a selection criteria for what kinds of reading took place:

Finding materials for intensive / analytic reading was easy. The harder issue was finding materials suitable for extensive reading, i.e. the kind of wide-reading that students are able to do with some level of ease. Arabic poses a particular problem in this regard, given its 'wide range of active vocabulary in use', and the 'complexity of the morphs-semantic system'.

Plays were believed to be the best for extensive reading. They carried a "high degree of word and sentence redundancy", usually had only a single theme and were of moderate length. (It was found that reading two 200-page books was much more satisfying than reading a single 400-page book). Plays also lend themselves to real-life activities. There is also the possibility of watching the plays being performed (or, now, on YouTube).

Novels were also considered useful, but the fact that dialogue is used only minimally means that they were kept for later in the semester. Short stories were denser in meaning and language use and thus harder. They were included in the programme, though, for the sake of variety.

Overall, texts were chosen for the language structures used rather than for their literary value / content.

Reading Texts

The course had students reading three items each week. Usually one novel or a play (a long item) and a short story and a 1-act play (i.e. two short items). These were generally from the same author, and difficulty would escalate over time. All texts were authentic and unabridged. Ideally they were selected from leading literary figures and they would all be texts for which no English translations already exist. Selecting these texts was hard at the beginning, but over the years they settled into a broad pattern, escalating in difficulty:

  • Group 1 (first three weeks)

Plays by Tawfiq al-Hakim (short and long). These were good because he uses a lot of redundant vocabulary, follow familiar thematic sources to those with which students would have been familiar, used a lively dialogue and generally contained "straightforward language".

  • Group 2 (5 weeks)

This consisted of works by Ihsan Abdul Quddus, a journalist, novelist and short story writer. These works tackled themes from social phenomena and thus were appropriate to a young audience. They referenced local customs and expressions. They included fewer dialogues in the novels and short stories. They had a lucid structure and controlled range of vocabulary.

  • Group 3

This was works by Yusuf Idris, blending MSA with colloquial idioms, Qur'anic citations and quotations from the hadith literature. These were at a higher difficulty level.

  • Group 4

This was a mix of items chosen for special topical interest or artistic value. For example, in the final week, students read Fathy Ghanem's 1958 novel Al-Gabal. They also tackled some of the non-famous novels by Nagib Mahfouz.

Mixed in these various groups were shorter items: one-act plays and short stories. There was generally a balance between length of a text and its linguistic difficulty.

Reading Instructions

I found this section of the article the most interesting / instructive. Students were told the following:

  • The beginning of a story / text is always the hardest. You don't know what's going on, who the characters are and what the context / scene is. Bear with it. A lot of this will be scene-setting. You can always return back to it later on.
  • Arabic has a lot of redundancy. Compare what you are stuck on with what follows and check if you can figure out the meaning that way.
  • Continue reading as long as you can make out a story or theme for yourself. Don't worry or second-guess yourself as to whether what you understand from the story is the same thing as what the author intended you to understand.
  • If you find a word or part of the structure you don't understand and stop, DON'T look the word up in the dictionary unless:
    • you have failed to guess the meaning
    • there is nobody around to ask the meaning
  • Mark / highlight the words you were able to guess in the text. Mark the words you were able to do without understanding.
  • Make a list of cultural features that you'd like to be addressed in class.
  • Mark and make a list of any expressions and grammatical features or constructions that you want addressed in class.

Classes

Class sessions were essentially there to ensure that students were keeping up with the reading volume. Students would narrate their understanding of the texts they had read, and would raise any issues they wanted to learn more about.

Classes were also a good time to increase students' semantic understanding -- allowing students to identify shared roots and usages in different contexts and forums.

Students submitted written responses / follow-ups to the text in the class with the teacher present. A weekly conference with students gathered feedback on the choices of texts, allowing teachers to adapt the programme depending on the ease/difficulty perceived by each individual cohort of students.

Results

By the end of the 14-week programme, students had read an average of 2500 pages of authentic Arabic texts. Graded text levels showed that their language was improving. They were encouraged by managing to review words and structures that had been marked as 'hard' earlier on in the semester. (Usually 25-40% of these words had become intelligible to them, despite no vocabulary learning strategy specifically targeted at learning these words.) The graduate-level courses (all taught in Arabic, obviously) of the final semester were also a proving ground for students.

This reading programme increase students' competence and was transferrable to their other skills. (Yes, even their spoken Arabic.) Reading helped with writing. Reading 'complete texts' did a lot for the morale of the students at the intermediate-level, too. And the literary focus of the content was useful for students even if their interests didn't lie in that particular area.

My next post about reading Arabic will detail some options that are available to the intermediate-level student of Arabic, and some practical considerations resulting from this article.

Language Learner's Journal: Independent Study

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[This is a continuation of Taylor's blog series where she details some of the week-in-week-out lessons that she learns through her Arabic studies and coaching work together with me. For other posts in the series, click here.]

For some Arabic students (myself, certainly), when we first start to learn about the diglossia in Arabic, we feel somewhat cheated, like, "I signed up to learn a language, and now you're telling me that I need to learn some second, shadow language if I'm actually to use it?" It's like the rug is pulled out from beneath our feet, like we'd be studying Shakespeare and are frustrated to find that real people actually speak Singlish. Colleagues who work in journalism/research repeatedly encouraged me to study dialect, which led me to leave my last fusha course for an ammiya one at Sijal. 

Happily, it doesn't feel nearly so intimidating as I once imagined when I turned on some ammiya YouTube videos and despaired that a year in MSA classes seemed to do me no good. Indeed, the listening comprehension and vocabulary I learned at Qasid feels like a swiss army knife I now use to pick a new lock. Also, another useful tool from my MSA classes – an extreme comfort with not understanding many of the words I'm hearing but still staying engaged and hanging on for the ones I do.

On a related note, Alex has encouraged me to keep up independent reading even as I'm in a course that largely focuses on speaking and listening. That's another skill that I appreciate from my time at Qasid – the willingness to dive into a text, even when many of the words are ones I don't recognize, and look for the keys that will give me some clue about it. I'm a pen-and-paper learner, so I've been printing out media articles and reading them through twice, no dictionary, then underlining words I don't know and making my best guess at what they mean. 

For example, this week I read one in the Huffington Post about scientists questioning whether we need to drink eight cups of water a day. The piece mentioned drinking a sufficient amount of water so that "البول" is "واضح اللون أو خفيف الصفرة." I didn't know that first word, but I was delighted to know exactly what it was as soon as I read the rest of the sentence. I'm convinced that process of discovery is a powerful learning tool, more so than having translations readily at hand to answer our doubts as soon as we have them. 

Also, having a bit more free time, I've been able to take advantage of events going on around me to get extra-classroom contact with the language. I sat in on a Sunday morning lecture from an Al Jazeera filmmaker who produced an extraordinary documentary, "The Boy Who Started the Syrian War." His discussion afterwards was well above my level, and I only got the outlines of what he was saying, which is still far more than I would have gotten just three months ago when I came to Amman. It was still, of course, a very useful experience. For example, he used the word نظام always when I was expecting him to say حكومة, which led me to ask and confirm with my teacher that it seems to be used like we say "regime" in English, or, a disdainful/pejorative word for a government. 

Being someone who spends plenty of time in the kitchen (because organic vegetarian food doesn't make itself, at least not anywhere walking distance from me =) I'm a big podcast fan. Alex's on Jordanian ammiya is great listening for me at my current level – when I tried this just a few months ago, it was beyond my grasp. I also like the BBC Arabic service and DW's current events discussion panel. 

And repeating what I wrote in my last post – an upcoming post will be some reflections on accents and errors and embarrassment and the ways we as language learners judge ourselves (and others? I hope not. I indeed only judge myself when it comes to foreign language ability, which may point to, as Alex says, how much language is a confidence game). I'm on a scale between sheepish and chatterbox depending on what situation I'm in, and I've been chewing over what it is about a given situation that makes me feel either of those ways.

[To learn more about coaching with Alex, click here. To learn more about 'Master Arabic', a guide for intermediate-level Arabic students, click here.]

Language Learner's Journal: Leaving Qasid

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[This is a continuation of Taylor's blog series where she details some of the week-in-week-out lessons that she learns through her Arabic studies and coaching work together with me. For other posts in the series, click here.]

After two-and-a-half intense months, I've finished my course at Qasid. Though this didn't always feel easy to see on a day-to-day basis, it's extraordinary how much students there learn over a short period of time. On my first day, I couldn't produce full sentences other than my go-to greetings and "I'm an American journalist in Brazil," and over the weeks there, comprehended and participated in discussions about women's rights, marriage customs in different cultures, literature, colonialism and occupation.

Even if it kicked my butt (or because it did), I leave with a great opinion of the school. Qasid's teachers are extremely well trained in how to instruct students in an immersive method – we only occasionally resorted to English words when, say, our teacher wanted to make sure we really understood a grammatical point at hand. My listening comprehension soared, as did my ability to read texts (each week's lesson in our textbook revolved around one or two native texts). Also, I had the great fortune of my class whittling down to only two students, which meant that for three hours each morning, my classmate and I were responsible for answering every question and participating fully in every discussion. So much opportunity to speak in a comfortable, mistakes-are-fine-and-expected environment turned me into something of a chatterbox, though my enthusiasm is several steps ahead of my accuracy.

Also, a delightful unexpected benefit about Qasid is that a group of students and teachers stay the afternoon there in their study halls. That meant that while I worked on my computer after class, I was often surrounded by chatter in Arabic, both teachers engaging their students in fusha and many students who were native dialect speakers chatting amongst themselves.

That said, after speaking with several other language students and journalist colleagues, consulting Alex, and thinking about my goals, I decided to switch tracks from my original plan to study two terms at Qasid and then move back to the U.S. for a summer language institute to instead focus on ammiya here in Amman. I work a part-time job to support my studies, while most Qasid students are full-time exchange students. If all students there were exhausted from their homework load, I was 150 percent so. Journalist after journalist tells me they wish they had better dialect skills and, not being someone who has a "good ear," i.e., I don't pick up much language without studying it in a methodical way, I think it will be important to focus on a dialect in a structured setting.

Still, I'd consider going to Qasid again in the future. In fact, I was part of a test group to try out a new study tool the are developing that would supply easy-to-access audio and videos to accompany texts and vocabulary we study in Qasid's textbooks. It looks like a promising way to bridge the gap between reading comprehension and pronunciation of the words in the text, i.e., I often recognize words in a text based on their consonants and long vowels but am mentally (and inappropriately) filling in a fatha each time I don't know the short vowels.

As for my next steps: I've enrolled in a twice-a-week ammiya course at Sijal and am already enamoured with the class. I tested into the advanced level, though the other students in the class are far ahead of me in dialect. That said, unlike with Qasid the first time around (when I asked to be placed down a level because I was having difficulty following the class), I felt comfortable sticking to this level since I indeed understand the majority of the lesson. I'll also be taking private lessons to complement the group course.

Another choice I've been happy with is that I've also moved to a far more happening place than my last home in Shmeisani, which has meant a world of difference in terms of just having daily interactions. I try to look up the words of things I'm looking for before I hit the streets (most recently, شمعة، سبانخ، و لوز بدون ملح). I find most people are very willing to speak with a foreigner in Arabic, though this sometimes involves my telling strangers who respond to me in English "بحكي الإنكليزية شيء، انا برازلية). I will reflect on the merits of this and some broader thoughts on expat language learning/daily usage in a future post.

I've also become a social media and technology ascetic, logging out of my accounts and using them only when something necessary is at hand. In addition to being an old soul who believes that technology is eating away at humanity and rewiring our brains like substance addiction, seeing the Facebook I see every day anywhere else in the world is not one of the reasons I came to Amman. It's pleasant to let my eyes wander while I sit in a taxi or service and try to speed read the signs around me before they're out of sight. I don't think I risk جهالة anytime soon – I read plenty of news (it's part of my job), but it's confined to a couple of hours of work a day, and then I'm free.

And as for that free time, another upcoming blog will be about independent study methods post-Qasid that I will develop with Alex to make sure I keep up the reading skills I learned there even as I switch into a dialect course.