How my journey began

العربية بين يديك (Arabic at your hands)

In september of 2024 I decided, kind of randomly, to start learning Arabic with a book called العربية بين يديك (transliterated 'Al Aarabiya Bayna Yadaik') in its PDF version. I thought this was such a crazy and funny thing at once and as it is or was considered quite a hard language I was itching to learn it. Also I had set myself the goal to achieve fluency without spending any money. I was very excited because I thought, as it was written in this book's instructions that in a certain amount of time you will be able to speak it and all the usual bla bla.

So I sat myself down everyday and spent around 2-4 hours everyday learning Arabic with this book, having the PDF file opened up on my laptop, a GoogleTranslate tab open to the side and listening, reading, answering questions, speaking to myself. That went on for about 2,5 months, up until I was moving with my family to a new place during which I didn't have the time to spend on learning Arabic, even though, to be true, I still had the motivation, so I did some lessons and chapters here and there. Also I had started watching videos in Arabic, of course I didn't understand anything but I just did. Sometimes it was frustrating but at least some words I recognised. Of course they weren't that much and I often felt kind of stuck.

I would find myself thinking about what the most effective and efficient way of learning a new language, especially one that is as hard as Arabic (supposedly) be. I never really came to a conclusion. Some people were saying this, some other that, I still remember when I went to sleep one night, thinking as hard as I could, trying to connect the dots and figuring out what the ultimate solution was and I woke up the next morning and still had the words of someone in my mind saying "Just read and listen and you're going to acquire a certain language in the long run" as well as "Just learn vocabulary" or "You have to speak from the beginning on".

The problem was just that it was made as a teaching book but I had no teacher nor had I interest in getting one and it was all in Arabic which made it kind of hard but still it was fun discovering all the translations and repeated translations, e. g. in task commands (where I felt like I had learned something and I made at least some progress.) Also a problem of being a teaching book mainly intended for students of the Qur'an was that there were no explicit grammar explanations in text form whatsoever. Because in reality the teacher is probably meant to explain it all while I always had to assume what the core point/pattern was which was meant to be taught by these examples. In general, I would recommend that book as a starting measure and as a slow start as it never really made me feel under pressure (which you never should, it should come from your motivation, from inside, not from the outside!), but to be transparent, there are, in my opinion, better and faster methods to introduce you to Arabic or any foreign language.

Then, after roundabout 3 months or so (summed up learning time) the book came to and end. And when I was looking at the 2nd book I was negatively surprised how much the concept had changed and that the Islam influence (which of course is to be expected to some extend in the world of the Arabic language) was really coming through. No shame on them but I really wasn't intending on becoming a Muslim. I mean, no wonder if the book was made by Saudi-Arabians but I just thought I could keep on going with the book the way it was in the first one. To be really honest, the book's influence is still seen and has played a major part in the creation of the 'lessons', or rather texts today, but of course, it is not the book itself but rather the concept behind it.

Working with the visual dictionary

So when I saw the book coming to and end I was already thinking about how to continue i picked up a cery certain book.

My parents had gotten me a visual dictionary as a gift for St. Nicholas day (which is a smaller version of Christmas on the 6th of December) and I had originally thought this was going to be just one of those 'look in there once and probably never really going to use it, maybe here and the but not really'-presents.

Well, to make it short, that wasn't going to happen. I simply wasn't going to allow that.

Why?

Well, as you might have noticed in your years of living on this earth, I or as (I believe so) we humans tend to rely (sometimes too much) on promises. I decided to rely upon that kind of promise that was written on the back of that visual dictionary 😉.

There was written (exactly) 'Niveau A1-B2', according to the CEFR which is the European standard language level measure.

So, what did I do?

As the vocabulary was seemingly all it needed to get to the B2 level (maybe I was completely delulu because in most cases B2 is just the maximal difficulty of some words lol) (which is usually what most learners aim for - advanced and comfortable in the language) I decided that I wanted to implement that logically. So I thought, if I somehow managed to acquire all of this vocabulary and maybe a bit more (if I was to acquire it in context so I would also get the pronouns, conjunctions etc.), I would probably be very good at this language and at least understanding quite a bit. Of course I had no real idea of what exactly B2 meant or any of the more conceptual expectations.

Anyways, to shorten the story: what I did was that - as this was only vocabulary without any context and previously I myself had come to the conclusion that you learn/acquire words way faster in context and in different contexts with different degrees of importance/difficulty (what I mean by that is: if you are able to connect the new word to something you already know, thus context, either visually or content-wise, you are going to have an easier time remembering the word). So what I eventually did was that I sat myself down everyday (or rather did I keep on sitting myself down, to be honest) and

asked ChatGPT for texts containing of all of this vocabulary
went ahead and read all of these texts on LingQ (another language laerning website) (usually around 10), which meant to get every translation to any word, if you click on it, and also sentence translations
and occasionally asked for grammatical/word/phrase explanations when I didn't understand something (especially the words/sentence structures I didn't understand repeatedly)
and I looked into the visual dictionary at the introduction of every word to try and condition my brain to think of the pictures associated with the words and I said them out loud sometimes

and all of that whilst trying to understand. I prioritised understanding. Then came the repetition of vocabulary & over time and then the quality of the content (in terms of priority). Of course as ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence it didn't make everything make sense in the context (how could any human do so with 25 to 50 vocabs at hand and try to make one story out of it?) so maybe I overextended its powers sometimes a bit. But after a while I simply realised that splitting the vocabulary simply made more sense than trying to force ChatGPT to make it make sense and create some obsurd scene. So then I went for 3 and 5 stories and dialogues instead of one. Over time I arrived at 10 and for recipes and very short texts I even hit a high of up to 20 texts per vocabulary section.

Also what this showed me was that in the end it might not necessarily matter too much the quality of the content (content-wise) as long as the language/the spelling is correct and you keep on consuming it (so either the content is interesting enough or you feel success in understanding (especially in the beginning) which motivates you, because robotically consuming any content of course is not realistic). But even if there is a mistake, it is basically same as when you see someone do a mistake somewhere. As long as you see other people doing it correctly you will most certainly also do it correctly in the long run and inhabit the right way of doing it. Also if you even notice that something is a mistake, that shows how great your understanding already is.

So I might have had headaches (not really) from ChatGPTs stories and dialogues, but looking back all the conditioning and brainwashing (language-wise) was very effective.

All about what? - my conclusions

After all that journey of about 5 months, with the 'introductory phase' of 2-3 months about 7- max. 9 months, depending on how you want to see it, language learning to me is about

listening and reading a lot (getting much input - extensive)
translating it (understanding - which is the key to it all - intensive), thus seeing a word and its translation as much as possible
doing it a lot (per session) and repeatedly (over a long period of time)
+ the extra point of motivation (which you could count to repetition) -> so the WHY.

(you could also say that the conditioning in other contexts like YouTube videos or in real life matters, too but this is, in my opinion, mostly a lot of not understood content. Though, to be fair, it is very good at conditioning with visual connections, either when they show you something and say its name or when they repeat certain words all over again. But this is rather rare, which is my problem. For me this is just like intensive input when it happens. Also the listening can be very effective, if you do it a lot because at some point your brain is going to recognise certain words or word clusters/blocks, e. g. "this is", "I feel (that)" or more phrase-like word blocks like "in the end", "in terms of" etc.. This is just what I remember from listening to a lot of Podcasts in Arabic. This does not go to say that it is unnecessary but it's a bit slow, in my opinion. Especially in the beginning, when you don't understand a lot of words, I personally find it to not be that effective, but rather de-motivating. To read more about this topic, just google comprehensible input, where people try to learn a language lika a baby, mostly without reading)

Also my stance on language learning has completely changed. For example do I now look at seeing new words as something positive instead of something overwhelming because it means that I'll be even more far gone if I have encountered and understood them once. I know I cannot keep every word after seeing them for the first time but I now have the trust and confidence as well as patience and grace (of course not all the time, I ain't God) to understand that the 'pain' (even though I do not see it as such but rather mostly enjoy it except when I put myself under pressure) is what it takes to become what you want to be. Also the core of language learning for me is translation. Translation, translation, translation. But rather from the target language into yours than the other way around.

One point I still debate a lot of times about is the discussion point of either extensive input or intensive input.

But my simple and true answer is: it is not linear, sometimes you do more and understand less, sometimes you do less but keep more.

And in terms of levels: the more advanced you are, the more words you understand, thus you can read a lot faster. So, if you start, rather intensive, if you are more advanced, rather extensive. Also the ability to remember once completely strange characters is goping to grow over time. I still remember how many problems I had in the beginning reading Arabic at all. Now I have little to no problems at all and mostly understand even the handwritten-like writings from older books etc. which I couldn't a while ago.

By the way, a reason why you might understand a lot but can't speak (especially if you speak a similar language like Spanish and learn French or Portuguese or Catalan or Italian) is probably because you simply haven't consumed enough content. You might be able to assume the meaning but your brain has not been given enough opportunities in the form of language material to be able to repeat the words in the matching patterns and structures.

My shortcut (boring but very effective)

So all of this is just to say that, in my opinion, the fastest method to learn a new language (especially from scratch) is through massive understood (translated) input with a lot of repetition in different circumstances.

As what goes for the advanced section I would always recommend something based more on motivation and easiness because it's always better to keep on going and to feel like you are making progress. So something like stories, a book you like or articles (preferrably about the same topic to have some more short-term repetition) are just ideal.

Why I created this website

My mission

First of all I wanted this website to fit my standards and fulfill all the needs of language learning. It should be a tool that I am 100% convinced in and know that it works.

Also a deep belief of mine is that everything should be free and accessible for everyone so I made it free for everyone. I always hate these premium limits or paywalls. To help me continue this in the best way possible you can donate here.

In the end I wanted to create something that is free, easy to use and accessible for everyone and should, of course, also fit my standards.

Programming learning journey

Another reason I decided to create this website is because this was a way for me to learn how to program websites with SQL, Node.js, JavaScript, HTML and CSS.